Born in 1986, I grew up in the suburbs of Denver, luckily living a charmed suburban life and playing sports year-round. In 2005, I left Colorado to attend UMass Amherst, where I majored in political science, and I then moved to Boston where I would spend the next near-decade of my life. Graduating during the Great Recession was challenging, to say the least, and fresh out of college, I entered a career in sales as a necessity more than anything.
While figuring out what I wanted to do with my life while living in Boston, I tried to start my own tech company. Named the Pollis, the goal was to supplant Twitter and fill the void left by Google Reader by wrapping a social network around an RSS feed. I and my friend treated it as our version of graduate school, as seemingly every other person on the east coast has an M.B.A., and I wanted to find a way to stand out while also amassing less debt than graduate school demands. This experience prepared me for more serious sales jobs in merchant services and insurance that would come next, which informed my journalistic worldview as much as any of my professional experiences.
In 2016, without any full-time work experience in media, I was hired as Paste Magazine‘s editor for its brand-new business and media sections. After those met the same fate so many others in digital media have these past few years, I was shifted full-time to a politics staff writer position. While at Paste, I had my work shared by major outlets like The Washington Post, NBC, Fox News and Berkeley Law—as well as Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign announcement. We also launched a successful section within the media section on podcasting that got the attention of outlets like NiemanLab.
Now that Paste politics has joined so many other digital media ventures in a farm upstate, I find myself amongst the army of freelancers that grows with each day in the media industry, and I am looking to the private sector as well to see if I can find a fit for my communications and sales skillset.
You can reach me at jacobweindling at gmail dot com