7 minute read
Alum Spotlight
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.
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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. 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.
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
The online journalism landscape has changed immensely in just the past few years. How do you see the industry evolving in the future?
I would say one big change, which includes online stuff, but is a little bit broader, is that, for a brand like Fast Company, it’s basically about meeting our readers where they are. That doesn’t always involve reading. We still have a magazine, which people really care about. We have a website that has more readers than the magazine ever did. We do live events. Especially over the last year, we’ve also done virtual events. We do podcasts. We do video.
That’s been fun. To be a journalist today, you can’t just think of yourself as purely being a writer. You need to basically communicate to people in a bunch of different ways.
What skills or competencies, specifically related to technology, do you believe are most important for today’s high school student to learn?
I am sorry that everybody doesn’t learn to program at least a little bit, because it gives you great insight into how computers work. They’re a little bit less intimidating, and I think you’re more inclined to be skeptical of people saying that computers are miracle workers if you’ve done enough programming, understand how they work.
The computers that were there when I was there, they could just barely do black and white graphics. They basically did not have built-in sound at all. So I’d say one of the most exciting developments since then is just the degree to which you can do anything from animation to movie making to music on computers. As far as I remember, there was not a lot of film production going CSW when I was there, just because it was so expensive and complicated. The fact that any computer can be a movie studio or an audio production facility is super exciting.
I’d say one thing that’s been true about computers and education since the start is that sometimes people get over excited about their potential, or think that the fact that you have computers around is educational in and of itself. So there’s been a fair amount of disappointment over the years, when people realize that, ultimately, all computers do is facilitate people doing interesting things. The people are more important than the machines in the long run. I also think it’s also critical for anybody who uses technology to develop a pretty strong, healthy skepticism about it. Over the last five years or so, we’ve seen all kinds of pieces of evidence of the fact that computers and smartphones and social networks are not automatically healthy things. So I’m curious about how students look at this stuff. I’m hoping that maybe they grew up smarter about some of these things than the generation before them.
What is a new technology product you are excited about?
I’d say one at the moment I’m excited about are e-bikes. The idea of putting an electric motor on a bike has been around for, I think, literally, 100 years or more, but just over the last few years, e-bikes have gotten really good. The world is looking for transportation options other than automobiles. If you live in a city, an e-bike can actually be more convenient than a car, since you don’t need to find a parking space, and you don’t get stuck in traffic. I’ve had a lot of fun with my e-bike, and got to write about that. Amid all these other technologies, where you have to worry about them potentially having a negative impact in the world, it’s nice to write about something that’s pretty clearly an unalloyed good.
What advice do you have for anyone shopping for a new piece of technology?
Among other things, I always say you should wait as long as you can before buying something ” new, but no longer, because no matter when you buy something, a few months later, if not a few weeks or days later, there’ll be something better out there. So you need to learn to live with that disappointment. But it’s also not great to hold onto something that’s no longer useful.
I think a lot of smart people, rather than rushing out on day one when there’s a new iPhone out there, they buy a new iPhone when their old iPhone is no longer working as well for them, rather than doing that on Apple’s schedule. That also applies to things like laptops and cameras and all kinds of other products.
