Miranda Mulligan — digital design director of Boston.com, the web site for the Boston Globe — has been named executive director of the Knight News Innovation Lab at Northwestern University in Chicago, her colleagues announced today via Twitter.
She’s been replying to well-wishers this afternoon.
The Knight News Innovation Lab aims to help create, improve and refine methods of publishing news and reaching readers in ways that newspapers just don’t seem to be willing to do. The lab’s own web site describes it like this:
In partnerships built across the Chicagoland region — from neighborhood bloggers to large media companies — the Lab invents, improves and distributes technology that help build and sustain a better informed citizenry and a more innovative publishing environment.
It’s most definitely a place where a brain like Miranda’s should be able to flourish. She begins her new job on July 23.
A 2002 graduate of the University of Miami, Miranda interned for Ocean Drive magazine and the Philadelphia Inquirer and taught a graphics class at Ball State University and earned her masters degree from that institution in 2006. She then interned at the Sun-Sentinel of Ft. Lauderdale before starting work at the Virginian-Pilot that fall.
Where she handled multimedia and print assignments. And did fabulously well, despite having me for a boss for two years.
She taught a class at Virginian Wesleyan University in 2008. The Pilot promoted her to multimedia presentation editor in 2009. She moved to Boston in 2010.
The launch of BostonGlobe.com — which Miranda oversaw last year — was a tremendous success. Miranda reminds me it wasn’t a “relaunch,” which I’ve been calling it. The Globe‘s old site still exists. BostonGlobe.com is the newer site that incorporated HTML 5 and “responsive design” into its basic structure. Many online news observers declared it the news web site of the future. Miranda talks about it here.
All this made her a huge rock star at the Society for News Design conference in St. Louis last September. I was so proud of her. And still am, of course.
For more reading…
- Find a nice Q&A with her here published by Sparksheet.com.
- Watch Miranda describe her job at the Globe in this video.
- Find a grad student-written profile of Miranda here entitled “Part Journalist, Part Space-Cowgirl.“
- Find a profile of her here, published by Ball State University.
- Find Miranda’s Twitter feed here.
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UPDATE - Thursday, June 28, 4 p.m.
The folks at the Knight News Innovation Lab finally put out a press release. Find it here.
