Larissa Padden 00:06

Hello and welcome to Cogcast, Cognito’s podcast, where we talk to journalists and media pros on everything that’s happening in the world of media and PR. I’m Larissa Padden, your host and a former journalist turned PR professional.

On today’s episode, we have Caroline Nihill, reporter at IT Brew. She and I chat about her beginnings in journalism, which are hauntingly familiar to me, how she came to cover today’s rapidly evolving tech landscape, and theoretically, just how good can AI get? Here’s a hint. If you’ve seen the movie Clueless, you’ll understand how good her answer is. Please enjoy this episode.

Hey, Caroline, thanks for being with us today.

 

Caroline Nihill 00:45

Thanks for having me.

 

Larissa Padden 00:46

So I wanted to start, as I always do, with asking you to tell us a little bit about yourself, your background as a reporter, what you’re focused on now, and how you found your way to that subject matter.

 

Caroline Nihill 00:57

Yeah, absolutely. This is a story I find myself telling all the time, because I feel like it’s not the norm for tech reporters, but I’ll start a little bit personally. I’m originally from Philadelphia, so I’m a big Eagles fan. I went to Ole Miss for two years in Oxford, Mississippi, and then I transferred to UNC, which means that they’re not competitors, really, to me. So football season, I’m all Ole Miss, and then basketball season, all UNC.

 

But when I was in college, I started writing for the newspapers that were at both schools. At Ole Miss, it was The Daily Mississippian, where I was the arts and culture editor. And I started as an editor, which you don’t usually do. And I really dove into writing about the creative economy in Oxford, which is huge for anyone who has ever been down there or knows that area.

 

And then when I went to UNC, I continued that at The Daily Tar Heel for a few months, and then I moved on to start writing about fashion and lifestyle and wellness for a small student organization called Kultur. And then I branched into a lot of fashion and arts and culture writing, because once you start writing into a niche, you kind of box yourself in. If all your bylines are about what someone’s wearing, it’s hard to then be like, “And the news…”

 

But it’s not impossible, obviously, because once I graduated, I moved up to Washington, DC. I applied for maybe every single job. And I found myself applying for a job at Scoop News Group. And I tell people this story all the time. I applied, and I thought it was a scam, because there was hardly any information there. And the hiring manager knows this, too. And I was like, you know, whatever.

 

And I ended up getting an interview and joining Scoop News Group, which is a federal government IT publication, conglomerate of publications, as an editorial fellow, before joining full-time as a FedScoop reporter. So I like to tell people that I kind of just looked up and that I was in the tech world. And now I feel like when people are like, “AI,” you know, they’ll say something about AI where I’m like, “Actually, that’s not true. No, I just heard about it last week.”

 

So, yeah, I found myself really progressively interested in covering tech. And then I moved on to Morning Brew, where I’m currently at. I’m with IT Brew. And my current beats are cybersecurity and IT strategy, because I feel like there’s a lot of human interest there, and that’s the thing that drives my reporting.

 

Larissa Padden 00:46

Interesting. I feel so connected to you, because I already knew that you lived basically in my hometown, where I grew up. We bonded over a very lovely bread shop. I also went to college in Philadelphia. So I was there for about the four years I was in college and then about a year and a half after, before I left. And I am very, very aware that being an Eagles fan is basically a religion.

 

And your journey as a reporter matches almost exactly what my journey was like when I moved here to New York. Just apply for anything that will take me just so I can be a reporter. And I was an art history major, but I ended up writing about auto finance. And it’s because it’s the job that’s offered to you at the time. And then you find it super interesting, even though you knew nothing about it. And you, as you say, get boxed in. And sometimes you’re happy to be boxed in. So I feel like that’s very much the life of a reporter.

 

Caroline Nihill 04:22

Oh, exactly. Where’d you go to college?

 

Larissa Padden 04:23

Temple.

