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 this episode, and a former journalist turned PR professional

Larissa Padden 00:24
Hi, Jen, thanks for being with us today.

Jennifer Riggins 00:26
Sure.

Larissa Padden 00:27
So I wanted to start off with you giving us a little bit about your background as a reporter and what you’re focused on now.

Jennifer Riggins 00:33
Well, I’ve been a working writer in many ways since 2003, and I’ve been in the developer experience space or speaking on developer tooling and bridging that gap between these very expensive employees and to creating the business value and explaining the business value and how to help them be connected to the business value and how the business can understand what these very expensive developer employees are up to. So I’ve been doing that for about 16 years now.

Larissa Padden 01:05
So I guess it helps to have that technical background when you’re having these conversations and trying to translate this complicated, sometimes, material.

But in this really crowded space, you’ve created a really interesting beat, which is the culture of tech. And I did see your recent LinkedIn post chronicling your 10 years covering tech for The New Stack. And it’s fascinating to look at just how much tech touches all these important cultural milestones as well in our lives. So how did you define this role for yourself and this new focus—and well, I guess I shouldn’t say new, but this focus, I haven’t heard of it before. And how did that come about?

Jennifer Riggins 01:43
I mean, I just kind of fell into it, I guess, like every niche. But I am not technical, which I think provides value because if you ask the right questions and you get the people, the developers, the domain experts to explain things to you in a way that you can understand, then you can explain it in a way that other people can understand.

And in both ways, it goes both ways, helping developers and technical engineering teams understand how they are connected to business value and how to explain that and vice versa, how the business can understand what’s happening on the technical side. Because again, it’s very expensive.

Larissa Padden 02:25
Yes. As I shared before we started this, I’m not tech enabled at all. I actually was a finance reporter and I was not in finance or had a background in finance. And there is some satisfaction in taking something so complicated and kind of translating it into something – you know – that’s showing what’s actually interesting about it.

And I wonder if you kind of get that same satisfaction from being able to take something that maybe doesn’t seem that interesting on the surface and able to show kind of how it’s important to our lives.

Jennifer Riggins 02:52
Absolutely. Because first of all, everyone has to understand it. Everyone needs to be more involved in creating technology and understanding technology. It’s in our bodies, it’s in our homes, it’s in our schools, our cars, everything. So everyone – more diverse group of people need to not only be building it, but understand how things are built, especially as we get into this AI space.

But then people are interesting. So if you ground a story in stories of experience of people, it’s always more interesting than this technology does this and then that and features, which I don’t really write about. I also don’t write about funding.

It’s interesting for me as a freelancer, I guess, sometimes to know if people have gotten funding, especially if I’ve worked with them before to raise my price. But it’s not an interesting story. The story is when technology has enabled a very human endeavor, which is still creating software, which we all rely on.

Larissa Padden 03:56
Right. And I do want to dive into some of your more recent stories a little more in a bit. But before we get too heavy into the AI conversation, the other thing that I found interesting about your background and what you’re currently doing is, I’m assuming from the accent, American, but you live and write in the UK. So I wanted to ask what the cultural difference between the media landscape is between those two markets. And do you feel like the reporting is different or what readers are interested in is different?

Jennifer Riggins 04:25
No, it’s just simply not. I’ve lived and worked in Spain as well for eight years before moving to London. I think that the media you are writing for dictates if you write in British or American, if you use the Oxford comma or not, things like that. I personally don’t use words like ‘whilst’ anyway. But other than that, there really isn’t that much of a difference.

Still, I’m probably interviewing more Americans than I am Europeans, but I work probably equally with European clients, whether in Europe, or the Netherlands, or the UK, as I do the US, but the US is the size of a continent and it’s the most vocal in technology. So often, that is who I’m working with. But also London is just filled with a hotbed of fantastic events. So it’s not necessary, nor do I really want to right now in the current state, go to the US.

So I’m able to talk. I mean, it was easy for me when COVID happened because I’ve always worked online and I believe the tech industry, despite some leaders trying to push this return to office, the tech industry, unless you’re in finance or well-regulated industries like that, which are accidental tech, but certainly some of the most advanced tech industries, like banking, the return to office just as a non-interest for anyone, we’re used to just working whenever and technology is always partnered with teams like offshore and things. So everything is online anyway. It’s quite rare.

