🔨🧱 Building the internet we deserve: Introducing our new Founder in Residence

How Trei Brundrett bridges community values and digital innovation

We are seeking a Social Media Fellow, and an Open Source Developer, PSI

Today I want to introduce you to our new Founder in Residence, Trei Brundrett. Trei’s arrival is a milestone for New_ Public, as he leverages decades of product leadership to take our Local project to the next level and build technology to support digital spaces for local communities.

Trei helped build Vox Media over the course of 16 years, growing a collection of sport blogs into a 21st century media brand with a purpose-built publishing platform underneath. Recently, he’s been serving on the boards of The Guardian and The Texas Tribune, while consulting on local nonprofit news and AI.

Read on for more about what brought Trei here and what he’s excited about building with us. To hear from Trei live, please join us this Friday as he hosts our virtual event on new trusted messengers of local information, featuring panelists Melissa Bell (Chicago Public Media), Mitra Kalita (Epicenter NYC / URL Media), and Adam Whitaker (The Peak Weekly).

–Josh Kramer, Head of Editorial, New_ Public

Why Trei joined New_ Public’s Local team:

I'm here because New_ Public has, I think, the most interesting frame on the future of the internet and media. We're in a moment where the internet feels broken, and we get to imagine, what would it look like if we were to take it in a new direction? What would we want the internet to be?

And I think that New_ Public, grounded in research, has started to imagine a very different internet that is totally possible to build. It’s one that thinks about how we create digital public spaces that are welcoming and valuable and fun and informative — all the things that you find at parks or libraries or any of these other public institutions that I've felt really privileged to have growing up. We deserve to have that type of experience online. But we have to be really thoughtful and intentional about how we do that. We need to involve more people and listen to them about how to make that happen and imagine that together.

The most interesting version of that, to me, is to think about how that relates to the places where we live and where we raise our families and where we get engaged in our communities. How do we connect with each other and how do we work together? How do we just enjoy where we live?

There's just all this really great raw material to produce the types of insights that you need to have, to form a hypothesis and go and figure out the right reference implementation to build that. What I'm here to do is to take all of that work and go from R&D mode into startup mode. Where we take all of those ideas and we get to work building it, with the community. Where we're learning as we go and we're making a new thing together. We’ll figure out what works and is sustainable.

Why Trei is focused on digital stewardship:

The thing that's most interesting to me is this insight about stewards. A steward is somebody who takes care of something on behalf of others. They are in service to the community. They are hosts, I mean like a great dinner party host. They sit the right people next to each other. They welcome people to the table. They start conversations. They make sure that the conversation is going in a good way. I think this concept of a steward is really important.

What we're imagining is something that's proactive, guiding a community. We can give them the tools to be able to do that. Stewards want a great community. These are the people willing to step up and take on that responsibility and do it. That's a really magical thing and we can empower those people. We can build a platform that helps people to figure out what that can be like.

We can do that for local digital spaces, where there's a big need for relevant information and trusted information and more connectedness. I think the outcome will be rebuilding social trust, but I think it'll also just be an awesome thing to use.

Where Trei got his sense of community and social trust:

I grew up moving around in Texas. When I was young in San Antonio, I lived in a neighborhood called Alamo Heights. All the business owners and teachers and everybody, people knew each other and had been there a long time. When I was young, riding my bike around, it really gave me a sense of the value of place and people.

And then I moved down to Kenedy, later, to live and work on a ranch, that was very rural. The community though was still very tightknit, very small. The library was a place that I loved to go.

It was a town that had more six shooter fights than a bunch of other places in Texas. Just this very rich and complicated history. It was a farm and ranching town. I was one of very few folks who weren’t Hispanic and I wasn't Spanish speaking, but I was welcomed into that community. I felt very lucky to experience different cultures there.

Everything about those places really made me think about and care a lot about where I was and how I participated in it. So that when I was older, in Austin and later Montclair, New Jersey, raising kids, I just understood the value of appreciating where you are and getting involved in the community, getting to know people.

I think that when you move that much, it takes work to build relationships and build trust and kind of reorient around your pride of place. Rebooting it multiple times over really requires you to think a lot about it and think about how to appreciate it.

Trei’s first internet communities:

The way that I encountered the internet was in Austin, Texas, which was a very internet-savvy town. I wanted to be a writer, a designer.

I had a Mac, and when I connected to the internet for the first time it was actually a sort of proto-internet. Apple had a community platform called eWorld. It was sort of like Apple decided that they were going to make their own version of CompuServe or AOL.

