By Sachi Akmal, CISLM student employee
Yanan Sun moved from Chapel Hill to New York City in 2022 to pursue her master’s degree, and she was directly launched into the world of journalism.
“The very first assignment we got was to interview 10 strangers about where they lived and why,” Sun said. “I thought that assignment at the beginning was insane — there’s no way I could just start a conversation with strangers.”
“It just kind of made me open up to the world and got me to really love the mission of journalism,” she said.
Now, she’s thrilled to be back in Chapel Hill as the UNC Center for Innovation and Sustainability’s Local News Researcher.
“She’s already had an immediate impact, she hit the ground running,” said Jessica Mahone, center research director. “I think we are going to be very successful moving forward because of her.”
Sun graduated from UNC in 2022, with a double major in communications and computer science. Although journalism wasn’t on her radar as an undergraduate, she still had an interest in innovative storytelling via documentaries and game design.
Appreciating the intersection of storytelling and computer science, Sun didn’t want to give up either of her tracks when applying for graduate programs. That’s when she came across a dual master’s degree in journalism and computer science at Columbia University.
Sun’s interest in local journalism in particular began at the Brown Institute for Media Innovation. As an entrepreneurship fellow, Sun developed a data studio that provides data communication services for local news outlets.
The three-month fellowship helped her work with local newsrooms – more than 100, in fact, as she interviewed data journalists about their needs, workflows and difficulties.
“Yanan, with her collaborator Yuqi Cheng, reached out to an interesting range of organizations and people to understand how they were thinking about modern information needs, and to identify critical challenges these organizations are facing in meeting those needs,” said Eric Chen, director of creative research at the Brown Institute and Sun’s former supervisor.
“I thought it was important that she talked not just to traditional journalistic outlets but also to research- and design-focused organizations, and thought broadly about how people can better understand the world and each other,” Chen said.
Sun’s knowledge of artificial intelligence may also come in handy in her new role, she said. Sun co-founded PrivaSee, an AI product that helps users read mobile apps’ privacy policies.
“I really appreciated Yanan’s drive and creativity in exploring novel ways that journalists can help meet modern societies’ informational needs,” Chen said.
Sun’s technical background will help the center’s research go further, Mahone said.
“We are very excited about Yanan’s background in data science,” she said. “That is something we definitely need as we are working on some big ecosystem analysis projects.”
Sun has already identified ways to use data science to scale up the center’s research.
“I remember Jessica telling me about their (previous) project, the NC News & Information Census, where they spent a year just manually (going through) all the data,” she said. “But it will be really great to use code to automate the process so that the research can reach not just North Carolina, but nationwide.”