 

Caroline Nihill 04:24

Wow. Oh, my gosh. My hometown, I don’t know if we’re known for it, but I grew up in a very small town outside of Philly. Not like Reading. And then like I said, I’m from Philly. I grew up in a town called Huntington Valley. And oh, no.

 

Larissa Padden 04:40

No, because my family is from Levittown, Pennsylvania. And I was going to say, if you say Levittown, we have too much in common. We’re like separated at birth.

 

Caroline Nihill 04:49

We’re birds of a feather. We are definitely connected. That’s awesome. Yeah, we definitely have very similar paths, don’t we?

 

Larissa Padden 04:56

Yeah, I know. I feel like that is very common in journalism. And I did see that you had studied fashion before, and I was going to ask how you transitioned to tech and AI. You already told us.

 

But covering AI is a very interesting space right now. Very competitive, very almost oversaturated, some would say. But what is the last two to three years been like for you when this kind of boom happened? And then also, what has it been like in the past year where some people are now complaining about AI fatigue? And how has that changed your reporting?

 

Caroline Nihill 05:29

Yeah, I mean, two to three years ago, that was right when I was starting out after college, when I joined Scoop. And when I when I first joined the tech world, I had no clue what was going on. I felt like I was trying to figure out the difference between CISO and CISA and finding people who I could talk to who were relevant to the space and trying to speak to government officials.

 

And so over the past two years, two to three years, I found that the spotlight on technology has only grown. I felt like when I when I started working for Scoop, I was like, people are talking about tech, but it’s obvious that this is a niche and it’s obvious that the people that I was writing for, the people that I was interacting with, the Venn diagram was almost a circle.

 

And then something crazy happened in January and then everything changed. And then tech was the spotlight. USDS was moved into the main suite of the White House. We saw AI just kind of become this this more national topic. We saw Joe Biden say AI in the State of the Union. I remember watching that that night and being like two seconds of my beat. And then we saw a lot of conversations about it on The Hill, which I covered extensively.

 

And so I think the huge difference that I’ve seen over the past two to three years has been the visibility of tech and how much people are focusing on it now. And you mentioned something really important, which is AI fatigue. And I’m seeing more people personally. I’m on TikTok. I deleted it for a while for my old cyber colleagues who were like, “You should get off that app.” But I’m back on it.

 

And I see people all the time. And it’s so funny because people who maybe are more firmly planted in Gen Z and are digital natives, they hate AI. They absolutely hate it. And then I talk to anyone professionally and they’re like, “AI is great. It’s a tool. It’s the great enabler.” And the difference, the disparity between those two groups is insane to me. It’s totally insane.

 

Larissa Padden 07:45

Yeah. So how do you feel as a journalist when you see these headlines about major publications replacing the reporters with AI?

 

Caroline Nihill 07:54

Well, I don’t love it.

 

Larissa Padden 07:56

It’s hard enough already out there for a reporter.

 

Caroline Nihill 08:00

Yeah. Literally. I saw this thing a long time ago, relatively, where it was like, how do you talk to people who want to become reporters? Like, “Hi, thanks. The job market is insane. And we’re all riding the struggle bus together.” But I mean, I don’t love it. And I can’t say that I’m like, “Oh, yeah, I’m super pro using AI in my work,” because I’m not. I don’t use AI in any of my work.

 

The transcription service that I’ve been using since I started being a journalist, Otter, is now AI enabled. And I try not to look at the summary it gives me. I feel like it takes away from my original thought process. And I just don’t want a computer to be telling me based off of whatever data it has, these are the top points of the conversation, when really I’m like, “I’m interested in this part.” And the large language model or whatever it is that Otter uses isn’t helpful.

 

So to answer your question, I don’t think that it is productive for us to be looking at positions that rely heavily on human creativity, thought processing and instincts and handing that off to a system that is not human. And AI is a great tool to use so many different ways. But I really don’t think journalism is one of them. And it’s really disheartening to see the preference for hiring a robot over hiring a human to do this. I might be biased because I am human. I’m a reporter. So c’est la vie.