Actually, I have an interview in person and honestly doing it online is better quality recording, better quality if I want to use an AI tool with permission for transcribing the conversation, things like that. It’s just easier and better. And sometimes technologists are not the most outgoing people, so they are more comfortable behind the screen anyway, communicating, but it can often make for at least an equal level of quality of communication.

And then a lot of times I end up meeting people years later that I’ve known and been friends with for years online or have used as sources or collaborators for years. And that’s great to see them in person, but it’s not even necessary. So besides data restrictions or cloud, maybe environmental technology has no border.

Larissa Padden 07:03
Yeah, it’s still an interesting conversation, the return to work and tech played a huge part in us being able to switch so quickly. I was still a reporter when COVID hit and it was like ‘come get your stuff because you’re going to be home for a week, maybe a month.’ Who knew it would be two years, but we didn’t miss a blip. The very next day, we were back online at 9 AM being able to do our jobs because as a reporter, sometimes all you need is a phone and a computer.

But so it’s an interesting conversation that we’re still having. And it’s a hard thing to put back in a box to say in some ways it was successfully done. But that’s a whole, whole other conversation we would probably get into for a long, long time. But I did want to ask as a freelancer and you know, in this conversation of not being in person, but sometimes being in person, how do you source your stories? How do you find your stories and your topics and then also your sources?

Jennifer Riggins 07:55
It’s a total mix. I’m extremely active on LinkedIn and in keeping up with different news sources, etc., and technology and what people share that, those that I respect that share, etc. But also, I’m of course pitched incessantly.

But you do build better relationships with some PR people that are better at pitching at this point and understand what I’m going to do or not. Any PR person I’ve worked with before I say work with or interviewed their client or something knows, I’m not interested in funding. It could be the last line of an article if it’s really that important of “Oh, by the way, they got this much funding.”

It’s not interesting. It’s usually quite depressing at times, in fact, in the world we live in. But they know I’m looking for stories. So it’s quite clear. And because I have such a niche, those that come to me know what I’m looking for. And then of course, there’s art, there’s events, so I know which events. And there’s still a process pitching through editors of what I can cover or not. But yeah, it’s totally fine.

Larissa Padden 09:08
Yeah, that’s something we always try and tell our clients and kind of hammer home is that this really is a relationship business. When I was a reporter, now on the PR side, it’s kind of building those relationships and knowing what you’re pitching to someone and kind of being able to be recognizable to them and know that I’m reliable and I’m pitching you something that’s relevant to you.

So you said you get pitched incessantly. I always wonder how that works as a freelancer.

Jennifer Riggins 09:33
Yeah, you have my email. I use my Gmail. I could have emails with my clients, but that’s just other emails to check. I prefer not. It’s actually kind of good because sometimes that means it’s better filtering is a personal email, I think, than a professional Gmail, I’m finding, filtering out stuff.

But also, my email is out there. Because it’s on my LinkedIn and stuff, I’m not keeping it that secret or anything, but I’m not on a bunch of lists to that extent, thank goodness, because I’m so niche and so specific, so it’s mainly press people in the open source of the developer relations or developer tooling community that will reach out to me. So it’s usually fine.

Larissa Padden 10:21
So you had mentioned you’re very niche, which I could tell from some of your articles. I’m a Formula 1 fan, so obviously your recent article on kind of the engineering and the data science that goes into that sport caught my eye.

But then you have more traditional articles and then there’s an article about the tech that’s being used at Adidas. And so as I mentioned before, you have such a diversity of what you cover, but I wanted to know how you find your stories. I know you mentioned pitches and conferences, but the topics, like what interests you and what do you want to be reporting on right now?

Jennifer Riggins 10:53
Right now, everything’s about increasing developer productivity. So much of that is AI, though not in the way it was originally intended or originally adopted, like AI is still not great at writing code. And that’s not the point of AI. Because the point of AI is to reduce toil, to reduce the boring repetitive tasks.

But so anything in the intersection, which is creating internal shared resources, like internal developer platforms that help everyone understand what’s happening, but also not have to know everything. Because there’s a lot of cognitive overload in technology because the technical stack is so complex. But also how to adopt AI, and where to use AI securely, and where to just experiment, how to measure developer productivity is incredibly interesting, because it is a multifaceted, multilayered, very deeply human activity. And that will involve AI.

