From the time he was a young boy, Eric was fascinated by space, eventually leading to his pursuit of an undergraduate degree in Astronomy. During his time in college, he realized that the career path of an astronomer was not what he wanted. After pursuing a seemingly different path in graduate school for Journalism, Eric has merged his love of space, his talents in writing, and his side project blogging about Houston weather into a rewarding and exciting career. Join us for this conversation about pursuing your passions and merging multiple talents and experiences to create your own path.
You can find Eric and his work at spacecityweather.com, https://arstechnica.com/author/ericberger/, or download the Space City Weather app in the App Store.
From the time he was a young boy, Eric was fascinated by space, eventually leading to his pursuit of an undergraduate degree in Astronomy. During his time in college, he realized that the career path of an astronomer was not what he wanted. After pursuing a seemingly different path in graduate school for Journalism, Eric has merged his love of space, his talents in writing, and his side project blogging about Houston weather into a rewarding and exciting career. Join us for this conversation about pursuing your passions and merging multiple talents and experiences to create your own path.
You can find Eric and his work at spacecityweather.com, https://arstechnica.com/author/ericberger/, or download the Space City Weather app in the App Store.
Thank you for joining us today on Paths in Progress. I'm your host, Carrie Young. On this podcast, people in a variety of career fields, talk about their journey from choosing their college, deciding which majors and minors to pursue, their first jobs out of college, and all of the hurdles, detours and victories along their path through today. Our goal is to help students hear about a variety of exciting opportunities out there and understand what day-to-day life is like in these careers. I hope you enjoy and learn from our story today. Thanks for listening.
Carrie:Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us today. We are here today with Eric Burger. He is an editor, he's an author, and he is a founder of Space City Weather. He has an undergraduate degree and astronomy and a master's degree in journalism. Eric, thanks so much for joining us today.
Eric:Oh, it's my pleasure, Carrie. Thanks for having me on.
Carrie:Thanks for being here. Well, can you start by taking us back to high school and telling us a little bit about what you were thinking back in those days regarding your career path and how you were approaching your college search?
Eric:I'm gonna go back to even before high school. All the way to elementary school. I think it was a class assignment, I'm not sure. But the assignment was to write to NASA and see what they would send us back. And so I wrote as a student saying, Hey, I'd love to see some photos of planets or something. And this was at the time the voyagers were just kind of going out in the solar system and taking pictures. And they sent me back these wonderful glossy eight by 10 photos of Jupiter, Uranus and just Oh wow. Yeah, it was like really, like inspiring. I had always had this interest in science and space and that really nurtured it. When I got to high school, I was living in Michigan and going to a magnet school for Math and Science. And I just sort of, you know, wanted to do some kind of science and the actually had a great teacher in physics and astronomy in high school. And so I decided I was gonna go off and become an astronomer, because that's what I was really interested in was the stars and what was out there and trying to understand it.
Carrie:Did you have a telescope in your room?
Eric:I had a telescope and I lived in a fairly rural part of Michigan. You could go outside at night and see stars. And I remember one cold November night seeing this really spectacular meteor shower, like laying outside when it was below freezing and just sort of looking up and seeing this and that just was just kinda all fed into this desire to really understand what was up there.
Carrie:So you said you had a great teacher in high school that encouraged you. How did you approach looking at programs? Were you looking for a program that had some strength in astronomy how did you approach that?
Eric:This was mostly pre-internet, so that you couldn't really do faculty searches and things like that particularly easily. I was looking at different programs, and I ended up at the University of Texas, because they have this great observatory in West Texas called McDonald Observatory. I remember I had visited Austin with my parents a few years earlier and just liked the idea of getting away and experiencing life in Austin.
Carrie:Did NASA have anything to do with you wanting to come to Texas or was really the university program you were looking at?
Eric:No, at that time, I mean, I thought it was cool that Johnson Space Center was you know, nearby, but I didn't make a pilgrimage over to Houston. I don't think I visited Houston all the four years I was an undergrad in Texas.
Carrie:So as you were going through your classes in college, were you starting to envision anything in particular regarding your career path? How did your actual coursework influence you as you moved through your degree?
Eric:Yeah, so I was envisioning that I was not going to become an astronomer.
Carrie:Oh, okay.
