A Dan Sinker Interview...Part One

A Dan Sinker Interview...Part One

Responding to a perceived need in punk, Dan Sinker and a few cobbled together volunteers began Punk Planet during the mid ‘90s ground swell of independent music. The magazine covered the music associated with the sub-culture, but also tangential political issues. Suffering financially and ultimately ceasing publication during the aughties, the rag’s absence left a void in the market place – at least according to Sinker.

Cessation of publishing, though, found Sinker arriving in academia. Meeting in his office, replete with just a few too many concert posters on the walls, the professor dealt sincerely with his past and passions while snidely deriding a few of his peers.

 

DJC: How’d you wind up being a professor at Columbia College?

DS: Before Punk Planet ended, I was invited to be a guest speaker in a magazine editing class there. I said sure and gave my normal shpiel. I got an email the next day from the teacher that said, “Hey, that was really great, have you ever thought about teaching?”

I think spring of 2005 was my first semester there. I did the magazine editing class for a couple of years and then added Visual Journalism. My last semester, as a part timer, was teaching those classes and co-teaching a course in the Grad program while still doing Punk Planet. I was working like 13, 14 hour days.

After Punk Planet ended, I went to California for a year on a fellowship. Half way through that a job opened up at Columbia.

DJC: What did the fellowship entail?

DS: It’s called the Knight Fellowship. It’s been around for 30 plus years. It’s a fellowship for working journalists. What they do is bring in 12 U.S. and 8 international journalists. They give you a stipend and open up the university [Stanford] to you. You can take any class you want with the one exception being neurosurgery.

The idea is to propose a project and then do advanced level research on it. My original proposal was to develop a back-end for managing and publishing independent magazines on the web - building a CMS [Content Management System] that at its core was designed around the work flow of an independent publication. But pretty soon into that project I got interested in the coming world of mobile ubiquity.

DJC: And that leads to Cell Stories [a once daily piece of fiction or narrative journalism delivered to your mobile device devised by Sinker].

DS: I got really interested in the idea of what’s possible with mobile technology. To me, it actually answers a couple of really interesting questions.

One is that it addresses the portability factor. Print publications always had computers beat, because you could take them with you. Phones are something you have with you anyway, so it answered that question. It also answered the digital divide question. If we target only computer users, we leave a lot of people out. If we start to think about phone users we’re suddenly reaching a lot of people that we weren’t reaching in print.