some personal news

on career changes and creative evolution.

Some personal news: Today is my last day at Vox, where I’ve worked as an editor for the past seven years. In the fall, I’m going to grad school, to a master’s program in creative technology at NYU. I’m very, very excited; I’m also quite sad. In my experience, that feeling is worth chasing.

I’ve been in digital media long enough to remember when the phrase “some personal news” was met with eye rolls. It was a hacky, faux-modest way to announce you had a new job, most likely in journalism, most likely on Twitter. There were entire weeks when it felt like half the internet was announcing forthcoming employment at Vice, Fusion, Mic, or some other recontextualized noun, a frenzied game of musical chairs soundtracked by the massive VC cash infusions of the mid-2010s. 

I wish “some personal news” were still in wide enough circulation to be annoying. Media has been in a state of crisis for years, the money spigot turned off as promises from platforms never materialized. This past year in particular was brutal. If you venture onto Twitter (I just absolutely can’t say “X,” I’m sorry), you’re far more likely to see a string of posts from media workers seeking, well, work, running the gamut from recent grads looking to land their first jobs to people with decades of experience all of a sudden out in the cold. 

It can feel really dire some days, even though I wholeheartedly believe there will always be journalism, always a need for smart people to tell true stories to the public, always a profession through the contractions and the shakeups. These cuts — at Vox, sure, but also everywhere else — leave publications forever changed. Writers and editors everywhere are wary; the ones with employment qualify every workplace complaint with “I’m lucky to have a job at all,” and they’re a vanishingly small portion of the whole. Any sort of clear career trajectory seems like a thing of the past.

Still, my choice to leave is far less about industry instability than it is just time for me to try something new. Even before these pronounced shifts began sweeping through media, I was thinking about what came next for me, professionally and creatively. I’d been working pretty exclusively with words as my building blocks, my atomic units, for essentially my entire life; at a certain point I started wondering if there might be some way to express myself in ways that aren’t quite so literal. That’s when I began fussing around with making games and interactive projects in my spare time. I realized that maybe this was pointing me towards what comes next. 

For the next two years, I’ll be getting a masters at ITP, the same NYU program that hosts the creative technology camp I attended last summer. I’ll be digging deeper into coding and physical computing, and figuring out where those skill sets run up against the writing and editing I’ve been doing professionally for the past twelve years. It’s a uniquely hands-on, project-based program, so I’ll be making a lot of stuff: games, apps, websites, electronics, maybe even a textile or two. I’ll be creating things I don’t have a name for yet, alongside people I haven’t met, learning skills I never contemplated picking up, and that unknown invigorates and terrifies me more than anything has since I can remember. 

My career so far has been marked by staggering luck. I’m lucky that I graduated from college in 2012, just when digital media funding ramped up in brief earnest. I’m lucky that I’ve had top-notch bosses (shoutout Peggy Wang and, in particular, Julia Rubin, my actual fairy godmother), who valued and championed me; likewise, an array of colleagues who remain some of my closest collaborators and confidants. I’m lucky that the capricious roulette wheel of media layoffs somehow never landed on me.

I’m lucky to have a wonderful partner, with whom I split uncommonly cheap rent and can rely on for health insurance. I’m lucky to have a network of great friends and creative peers, in New York and beyond, who were the first people to tell me to pursue this path, long before I could see its outlines for myself. I’m lucky to have a family who, even if they don’t quite understand exactly what I’m doing (we’ve landed on “making video games” as the party line for my parents’ friends), love and support me without condition.

There are moments when I feel a pang of shame over all of this luck, all of these people in my corner, like any successes don’t count for as much because they aren’t solely my own. But if I’ve learned anything from working in newsrooms for the past decade, it’s that the best things are built in conjunction with others. And if I’ve learned anything from being alive, it’s that luck changes all the time, without warning. It’s worth trying to grab a couple fistfuls and shape that luck into something more permanent, that moves you forward, that reflects who you want to be and the world you want to live in, when you’re given the chance. 

I don’t have a plan for what I’ll do after school. Whatever happens, I’m going to document it here, as I’ve been doing in fits and starts since I started teaching myself to code two years ago. I’ll be turning on optional payments for this newsletter, since the issue with leaving your job is that you are also leaving your salary, and opening myself up for some project-based work; if you find yourself in need of a resume editor, a narrative designer, a knitting teacher, an essay about video games, a custom embroidery or crossword puzzle or something else you think my peculiar set of interests might be a good fit for, please do hit me up at alanna.okun@gmail.com. 

Mostly, though, I plan to spend the next few months before school starts (my first proper summer break in nearly two decades) resetting my brain and body. I want to remember who I am outside the context of the job, off the endless wheel of productivity, unhooked from the IV drip of Always Online. I want to be still for a moment. Then I want to dive right in.