Eric:That became, that became readily apparent. My classes were basically calculus and physics. And I took some astronomy classes as well. You know, I was passable at calculus and I could do the physics, but like the higher end mathematics was like really pushing me and I wasn't excelling at that. And it really wasn't what I enjoyed doing. It was after my junior year and I was trying to figure out what to do and I was at some kind of conference or some kind of Seminar for like incoming students where different people got up and spoke. I'm not sure exactly what it was. And one of the speakers was the dean of the journalism program at UT, a guy named Rusty Todd. And I just ended up talking to him during one of the breaks and like, you know, you should really go to journalism school. Cause I explained that I like to write and I like science. And that was one of the other things about astronomy, you know, to be a research astronomer, you really have to specialize. You're not even like a stellar astronomer. You study a particular class of stars or a particular kind of galaxy. And that was great. And it was really fascinating and actually the field of astronomy has seen amazing growth in terms of discoveries, especially with the exoplanets and things like that in the last 20 or 30 years. But it just was not something that appealed to me to be that kind of research astronomer. And so I figured that maybe I would try my hand at journalism because I could write about lots of different kinds of science and I had always liked writing as well. So it seemed like a nice way to go.
Carrie:And that's a great example too, of how students can think about, you know, in one way you can look at the story as, you know, you changed fields drastically from astronomy to journalism. But on the other hand, you can look at it like you're saying, is utilizing that first degree and your interests and a lot of what you learn and putting it into that second field that you went into. And I don't think we talk a lot about that with students, right? That you can take these two fields that are seemingly not similar, but really put them together and find work where you're really utilizing both of them.
Eric:Yeah, I mean that's a great point and one of the things about journalism today, I think, is that it really helps if you have a non journalism degree or a non journalism background, that you can sort of bring some of that expertise to your coverage. And certainly majoring in astronomy gave me a deep appreciation of the science and the scientific method. That sort of helped inform my reporting and be able to read research papers and talk to scientists that I would not have had otherwise if I had come straight out of like an undergraduate journalism program. One of the other things I was thinking about as I was a junior at Texas was like, well, what am I gonna do with an astronomy degree? Right. Okay. This was my passion, then I followed it and, you can become an astronomer maybe if you go all the way and get your PhD and then get in a research position. But even that's, you know, academia is pretty challenging to break into. Yeah. Especially if you're not like an elite scientist, which I don't think I would've been. And so like what could you do with an undergraduate degree? Well, not much. I mean, maybe go work at a planetarium or something like that. I had decided that I wanted to do journalism at that point, but I wasn't ready to be a journalist. I need to get some practical experience.
Carrie:Yeah. So as you were applying to graduate programs, was there anything kind of different in how you had to approach that or submit your application materials because you didn't have undergraduate work in that area?
Eric:No, I mean, I think a lot of the graduate journalism programs were set up such that you could come in and get a grounding in journalism and sort of build based upon whatever your background was. I ended up looking at sort of three of the best journalism schools in the country at Columbia, Northwestern, and the University of Missouri. Like my friends at the University of Missouri, where I ended up, you know, had backgrounds in law and you know, criminal justice. Lots of different areas. Very few had had done undergraduate journalism degrees.
Carrie:So, was it exciting for you applying to that program? Like kind of thinking about merging these fields and writing about science and perhaps starting to envision your career in a different way than you had years before? Or do you remember kind of where you were at in that space as you were looking forward to graduate school and deciding where to go?
Eric:Yeah, I mean, it was fun. You know, I traveled to the different schools. I vividly remember going to Northwestern in, it would've been in the fall of 1994 or spring of 1995. It was just so beautiful right there on the shores of Lake Michigan. But then sitting down with the advisor saying that, well, you know, we can get you a$5,000 grant and with room board it's gonna be about$50,000 a year. And I'm just like, whoa, It's like, I don't think journalism pays that well. So I ended up at Missouri, which was much, much more affordable. It was exciting. It was different. It felt like this was something that I could be good at, sort of merging my interests in science and in writing.
Carrie:Yeah. So going through that program, what are the kinds of courses that you felt like really contributed to your growth as a writer and really helped you kind of figure out how you wanted to start navigating your path?
Eric:Well, one of the really good things was the practical experience. So that Missouri, at the time, had a daily newspaper called the Columbia Missourian, where you could go in and work for editors who had worked at actual newspapers and they would assign you stories and you could propose stories. And so it was basically like getting some hands-on practical experience with that kind of job. And then there were also lots of great theory courses. Like I remember one of the best I took was on copyright law, and plagiarism and things like that, sort of the legal aspects of journalism, because I mean, like it or not, you don't wanna write things that are gonna get you sued, but at the same time you wanna know where the line is so that you can make sure your reporting as honest and fearless as possible.
