At long last we're back with new interviews! First up is our conversation with journalist and entrepreneur Jennifer Brandel. She's the founder of media startup Hearken and the radio show Curious City on WBEZ, among many mother cool pursuits. We talked with her about her career path, how she got into journalism (she attended a lecture by then-up-and-coming NPR host Ira Glass at a friend's urging, and applied for an internship at NPR using a calligraphied cover letter), how she started Curious City, and how that led to her starting Hearken. Her career has combined her curiosity- and desire to stay curious and compassionate- with an approach to journalism rooted in "starting with people’s needs rather than your assumptions about what they should get."
Jennifer Brandel was "an intensely curious kid," and that curiosity has been her guiding principle all her life. After a post-college internship with NPR, Jennifer says her 20s were "a total hodgepodge of trial and error," freelancing as a writer among other things, including pitching stories to WBEZ, Chicago's NPR station. That led to her developing a show "Curious City" that asked the public what stories from their communities they wanted told. Jennifer took that idea and founded Hearken, a company that "helps newsrooms listen to the public before they publish" through consultancy and a tech toolset.