I’m not interested in AI is going to replace developers. I am disgusted at companies that are getting rid of or stopping hiring junior developers, because they don’t think they need them. But then I don’t know how they’re going to continue to have senior developers without having junior developers. It is illogical. I think it’s much more interesting companies looking at their business processes across everything and deciding how to safely implement AI, but also not AI for AI’s sake, because that has an environmental repercussion that’s insane. Like it’s so bad.

And then there’s also the financial cost. Because whatever you do in AI is going to be in the cloud, which is going to be very expensive, which is where the environmental cost comes from. Like in West London, there hasn’t been able to build affordable housing for years, because there’s not enough electricity, because it’s all going to data centers.

That’s something that we should be talking about every day, not how can we automate out people’s jobs. That is not the point of AI. AI is about helping us become better creative workers, not creating documentation, which for the last 15, 16 years, developers have all complained about not having good documentation. They don’t want to contribute to it. AI is very good at explaining complex ideas in a simple way.

Great use case, not writing code. The last 10 years, because of cloud and how fast we’ve been producing code anyway, and it’s going to get worse, and actually, they’ve complained about technical debt. Again, AI is very good at explaining complex systems, so it’s very useful for that skill. It’s not great at writing code, and that’s okay, because that’s where developers can solve interesting, unique problems and then automate the boring out.

Larissa Padden 13:50
I feel like we’re in this really weird time of experimentation when it comes to AI, and maybe not in a great way. I don’t mean this dangerous AI is going to have a mind of its own. But if you look at journalism, recently, two weeks ago, last week, there are publications that are getting rid of writers, because they’re just going to try using AI. I’m sure we’ll see some backpedaling on things like that and finding out where we really do need humans.

But it’s such an odd space over the past couple of years, because you’ve been covering this for over a decade, and people will say, AI has always been there. It’s just in the last couple of years that all of a sudden, this topic’s exploded. I’m wondering, in terms of what you cover, and I know you mentioned what you’re looking to cover, how have you seen this space change, and what are your thoughts about how people cover AI right now?

Jennifer Riggins 14:38
It’s always had the same problems. it’s been at least 10 years since companies have been using AI for application tracking systems. Because the AI is trained by mostly white young men, it’s been mainly choosing them. Nothing’s really changing, it’s just at a larger scale. And there’s more people who think their jobs are affected.

I think there’s more demand for tech storytellers and whistleblowers and people explaining what’s happening, and there’s a greater need than ever for the average person to understand technology, its use cases, and how it’s made, whether you’re a parent or a teacher or how you’re going to use it in school, how you’re going to use it in the workplace. Everyone needs to know it now or needs to at least understand it.

But it’s just at scale. The same problems have always been there with AI bias. It’s just probably the scale that now these have been trained not by individuals or smaller databases of companies where it had specificity at least, but instead it’s being trained on the internet, which is a crapshoot. So it’s riskier, but it’s here. So now we’ve got to figure out how to use it because people want to use it. So, okay, explain to people.

Basically, privacy law too. Because the US isn’t as good as Europe by any means, maybe California, CCPA, but if half of companies don’t have an AI policy still, to me that’s wild, especially because you need to at least reinforce GDPR. You need to reinforce ‘Do not put people’s personal information in the public experiment,’ things like that. So it’s just us getting used to what that is, but I think it’s really jumping the gun to be laying off people already because of that.

There are other things that are playing and maybe we’ll use AI as an excuse to lay off, but that’s not why the layoffs are happening, I think, except for the very small-minded companies that think their workers are worthless, so they’re probably not doing great anyway.

Larissa Padden 16:51
Well, we’ve seen, as I said in the media landscape, not just from a tech standpoint, but things have been changing so much. When I started working as a reporter, we were trying to figure out what is digital journalism and how is the internet going to shape that, and now we’re looking at replacing writers with AI.

You see, at least in the US, a lot of writers going to what we call non-traditional media, that’s what we’ve been referring to it, like Substack, or using their LinkedIn and socials to report stories and build their own brand. And so they’re not just a reporter, they’re not a representation of a publication, they’re building their own brand. So I wanted to ask if you’re following these new media spaces and kind of your thoughts on the way media has been changing.