Carrie:So were you doing science writing in graduate school or were you kind of sampling a lot of different things?
Eric:One semester was like general reporting, so I did general assignment reporting and then I had like an advisor who had a background in science journalism and so there was me and a couple other students who were studying under him. So he helped me with my thesis. And so I was doing some of both, I was doing some general reporting and some science specific reporting to get a sense of, you know, reading journal articles. Contacting researchers and writing up the results.
Carrie:So once you graduated from graduate school, that's a huge turning point for a lot of people, right? Cause you feel like you're being kind of catapulted out into the world and you've gotta figure out what you're gonna do. So can you tell us a little bit about your work in the first few years out of grad school?
Eric:Yeah. So I had some personal reasons after graduate school to wanna look for a job in journalism in the greater Houston area. A little bit daunting, right? Because I had no real world experience. I had done a couple internships, where I'd gotten some basic experience, but I hadn't like, worked at a daily newspaper or magazine or anything like that. I didn't have much to sell editors other than like, Hey, look, you know, I've got this pretty interesting background. I ended up at like a small weekly paper in a suburb of Houston covering like grocery store openings and stuff like that. It was not what you call exciting work. I had made some contacts with the metro editor of the Houston Chronicle guy named Steve Jetton and just said, Hey, here's my resume, if anything ever comes up, I'd be really interested. But it was a tough time because the Houston Post had just closed down. And so the Chronicle had absorbed some of those reporters. They didn't have like a bunch of openings and they were like journalists looking for jobs. Mm-hmm. But maybe after about 12 months, he called up and said, Hey, you know, we need someone to come in on Saturdays and Sunday afternoons to cover general assignment, breaking news stuff. And I did that, and I was able to parlay that over time, another six to 12 months into like a full-time job on the city desk, just covering nights basically, which was like the standard murders, car crashes, nighttime of marches, things like that. The night beat. This was late 1990s, early two thousands.
Carrie:Okay. So we're talking like early internet stuff, right? So how were you getting your stories? Were people calling in? Were you getting them from a feed of some kind? How were you getting your leads to go out and do the stories at night?
Eric:Oftentimes it was just assigned by the metro editor who said, Hey, we want you to go cover this, or, this is happening today. Or, I was sitting over in the cop shop listening to the police scanner and trying to interpret what that meant and, and go to a crime scene and report on that. Mm-hmm. and, you know, this was not what I wanted to do. I'm pretty introverted. So the easy parts of journalism for me, were sort of seeing the story and then writing it up. Mm-hmm. in, in a way that was, I think, compelling to people. But the difficult part was the reporting in the sense of going out to places I hadn't been, introducing myself to people I didn't know and that sort of thing. That was a real challenge for me to try to navigate, in those early years, you know, as opposed to beat reporting where you develop sort of a network of sources that you know, they know you. And so it's a much more kind of comfortable relationship, not in the sense of like, I scratch your back, you scratch yours. But for someone who's introverted, it's more like, Hey, this person knows me. I don't have to feel like I'm, you know, introducing myself or butting in on their time. We have an established relationship.
Carrie:Yeah. So how long were you doing that type of work with the Chronicle?
Eric:It was about two or three years, and I moved from nights to sort of evenings to days. And then I basically was able to get the science beat at the Chronicle, because the person who was doing that had wanted to go cover medicine. And so it was like by 2001, 2002, I was doing almost exactly what I had wanted to do coming outta graduate school, several years earlier, which was to write about science for a major daily newspaper.
Carrie:And how were you developing your stories in that? Were you also assigned things to report on, or could you go out and find things that you wanted to write about?
Eric:No, once you got a beat, you worked with an editor, but basically if you were coming up with good story ideas, they mostly stayed out of your hair. You'd get news releases, you'd get tips over the phone. You would develop sources from people you know, that sort of would give you ideas. The weekly journals, science, nature Proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences. There'd be meetings and stuff where new research would come out. And so it was just kind of a steady stream of things that came that was interesting.
Carrie:Yeah. So it was a mix of local and national news?
Eric:Yeah, that's right. And oftentimes the national news would have like a local perspective attached.
Carrie:Okay. Could you give us some examples? Like when you have a quote, science beat, what are some examples of the types of topics that you were writing about?
