I am joining LinkedIn

Starting this week, I’ll be a senior editor at large for LinkedIn, based in New York City, and continuing to explore the set of ideas that has driven my reporting for the past 15 years — the way technology is upending our lives and shifting the way we live and work.

In publishing, one promise of the internet has always been that writers and readers can engage directly. But 25 years after I got my first AOL address, most traditional publications still haven’t figured out how to make good on this opportunity. For years, they have endeavored to build commenting into stories in a way that extends the value of the work —creating a digital version of the physical office water cooler around which people gather to exchange ideas. But the benefit of that water cooler is that it offers physical and contextual proximity: everyone knows and trusts each other enough to cultivate civil conversation while refilling our glasses. That’s largely missing from the internet.

Not at LinkedIn. Over the last 15 years, the platform has built a trusted network of 575 million professionals who visit throughout the week to get better at what they do or what they want to do. A key part of achieving that success involves staying informed and sharing their own insights with their communities on where the world is going. One of the key ways they do both is by following LinkedIn’s fast-growing body of editorial work: posts, articles, videos, pushes and trending-news packages created and curated by a 50-plus person editorial staff. Importantly, professionals don’t come just to consume this work; they use it as launching pad to share and develop their own points of view.

When you start with the community, you end up with new types of editorial products —vibrant, dynamic stories, podcasts and videos that encapsulate the interplay between experts (you) and journalists (me). Just take a look at Jaimy Lee’s reporting on urgent care, or George Anders’ reporting on the self-driving ecosystem in Pittsburgh. When the article ends, the real conversation starts. This type of journalistic work is starting to be recognized for its quality; last year LinkedIn won a SABEW award for a collection of stories on rapid changes in the labor market, an editor was chosen for the elite Mayo Clinic-Cronkite Medical Journalism Fellowship and a member — an ER doc out of Indianapolis — won a National Society of Newspaper Columnists award for his work on opiates in the emergency room.

I want to be part of this.

I’ve had the privilege of spending the past four years at the publication that first called this version of the future, WIRED. The smart writers and editors there have always pushed beyond the hype to identify and understand the potential of the underlying technology and offer deep analysis and calculated bets about how it would shape the future. More often that not, WIRED has called that future correctly. I’ve enjoyed being part of that legacy with analysis like this piece on Instagram’s leadership change, and I’m still wrapping up a story that will publish later this year. As the publication turns 25 —and celebrates with an epic festival in San Francisco next week (GET THERE!) —I will renew my subscription and cheer on its work.

And, I will draw from all that I’ve learned there to publish on LinkedIn. I look forward to providing deep reporting, uniquely knowledgeable insight, and a sense of what really matters in an echo chamber full of distracting journalistic noise.

This is where you come in.

If you’ve gotten this far, you’re invested in how tech unfolds. Please, speak up. We — you and I — are part of a small band of people, a community of tech enthusiasts, whose collective insights will influence our future path. Please drop me a note here, in the comments, to tell me what trends, ideas, and companies I should explore. I’ll use your thoughts to inform my priorities for the next year.

And find me — on every platform — to tell me what I should be writing, and what you’d like to add (or even just to say hello). That’s how we begin to steer tech’s future in the right direction.