Jennifer Riggins 17:34
I mean, I’m trying not to. I left Twitter. I have a BlueSky. At some point I had a Mastodon. It’s not great for me. It feels, I thought I’d miss Twitter or X a lot more than I did. It wasn’t healthy for me, so I don’t mind. The idea of Substack that you pay to play, I don’t mind that. It has some other issues for diversity and inclusion and all, but I’m okay with you directly playing a journalist, just like I’m okay with the idea on GitHub that you can tip someone that’s contributing freely on open source.

But the truth one of the reasons I don’t use generative AI in my writing is because I don’t want to train it on my writing yet. I’d rather have the published first and then it will be training on my writing. So just assume everything you put out there is out there. But if journalists want to get creative, I still think there’s probably more demand than ever and I’m finding more demand in my work than ever for tech storytellers.

What went with TechCrunch is not okay, that a private equity or VC venture capitalist firm, whatever it was, bought it and then fired everyone and specifically fired every single writer in Europe because they felt that technology built in Europe was not important to have those told is disgusting. But that just means there’s a lot of really qualified people out there looking for work.

And also, at least in the technology space, developers don’t like being sold to, they don’t like being marketed to, so there is an increased demand from companies to help them tell their stories, to help them tell their case studies. So I’m hopeful about that, I just think we’re seeing some pretty gross negligence on companies, and we know some of its tax law in the US and things allowing for this, but those are the companies I think that are going to lose out in this competition.

Larissa Padden 19:42
And I think we’re seeing at least in the US, some of those people that have kind of built their own platforms on their own socials or on Substack are increasingly becoming important to our clients, especially the fintech clients, I think that they’re a little more clued in to where their audience is getting their information and so we are seeing those very qualified people still working with brands and telling stories or just kind of doing it on their own terms and it’s starting to be noticed. And so personally, I think there’s a lot of potential there.

Jennifer Riggins 20:15
The influencer economy kind of, right? The influencer economy. Some of it’s good, but some of it’s just like…

Larissa Padden 20:22
Like in any space, yeah.

Jennifer Riggins 20:24
It’s sad when you hear that kids, that’s what they want to be is social media influencers. That job pays crap, like really badly. So maybe we need to be more all vocal about how much we’re paid. I’ve always said this in journalism, women are always paid less in tech journalism or anything else, so we need to be more vocal.

But in general, that’s not a good job to have. A social media influencer, a successful one, it’s very hard work, like 80 hours a week and it doesn’t seem good for your emotional state or anything, but also it doesn’t pay well, but diversify what you can, I would say.

Larissa Padden 21:04
Well, you kind of perfectly led me into my last question, which is I saw on your LinkedIn that you have done mentoring and that you champion a lot of causes that are important to you. And so I wanted to ask in this time where everything seems to be changing so quickly and a lot of things are up in the air, if you were to give some advice to reporters that are entering either the tech space or just any kind of journalism right now, what advice would you give?

Jennifer Riggins 21:27
Protect your byline. Ghostwriting is a way people make jobs, but it’s not a way to secure your work. You need your byline as much as possible. If you’re going to do ghostwriting, that’s fine, but charge double because your byline is something that is important to Google and SEO, search engine optimization, et cetera, but it’s also the only proof.

So if someone wants to take your ideas, you better have your name on it first. Because you will be training the AI. That’s just how it is. We’re in the public but constantly having our name on our creative. Whether it’s hosting a blog, hosting a podcast, hosting a video, have your name out there because that’s all you have in the end, especially if you’re freelancing.

Larissa Padden 22:16
That’s very interesting. And I remember when I started before, as I said, AI was a conversation within journalism. That was always the case too. Don’t write for free and don’t write without a byline because how else will you build your recognition and build your career? So it seems like even as technology changes, that never changes.

Okay, great. Well, thank you so much. This has been super fascinating and really hope that as these things develop, you’ll come back and talk to us again.

Jennifer Riggins 22:40
Cool. Great. Thank you so much.

Larissa Padden 22:43
Thank you. Have a good day.

Jennifer Riggins 22:44
You too. Bye.