Eric:So, one of the big things, you know, back in that day was a chemist at Rice University named Richard Smalley had just won a Nobel Prize, for the discovery of carbon nano tubes. And so those are writing a lot about nanotechnology and the potential implications of that, what may or may not happen. And it's interesting looking back now, 20 or 25 years to see all of the promises made, what actually happened and what did not. It was that, it was climate change. It was physics. George Mitchell, the founder of the Woodlands, would bring Stephen Hawking to Houston every other year. That was part of the beat, sort of the high energy physics bit. And astronomy stories. And just kind of like keeping track of all things science and biotechnology, everything.
Carrie:Well, for students listening who have an interest in writing for a major newspaper, do you have any advice for them as far as securing the kind of positions that you secured early on to move your way into what you wanted to do? Or any advice about what that life is like, or ways that they could prepare for that?
Eric:You know, the media landscape has changed so much since I got into the business. You know, it was gone from a time when newspapers were dominant to now where they're sort of very much secondary or third tier players in terms of news. So there are still newsroom jobs and newspaper jobs that people can do. But there's much more of a proliferation of online reporting. It can be tough to break into, but, the key thing is really try to do internships. Get your foot in the door at places because if you get in the foot in the door, newsrooms are always looking for talented people who can write on a deadline. And if you can show them that you're able to do that, then they're much more likely to hire you when openings come up.
Carrie:Do you feel like your grad school newspaper, or for other students that maybe their college newspaper, was helpful in preparing you for that?
Eric:Absolutely. I mean, I would not have had the confidence to write an on deadline story without the very practical hands-on experience of: this is how you interview someone. This is how you don't. This is how you write an inverted pyramid this story, this is things you should include. It was very helpful to go through the editing process too in college where they would look at your story and say, okay, this works. This doesn't work. Here's what I would do here. Because there is a sort of almost apprenticeship like part of journalism that's very important. Just learning what you should do, what you shouldn't do. And then once you have that foundation, you can sort of layer upon that, like good writing or expertise in a beat, source development. But you sort of have to really ground that experience.
Carrie:Yeah. How long were you on the science beat for the Houston Chronicle?
Eric:A long time and it sort of changed over time. And there were a couple really for me, watershed moments. The first was in 2001, when a tropical storm named Allison hit Houston. Yeah. And this was a really, a major, major flood storm, and I was caught out in the middle of it, at night. And so I just remember, these torrential rains and flood waters coming through the city and, basically being out in all this all night and then sort of walking to my brand new home, which I didn't know if it had flooded or not, in Northwest Houston. What stood out to me was that I had no idea that a: this was possible cause I'd grown up in the Midwest and I'd gone to the University of Texas. And so this kind of torrential, tropical flooding was not something I was familiar with. And then b sort of, I'd felt like I'd been caught on unawares, and I was someone who had written weather stories, for The Chronicle and was notionally a science reporter. That kind of really got me interested in weather. And then in 2005, a journalist at the Chronicle named Dwight Silverman said, Hey, you should start blogging. And back in 2005, blogging was the new, new thing. Yeah. So I started this thing called The Side Guy Blog and I just started writing about it and different sort of little tidbits in addition to stuff I was doing in the newspaper. I would do stuff online and that was pretty uncommon, certainly in newspapers at the time.
Carrie:So how was your writing different on your blog from what you were writing for the paper? Were you doing like a personal take on something? How was it different?
Eric:It was more conversational. So you could it less formal. You could have a little more fun with it. It's very liberating to be able to link out to other things as opposed to a printed format where you basically have to say everything because people can't hit a link and go get more information about this or find the source of that. And so it was very, very empowering in that way. And the other really important change was that this was 2005. And it's a long time ago, but that was really a major year for hurricanes. And you had Hurricane Katrina, which struck New Orleans, it decimated that city. It caused hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate. Many of them came to Houston. And then three weeks later there was another hurricane Rita, that really posed a major threat to the Houston area.
Carrie:I was in that traffic jam.
Eric:Yeah. It was up north, this horrible, horrible traffic jam. Yeah. And you look back and you think, well, why did I evacuate? Cuz the storm didn't hit. But I'll tell you, as someone looking at that, it terrified me of the forecast for Rita.
Carrie:When we left, it said a category five was gonna hit us. So it was a category five we're, we're leaving.