 

Larissa Padden 09:45

Yeah. Even on the PR side, we’re always exploring what we can do with AI, even if we’re not actively using it. What can it be used for? And I know a lot of the use cases are research.

 

But I feel like as a reporter, what makes you a good reporter is the knowledge that you gain along the way and kind of really honing in on your beat and kind of becoming a walking encyclopedia for that. So it’s a difficult thing to wrap your head around coming from that world to then say, “Oh, they can at least pull all this research together for you so quickly.”

 

It’s a tricky conversation for some. And I guess we’ll see where it goes is the best we can say, because it is inevitable. It is going to be in our lives in some way. It’s kind of one of those we just kind of have to find our way through it.

 

Caroline Nihill 10:27

Yeah. The only way out is through, you know?

 

Larissa Padden 10:29

Yeah, yeah. Well, you write some very interesting stories that kind of sound outside the traditional coverage of the AI space. Maybe they’re not, but they sound interesting. And that includes ‘What music and coding have in common: Math,’ and ‘Pig butchering: How scammers are enticing victims to give them their savings’. So I’m really curious to know, how do you find your stories?

 

Caroline Nihill 10:52

I fear I will not be offering anything original to this conversation. Because when I’m talking to people, they’ll sometimes mention something in passing. And we could be talking about agentic AI and log4j, whatever—whatever topic seems like to non-tech enthusiasts, it would be a snooze fest.

 

And then offhandedly, yeah, I met this person one time who they’re a musician, but they were interested in coding and becoming someone who had IT for their career. And I gave them a chance, and they ended up being the best person we had.

 

And I was like, well, I grew up really interested in music. I was in choir, played, tried a plethora of instruments.

But I tend to gravitate towards the stories where I can relate to at least part of it. Because I feel like when you have some kind of original experience with a subject matter or a topic, it almost makes you a better reporter in the sense that when you’re talking to people, you have a base level of knowledge of I know kind of how this works.

 

And for pig butchering, that’s not as true or relevant for me. But that story was more based off of the feeling of a need to talk about something that I feel can typically be sensationalized from the differences in the ways that people like to talk about it. Some folks say pig butchering is the translation of the original words, which I believe are in Chinese or Taiwanese. And others are like, ‘Pig butchering is like an editorialized phrase. We shouldn’t be using it. It’s doing a disservice to the victims when, really, this is a cryptocurrency investment scam.”

 

And so for me, it struck a chord in both the musicians’ story and the pig butchering story in that these are things that are happening on the fringe of what everybody is talking about. And the musician story was so fun to work on. I ended up talking to so many people in normal interviews and being like, “By the way, do you know any musicians in your company?” And they’re like, “Yeah, a couple.” And I’m like, “Awesome, awesome, awesome. Can I talk to them?”

 

Whereas pig butchering, you really have to kind of enter the specific cybersecurity space and go talk to those direct people who are subject matter experts. Like you think of, you know, Operation Shamrock or GASA, the Global Anti-Scam Alliance, and talking to those people directly and kind of leveling with them and being like, “This is something that I don’t know a lot about. I’m seeing some stuff about it, but I really want to get to the heart of what the issues are here.”

 

So like I said, kind of finding those surrounding topics of IT and tech and just kind of fleshing them out and seeing if there’s something that we should be talking about.

 

Larissa Padden 13:52

Interesting. So speaking of another medium that has blown up, podcasts, we’re on one right now, so it’s a little hypocritical of me to ask and say that. But you were on the FedScoop, The Daily Scoop Podcast, and I wanted to know, do you have plans to dive back into that world? Are you going to be on a podcast there? Are you on one? And I’m unaware of it. And then also how you feel podcasts can be additive in a news sense to a news publication.

