The Silicon Valley Beat

DURING HER JUNIOR YEAR AT DARTMOUTH Gannes applied for a writing job at a certain campus publication. Dartmouth Alumni Magazine turned her down because she had too little newswriting experience. “i didn’t actually do a lot of journalism in college, which is kind of funny,” she says. That’s changed.

Since graduating, Gannes has been a mainstay in the tech journalism scene as a reporter for Silicon Valley pub-

lications Red Herring, GigaOM and now Re/code. Sitting at a café in San Francisco, the former linguistics major talks about her journey in the world of technology. “Some of the things i’ve written about—like Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, Snapchat—are some of the most used products in the world,” says the Palo Alto, california, native.

Gannes remembers writing about YouTube when it was first developed by a few guys working in an office above a San Mateo, California, pizze- ria. Then the site only had a landing page. now “it’s turned into this tre- mendous force of citizen journalism, entertainment, democratization of media—it’s been involved in revolu- tions,” she says. “Following their tra- jectory has been fascinating.”

Gannes says one of the more in- teresting parts of covering startups is watching how these companies take on established industries and corpo- rations and seeing which succeed and why. “i get to live in a world of ideas,” she says. “And it’s a pretty fulfilling way to live.”

liz’s top 3 Apps ~ ~ Moves “It counts how many steps you walk, how much you run and how far you bike. It turns it into a pretty neat little daily log of where you’ve been and how you got there.” TiMehop Records social media posts to help users remember what they were doing years ago. “I tend more toward the nostalgic side of social media.” WhisTle Through an accelerometer at- tached to a dog collar, keeps tabs on her border collie mix, Crash. “It sends a little report on his activity and health every day.”