Eric:Heading right up toward Galveston Bay. So, I mean, I understand why they called for the evacuation and they didn't do it in the right way and they didn't have any plans for contraflow. I mean, it was really mm-hmm. A shamble. Shamble. Yeah. It was really empowering to me to be able to write about that in real time on this blog. Because if you write a newspaper story about a hurricane, you know, you can't link to the hurricane center forecast and you're writing about this at nine or 10 o'clock at night, and then 10 to 12 hours later, the forecast could completely change. It's whatever happens out of date. And so being able to cover Katrina and Rita in real time on a blog was really eye-opening for me because it was a clear demonstration of how this medium could be used and readers really appreciated it. Like the traffic on those stories was really pretty tremendous. And then three years later we had a Hurricane Ike in Houston, which again, was enormously popular with readers. And I realized I was onto something with writing online about weather.
Carrie:So was there a particular event where, I mean, it sounds like it might have been Ike for you, where you realized that you could really take this blog writing and do something bigger with it that would help people and serve people. Was there a particular thing where you started to make different decisions for yourself, for your writing and your career path? How did this all transpire?
Eric:Yeah, a couple important things happened from about 2009 to 2014. So you had asked about science reporting and if I was getting a little bit, Stuck in a rut. And I would say the answer to that is yes. I mean, I was doing interesting things, but my career kind of felt like it was stuck in neutral. You know, I wasn't really going forward, I wasn't going backward. It was kind of a weird time for newspapers in 2008, 2009 because we had this recession, the housing collapse. That was one of the first really bad time for newspapers in terms of advertising and people going online. I could see that this industry, the print newspaper industry, concerns I'd had earlier were sort of much more magnified about the future of the industry.
Carrie:In the industry in general, like if we leave the online part out of it, which I know is hard to do, but talking about the newspaper industry, would a traditional path have normally been like moving up to an editor of a certain section and then edit? I mean, is that kind of the hierarchy? What are the options as far as growth and moving up?
Eric:Yeah. In the newspaper you could go to like an assistant editor or metro editor or higher up in the publication or like as a science report, you know, you could take a next step and go write for a magazine. Right. Or write books or, you know, a lot of my colleagues would go into public relations or something like that. So there were career options, but, you know, I was happy in Houston. I was happy writing for the newspaper, but I didn't really feel like I was going anywhere. But then Ike happened. And that was really transformative in the sense that the editor of the Houston Chronicle at the time, a friend of mine now named Jeff Cohen, really leaned into it. So they were putting my picture like big, like the top half of the front page of the Chronicle would be sort of the standup of me with the forecast bullets and lots of information about this side guy that. It was very high profile promotion for me. And so, it was clear there was something to this forecasting online. The Chronicle was gonna support it. And so I asked Jeff if I could, you know, look, I said I'm not a meteorologist, but if I'm gonna be writing about the weather, I should be one. And so the Chronicle ended up paying for me to get a certification in meteorology through Mississippi State. It was a three year program.
Carrie:Oh wow. Can we pause on that? Yeah. So a certification in meteorology, what does that mean? What type of program is that? What is that like?
Eric:So this was a distance learning program offered through Mississippi State, and it was about 60 college credit hours. And the basic thing was, it was mainly for broadcast journalists who wanted to go be on air meteorologist. Oh, oh, yes. And so like if you're covering whatever in the city of Houston and you're like, I want to be Frank Billingsley, then you can, this was one way sort of for you to take those classes and make that transition. Because after the 60 hours, you could take a certification from some meteorology association. You take a test and then like you're certified. Okay. You're now a meteorologist. So it was basically that, oh wow. But I was a print journalist doing this, to do online meteorology, so it was a little bit different. And so I did that. It was mostly online. There were some classes, some work in Mississippi as well, at the university campus. It was great and I learned a lot. I came out of this in 2014 as a full fledged meteorologist. But at the same time, the paper had actually had laid off the space reporter. I mean, the Houston Chronicle is based in Houston obviously. Right, right. Yeah. What we talked about is Johnson's Space Center. And so the Chronicle had a full-time space report. They let him go as a part of that downsizing we talked about in 2008, 2009 after the recession. Mm-hmm. And so space became part of my portfolio in addition to meteorology and science. I just started writing more about space and it sort of rekindled this interest I had had as a kid that had led me into astronomy. I got it more into sort of space flight. And so in the year 2014, as as I was finishing my certification, the Chronicle also let me take most of that year and focus on a long series about sort of the pretty dismal state of the US Human Space Flight Program. That was a series called A Drift, and that actually really rekindled my interest in science, but particularly in space flight reporting. And that that's sort of what set the stage for the next phase of my career. Sort of this realization, I kind of had these two realizations from 2008 to 2014. One, that online journalism was the future and that I really wanted to be part of that before it bypassed me. And two, that the things I could do really well online were meteorology and space reporting.
