My point is that you CAN get yourself into a room with engineers, although my guess is that no formalized structure currently exists to do so. That said, I def. think it’d be worth your time to go and visit places like the MIT Media Lab (Boston) and to attend events like the NY Tech Meetup (you’re outside of NYC, right?) where engineers and entrepreneurs already gather systematically to see cool projects and mingle. If nothing else, it’ll get you excited about the future and start to think about news and technology in a different way.

Matt — Thanks for the very kind words! (And if anyone from Google is reading this, I want to go on record as saying I’d love to sit in a room with Google engineers!

You do make a good point. I fear you’re correct about newspapers, although in my heart I wish it weren’t so.

– Gina

Fundamentally, newspapers are dinosaurs. They have a vested interest in resurrecting the past––which is impossible––which makes them very poor as partners in the task of creating and imagining the future. Seriously, these are people who are still figuring out and debating the value of the hyperlink. This isn’t trailblazing the future, it’s living 5 years behind the times.

Rather than waste their time trying to teach newspapers how to use the internets and youtubes, universities should seek to pluck gold nuggets of talent from the industry (like you, Gina) and put them in a room with Google-bound software engineers and user interface designers and having you all collaborate to build some stuff, meanwhile facilitating access to the VC industry and the capitol markets.

Anything else is a waste of time and money.