34 • THE GRYPHON Summer/Spring 2021
Harry McCracken ’82 Harry McCracken ’82 is technology editor for Fast Company magazine, a business publication focusing on business technology and innovation. Prior to this role, Harry worked for Time magazine and had his own website known as Technologizer, and was once editor in chief of PC World magazine. In what ways did your experience as a student at CSW help shape you into the person you are today? Would your high school self be surprised by your current work? I was already interested in computers when I came to CSW. It was at the very start of PCs, 1979. Because my father got one, I got in on them early. When I arrived at the school, I discovered that it had a computer lab. It was the first year that there were PCs at CSW. These were Radio Shack computers, so pretty primitive. Basically, there was one math teacher who was in charge of them, and maybe the only teacher who was a computer enthusiast. There was a basic programming class you could take. But my friend Charles Forsythe ’83 and I basically came in already knowing more than this teacher did, so it was not about any kind of formal education in computers at the school, but we spent an inordinate amount of time in the computer lab, just writing our own programs mainly. When I came to CSW, I was much more of an art person than a writer. Although I was an avid reader and was reading technology magazines in great quantities, I didn’t think of myself as doing them. I think the fact that I had some great English teachers like Alorie Parkhill and Holly Hickler helped get me more interested in writing. So by the time I left the school, I was at least somewhat interested in writing. Shortly thereafter, I sold my first articles for money, which were about computers. So by that point, I was getting going on the trajectory that took me forward. What factors go into your decision-making when considering a story idea? Basically, my job is to identify the intersection between what I am passionate about and have some degree of expertise in, and what readers are passionate about. If something checks off both of those boxes, it’s potentially a good story, because if I don’t care or don’t know much, I’m not going to do a good job of
writing about it. If I do care, but there’s not a critical mass of people who read our publication who’d care, then it’s pointless. Particularly over the last couple of years, it’s changed a lot. In March of last year, it dawned on us that we really had, for a while, to devote almost all of our energy and our tech section to covering things relating to the pandemic. We really had to turn on a dime, and write all this stuff about health, and the implications of the pandemic for work and people’s lives at home. There was also a lot of politics going on last year, so that became a major influence on the stories we chose. This year, things are a little bit different. Six months from now, it’s possible that there’ll be really important topics that we don’t know about yet. One of the things that just keeps this field interesting is that the change is continuous and rampant, and there are all kinds of surprises. Does click rate play a role? It does. Just this morning, I shared the most popular stories from the last six months with the staff, based on clicks. One thing that’s critical is not to get stuck in this feedback loop where all you’re going to do is write stories that may get a lot of clicks, because that might lead you to make very unhealthy decisions about your content. One of the nice things about Fast Company is we’re not like a sausage factory, where all we’re doing is trying to please Google. We get to do really ambitious, creative stories. Sometimes, they find a large audience, which is great, but if they don’t, that’s not a disaster. We just try to learn from that experience so maybe the next time we cover that topic, we figure out how to do it in a way that will be appealing to enough people.