Carrie:Yeah, that's so interesting cuz a lot of people I've talked to have ended up in a space where that wasn't an existing job, or an existing field when they were in high school looking for college. Or it was just starting, so it wasn't necessarily a career path at like a high school college counselor would be talking about. So it's really interesting to hear how people have seen something start to grow or develop and want to get on board, you know, as it's taking off or as it's growing, or as they're seeing the landscape of their own industry change. It's hard to envision a future when you are seeing something begin to grow, right? Did you start to have ideas about what you could do with that or what you wanted to do with that?
Eric:Yeah, absolutely. So like when I was doing the online certification in meteorology. At the Chronicle, I was like, look, we should invest in this. We should create a special weather site. You know, I'll do forecasting, I'll do writing. My vision was to become Houston's first sort of digital meteorologist, right? You've got the TV people do their thing on TV and they're great. You know, they've got all these graphics and stuff and they get up during storms and they're at the front of the newscast when the weather's happening. But their focus was not online. Right. It was not the internet. And I felt like the Chronicle could sort of dominate that internet meteorology space. And so I was like, we need to create a website. We need to do this, that, the other thing. And they just, in 2014, after I finished up my certification and into 2015, they created a blog, but they never put any real resources into it. And it was part of my daytime job on top of all the other things I was doing. Like they invested in me to make me a meteorologist, but then we didn't take it to the next level.
Carrie:What were they wanting you to do with that then?
Eric:I'm not sure. Jeff Cohen kind of left. The editorial department and the new editor and publisher came in and they wanted to do different things and they were kind of into it, but I don't think they ever really quite got the vision. I mean, it's interesting now if you look at newspapers and newsrooms and major metro areas, they're really beefing up their meteorology coverage and hiring meteorologists because they realized how much traffic that is and how important it's to people's lives. Yeah. But back then, I guess it really hadn't sunk in.
Carrie:So what did you decide to do with that then?
Eric:So I was kind of going along and, as I said, spent most of 2014 writing about space and it was like, this is what I want to do. And then, what happens is, a friend of mine in Houston says, Hey, you should come work for Ars Technica, an online news site, which is not that well known. But I knew some of their writers, and they did quality work. They were creating a space beat. They sort of saw that we were in the midst of this space flight revolution, and they wanted me to come cover it. And I was like, well, you know, I was really comfortable with the Chronicle. Then they offered me like a 30% increase in salary and I was like, wow, this website can pay quite a bit more than this media publication. I had gotten some raises at the Chronicle, but nothing like huge. And I could see that they were never gonna offer me money that was really significantly higher than what I was receiving. It was frustrating because like, I felt like I was really kind of coming into my own as a very important voice at the newspaper. I was really successful with the weather stuff and was with well known in town for that. And I was sort of had this voice on space flight writing that was starting to be recognized but there was no upward mobility at the paper, right? It's not like I was, they were gonna double my salary or create a newer job. It's like I was sort of where I was going to be. And so if I needed to really take that next step, I would have to leave.
Carrie:Yeah, that's such a great point cuz I think a lot of people find themselves in that type of place where you have to make the choice to Sure you can stay and have the security. Especially if you feel yourself kind of having that itch and you wanna grow and you can envision something bigger and something that you're really excited about, you have to make that decision, you know, to go somewhere else to be able to do that.
Eric:Yeah. And what was nice about what Ars was offering is they're like, look, you will have total say over what you write about space. We just want good stories, interesting stories. But you'll have told editorial control over that. And I kind of liked that, you know, there had been times at the Chronicle when I had wanted to be a little more critical about NASA or things that were happening in space flight, and it was kind of constrained. From an editorial standpoint, there was a little bit less restraint I think expected there to be at Arse Technico. And the other thing that was interesting about that was, you know, back in 2015, it was a remote position, right? So it was like, you know, working from home, which I wasn't sure whether I would like, but I kind of thought I would like, and I mean, I've worked from home now for eight years, or seven and a half years, and I certainly would not go back.