 

Caroline Nihill 14:22

To answer your first question, this is the only podcast that I’ve been on. Currently on one. It’s this one.

 

Larissa Padden 14:31

It’s true.

 

Caroline Nihill 14:31

But no, currently, I don’t have any plans to be on a podcast. I mean, that’s not to say that I wouldn’t love to be on a podcast. As everyone in my last company really knew, you’re in danger if you hand me a microphone. I will not shut up.

 

Larissa Padden 14:47

Another thing we have in common.

 

Caroline Nihill 14:51

Amazing. So, yeah, I mean, I would love to be on a podcast again. You’re completely aware of all of my podcasting. It began and ended at Scoop, yeah. And then your second question was?

 

Larissa Padden 15:06

How podcasts can be additive in a news sense? Because so many publications also have podcasts. It’s almost mandatory now.

 

Caroline Nihill 15:12

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. So the way that I think about it, and this might be dumb, but the way that I think about it is people want information in so many different ways. You think of like video format of the folks who are like, “Here’s everything that you might have missed this week in 10 seconds.” Or like, “Here’s the news in a way where you don’t have to mentally engage for that long.”

 

And being in journalism for the past—if you’re counting just my professional experience—three years, it’s rare that people read below the first quote. And so I think it stands to reason that we as a society, we have to kind of adapt to in part meeting people where they’re at. I can’t force anybody to read my article, but if they listen to podcasts in their daily commute and they’re listening to a podcast and they’re getting tired of it, and they want to check in on what’s happening in the IT business world, and let’s say IT Brew starts a podcast that I happen to be a part of, I would love this. I don’t know.

 

But I think it stands to reason that people intake information in different ways and have different preferences for that. So I think it adds to the audience of, if you don’t like reading an article, if you find it really taxing to sit down, I don’t know your job. I can’t comment on whether or not I could judge you on that. But if podcasts are the way that you want to intake information, then why not add that as part of the products that that a newsroom puts out?

 

Personally, I cannot do podcasts. I will put it on, and it becomes background noise. Which is really funny because I love I love interacting with podcasts. Can’t listen to them at all.

 

Larissa Padden 17:03

Wow. Yeah. I had an editor once when I first started out and they said, “Imagine if you’re writing for someone that has two minutes to get the news. So you got to put it all up front.”

 

And I feel like that adapting to how people want to intake information is how journalism survives for as much as we do see journalism struggle. And interestingly, your IT Brew, Morning Brew, I feel like kind of cornered that quick hit newsletter type of style. I know a lot of people do it now, but I feel like that was kind of the secret to their success because they adapted how people were taking in news.

 

And I feel like we’re just going to see new mediums. Now we’re seeing Substack. Now we’re seeing podcasts be put on YouTube because some people want to watch what they used to listen to.

 

Caroline Nihill 17:46

That’s really interesting.

 

Larissa Padden 17:46

Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see where things go next.

 

Caroline Nihill 17:51

Yeah. Yeah, no, absolutely. I agree with you.

 

Larissa Padden 17:53

So shamelessly, as a PR person, I always ask people, do you accept pitches? Do your stories sometimes come from something that was pitched to you? And how do you like to be pitched to?

 

Caroline Nihill 18:02

Yeah. I’d say more than not, in what I’m doing right now at IT Brew, if I have pitched a story and I’m looking through my inbox to see who has pitched me someone who could be relevant to talk about this, this amalgamous topic, yeah, I’m looking at pitches and I’m taking them, especially if something fits into what I’m talking about.

 

Someone’s like, “Here is Jane Smith and she can talk to you about what agentic AI means for the finance part of an organization and how that intersects with IT.” And I’m like, “Great, I’m writing a finance story. I’d love to talk to Jane Smith.” It’s typically never about the last part of the email where it’s like, “And we’re announcing this product.” And it’s like, I’m so sorry, I’m not going to write about that.

 

Larissa Padden 18:53

Right.