It had the town metaphor and different neighborhoods and sort of institutions and things you’d go to, and there were a lot of guardrails. Like any Apple product, it was very bubble-wrapped. I had an uncle who was a programmer and he was just like, "That's not the internet." He's like, "You need to get on the real internet." And it turned out that there was this internet service provider here called Illuminati Online. It was just this scene of cyberpunk, indie internet vibes, and I was completely enamored. I built my first website there and I was in these MUDs, telnetting into different servers. And what I learned from that was this ethos of “the internet is for making things.”

All of a sudden you could publish to a lot of people and just put something out there and you could make a new thing and you didn't have to ask anybody's permission. It blew my mind open. And I should also say it was this community of people supporting each other, teaching each other, in some cases defending people's right to be able to do that without interference.

Apple’s eWorld circa 1994

How Trei built a career as a translator for the internet:

I think of myself as being very privileged to be of the generation that didn't have the internet, and then had the internet — sort of straddling it.

In my career I was a translator. I was this young person who had figured out how the internet worked. I started at Texas Monthly, which was the “national magazine of Texas.” A really phenomenal magazine. If you were in Texas you knew it was the gold standard of high quality magazines for writing and design. I helped them build their first website.

It was this role where you're figuring out the future while you're helping to translate these values and ideas of these really storied, incredible brands and writers. I was thinking constantly about, how do we bring those important ideas forward?

I graduated into the late '90’s, which meant that I got to be a part of internet startups doing incredible things and breaking ground. I launched the first web portal in Australia before Yahoo got there. I got to build web development tools. Thinking not only, “how do we make websites?” But, “how do we make the tools that make the websites?” All of that fed into doing a lot of work being that translator for large corporations and hospitals and things like that.

But what really got me excited is that at Texas Monthly we had built an online community for Texans spread out all over the country. This online community was so vibrant. We built a platform to help people to connect. You just saw the power of the internet, not just as this publishing medium that I had first encountered, but as a connectivity medium. When you put those things together it was very special.

The development of SB Nation and Vox Media:

I had been taking those lessons and building online organizing communities in the political space, which was also really born out of blogging. OK, the gatekeepers are down. You have this new generation of thinkers who can publish directly. There's not that much space between the writers and the audience, it's much more interactive.

Communities were building up around people who were publishing. With SB Nation, we built this network of individual sports communities, really empowering the communities to have their own identity. To share their ideas and influence the sports ecosystem by lifting up voices that had been on the outside but now had a big audience and were much more influential. We really focused on the quality of the journalism and the quality of the content, and reaching big audiences with that.

The big change was that search and social — as a means of connecting this high quality work to a big audience — became an intoxicating drug. We were able to build these really big audiences, these really meaningful brands, but we became dependent upon those platforms. We lost sight of being this place where people came to us directly. And so as social and search decided that they didn't care about news any longer, we had to turn back to that.

That's where Vox Media is at today, really thinking about that direct relationship with their audience. The Verge has always had a really incredible community. Vox.com has always had big fans who want to be better connected to it.

And so it's this arc, where we started in community, with content driving that, through that platform era, back to first principles of “let's make great things for people and with people.”

What Trei built at Vox Media:

When we got started, there wasn't really a platform for the bloggers who were creating community. There were lots of interesting problems to solve to enable what we wanted to do, and we also wanted to experiment with this medium. We didn't just want to put a newspaper on the internet.

Because we had a different vision, we built our own platform for that called Chorus. It was built with bloggers and their communities. We really were trying new things, so we just put it out there to get their feedback and tune it. We built a live commenting system for the platform to match the constant conversation that was going on about a game or about a team. It was relatively ambitious and complex.

You really haven't experienced building things on the internet until somebody uses your tool that you've built to tell you what's wrong with the tool that you built in real time. You're co-designing and collaborating, and you're making something that's never existed before, and you're doing it for the people who want it. We weren't trying to be disruptive. We were just trying to scratch this itch.

The result was a platform that was very powerful and exciting and other people who wanted to experiment with the medium came and joined us. The folks at The Verge and Polygon came. When Ezra and Matt and Melissa joined us, it wasn't called “Vox” yet, but they were excited to be trying a different approach to the news and build tools and a platform that matched their ideas and their ambition. It was incredible.

For us, the product team, we got to work with the most incredible, smartest editorial folks in the business. The people who conceived of these brands knew what technology fans wanted, or what video game folks wanted, or what policy and politics wonks wanted. There's nothing better in the world than working with these really talented people who are very focused on serving their community and their audience.

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Thanks, Trei!

Enjoying the weather and the holiday,

–Josh