I'm News Editor at Android Police where I spearhead editorial strategy, writing and editing high-impact tech journalism to establish brand authority in a competitive market.
For 14 years, I was Senior Features Writer at PCMag. I interviewed astronauts, Jeff Goldblum, the guy who invented the ghost gun. I’ve been on the Today show and talked to Anna Wintour in the Met hours before the Gala on that first Monday in May and got to preview looks for readers. I am a source in some of the weirdest and wildest of Wikipedia entries: Mr. Roboto, Gamergate, the poop emoji. That Bernie meme you’ve seen made for some of the strangest weeks of my life when mine went viral, even making it to Meet the Press.
In 2015 I saw a grainy image of three British girls at a Gatwick airport gate who were off to join ISIS and I could not let go of how they had left their pop-star-papered bedrooms for war-ravaged Raqqa in Syria. I followed the same path they took through social media before they left and found that their youth had heartbreakingly led them to fall for the most teenage of promises: a life of crepes and nutella, cute kittens, and true love that wouldn’t leave them. I won an Azbee Award for the resulting story “The Social Media Sisterhood of ISIS.”
At the height of the pandemic, I looked at how society was shifting and wrote service pieces to help people sort through new difficulties. I did painstaking research to create state-by-state guides on how to register to vote and how to vote by mail that were covered by and copied by local and national news outlets. I did the same with a first-of-its kind state-based guide to Covid vaccine apps and other ways to carry vaccination cards on a phone, which received over a million views per day for days. When virtual medical visits became the standard, I created a telemedicine guide on what patients could expect and how they could make the most of their appointment even through a screen.
When I wrote about the inherent bias of voice assistants being female, I heard from a member of the Cortana team at Microsoft who said they had not considered the implications and that they presented my piece to the team, who shortly after added a male option.
An interview I did with Ang Lee about his experience with VFX while filming Life of Pi led to an unexpected and touching email from one of the people who had worked at Rhythm & Hues, the visual effects company that did the incredibly stunning work on it but went bankrupt soon after. The team was snubbed during each of the film’s two Oscar win speeches and the person who contacted me said that the praise Lee gave them in the story I wrote was the first time they had heard such words from him about their work and when they shared it with others from the company, it had gone a long way to easing some of the bitterness they’d felt after the Oscars.
I convinced supermodel Coco Rocha to write a regular column for PCMag, garnering headlines worldwide in places truly unexpected for PCMag, like Elle and W Magazine.
I attended and covered New York Fashion Week more times than I ever thought I would have the chance to and worked my love of fashion into whatever I could, including examining how AI does at fashion design.
I put great care into the many, many how-tos, explainers, and guides I have written. People often find them when they’re at their most frustrated and so I’ve always made sure they’re straightforward and easy to follow. It’s been rewarding to have ones like my meditation apps story featured on WNYC’s All of It and my Instagram tips on Slate’s Political Gabfest.
I wish I had a repository of the well over a hundred TV, radio, and podcast hits I’ve done. I do have great memories of them, like my first on CNN International talking about the technology on the runways at fashion week and going to 30 Rock on the day before Thanksgiving to film a segment on holiday shopping tips for Better Get Baquero.
Somehow I filmed the pilot of The Reductress Hour with SNL alum Abby Elliott for Comedy Central and while it never aired, that day itself sometimes plays in my head.
I had the pleasure of writing product reviews and recently pioneered a hair tools category, reviewing the Dyson Airwrap Complete Long and the Shark FlexStyle Air Styling & Drying System, as well as writing a comparison of the two. It’s not the first time I identified and created a new category for reviews. At the start of the market for smart rings, I kicked off PCMag’s coverage with a review of the Kovert Designs Altruis.
While I love the tech industry for the promise that it holds and sometimes delivers on, it is undoubtedly built on gender, racial, and socioeconomic inequality, which I’ve strived to bring to the forefront throughout my work. I have heard from so many women who have been driven out of tech but still keep up with it and they have said that my writing has made them finally feel seen, which is both devastating and hopeful.