 

Caroline Nihill 18:53

But I think the most effective pitches that I’ve gotten have been based around interacting with a person and their expertise and growing my network and having another person that I have a professional relationship to where I know that I can trust this person after establishing that and having conversations. And it’s almost never like we are releasing this product that is going to change the world. If you want an advertisement, you’re going to have to pay for it. It will never be me.

 

Larissa Padden 19:25

Right. Yeah, yeah. Products like launches are very hard to get coverage for. So it sounds like it’s you’re pitching this news to me. That’s great. But always include a little more background, more broadly on what else they could speak about, because they may be a useful source to you, just not for the news that you’re pitching me. Give a little more in the pitch.

 

So the other question I always ask is if you had to quantify it, how many pitches do you think you get in a week?

 

Caroline Nihill 19:53

That is tough. And you work in PR, so you know that every week is different. Some weeks, I think it’s north of 60, 70 maybe. And then on the slower, like August is just always slow in media. So I mean, recently, it’s been like, I’d say in the 30s.

 

I think when I was at Scoop, it was so many all the time for everything, including things I had never written about. They were like, “Do you want to write about smart cars?” And I was like, “No. No.”

 

Larissa Padden 20:29

Yeah. I think the answer is almost even if the number changes, because I do ask that on every episode, the number is always more than listeners expect. Whatever that number is, unless you’re a journalist, you’re not really aware of how much is coming through.

 

And the reason I like to ask that question is to like set expectations for people that you have to cut through that noise. You have to somehow reach out to a journalist and get a response when you’re wading through a hundred other pitches.

 

So, yeah. Well, this has been amazing. I’ve learned so much about you that is like learning about myself. And I did want to ask one fun question whenever I wrap up, which is you cover AI. So what is your best case and your worst case AI robot scenario?

 

Caroline Nihill 21:15

That’s a great question. Best case, and I am stealing this from someone, I can’t name who they are, but I am stealing this. Best case is we continue on as a community to use AI as a tool and an enabler. I would love a Clueless-styled AI where it has all of my outfits in my closet and allows me to pick and also kind of inputs the weather. It’s so vain, but I would love an AI tool to do that. And I think that someone is working on that.

 

Larissa Padden 21:49

I’m sure it’s only a matter of time. And that scene from Clueless lives in my brain. Just press the button.

 

Caroline Nihill 21:53

Same.

 

Larissa Padden 21:54

Yeah. I never thought about the weather part. But yeah, input, take all the information in and tell me, “On this day, in this climate, you wear this today,” and take the thought away from me.

 

Caroline Nihill 22:03

Exactly. Wouldn’t it be so cool to have like a quiz of like, “What’s the weather like? What am I feeling? What’s the vibe?” I would love that. Worst case scenario is AI replaces us all.

 

Larissa Padden 22:15

Takes over.

 

Caroline Nihill 22:17

Takes over, replaces all the jobs and all the people. And we’re so reliant on AI that’s the worst case scenario. And I find that that really is upsetting to a lot of people. But for me, it seems very unrealistic that things could get that out of hand. But I don’t know. I have no magic crystal ball. So who’s to say?

 

Larissa Padden 22:41

Yeah. My coworker makes fun of me because I’m very nice to AI. Lots of pleases and thank yous because it’s kind of like hope for the best—no. So what is it? Prepare for the worst, pray for the best.

 

Caroline Nihill 22:53

Oh, yeah. If our robot overlords do happen to take over the Earth, then they’ll at least know that you were nice to them.

 

Larissa Padden 23:02

Yeah, they’ll remember me as the nice one.

 

Caroline Nihill 23:04

Yeah. Well, that’s great. That’s great.

 

Larissa Padden 23:08

Great. All right. Well, thank you so much. This has been hugely fun. And if and when you do start another podcast, do let us know so we can tune in.

 

Caroline Nihill 23:15

I’ll let you know. Thanks so much.