Carrie:The Houston Chronicle is something that anybody who lives in Houston is familiar with. What audience was this new company serving? Was it broader? Was it in Texas? Who was your audience that you were writing for?
Eric:It was a national, international audience, but it started out as like a website for information technology professionals like 20 years earlier. Over time it had since grown to like technology professionals and it had grown a science section. And like I said, they were wanting to expand out their science department by adding a space beat. It's pretty well educated, pretty well off readership. I could write at a little bit of higher level, assume a little bit more knowledge than, yeah. Than readers at the Chronicle, the general public. And other thing I liked about it too was that, at that time, newspapers and other publications were starting to experiment with paywalls. The Chronicle had a public site, but it was all of their kind of lower quality reporting. I would say, was going there. And then like the paywall site, where a lot of my longer stories were, was not accessible. And so if I wrote a story about NASA that somebody in Washington DC wanted to read, they might not be able to read it. And I didn't like that. And so it was like, oh yeah, ours was kind of freely available. And I just felt like, okay, it wasn't a major brand that anyone really knew about it in the space community, but if I did things right, I could change that.
Carrie:So how long were you there and how did you start to develop what you wanted to do there?
Eric:Well, I am still there. I've been there since October of 2015. It's been great. I mean, it just sort of grew over time. It was the kind of place where they hire people who have some specialized knowledge and say, go make this beat your own. And so I've just kind of done that with space flight. I've tried to write authoritatively about things that are happening, things that are good, things that are bad, things that are making progress, things that are slowing us down. And so that's been very rewarding for me because, you know, I had been a journalist when I took that job for 16, 17 years. And so I knew the basics of reporting and I knew I was interested in space, but it just sort of allowed me to take that experience and really run with it. And develop my own voice. It's extremely rewarding to be able to be in a field you're interested in and be able to look at everything that's happening and write about the things that you think are most interesting or most notable.
Carrie:So somewhere in the middle here lies Space City Weather, then, right? So how did that start and grow and in full disclosure to people listening, I have this app on my phone. I've been following Space City weather for a long time. Eric and Matt's work, it's something that a lot of people have looked to for, I don't wanna necessarily say calming because when there's a hurricane coming at your city, you're not exactly calm, but it's a different type of,
Eric:you can rely on us.
Carrie:It's balanced and we know that it's not a bunch of hype that's happening on a TV program that's trying to get a bunch of ratings right then, right. or that's trying to drag you in with the commercial. So, it's something that a lot of people, particularly in our community, have really come to rely on, especially when there's large weather events happening or if we're watching something that could potentially become a large weather event. So, obviously you were doing this on your blog, but how did this turn into what it is today?
Eric:Yeah, so when I left the Chronicle in October of 2015, I had all this experience blogging and writing about meteorology and doing daily forecasts. And I was a meteorologist by that point. I said, I'll continue doing this for sort of a pretty nominal amount of money. And they didn't have it in the budget. And so I was like, okay, well then I just decided to found Space City Weather. I came up with a name, the site, and I remember my wife and I went out to a celebratory dinner on a Friday evening in Houston, and we cut it short because there were like storms coming in that next day. And I was like, well, I better write about this. And so.
Carrie:Duty calls.
Eric:Yeah. Story, story of my life. Right. So basically the website was started like right after, like right after I left the Chronicle. And it was just kind of a hobby and I figured I would keep doing it cause I was used to getting up every morning and doing a daily forecast and there were some people out there who were reading it. And I had had Matt Lanza, a Houston area forecaster, do some contract work on the Chronicle. And he was great. I said I'm gonna start this, but why don't you come in as a minority owner and we'll go forward. And we did that. Like a really, really big day for us back then would've been like 50,000 page views on a story. But we were having server problems and I didn't know anything about that. I didn't know anything about business development. I was a writer, right? That was my background. Yeah. And we started something in 20 16, I think. Yeah. We're like, okay, you can sponsor the site for a month for a thousand bucks. And so, we got some different companies that came in. In like two different people had written well, eBooks and wanted to promote'em. It was really interesting that that was who was sponsoring the site. And then in June or July of 2017, Reliant came in and said, Hey, we like what you're doing. And it was like$1,500 a month. It was a very nominal amount of money. But then a couple months later, Hurricane Harvey rolled into Houston. Yeah. That we had a couple days there where we did 1 million page views and At least half of those were unique visitors to the site.
Carrie:I was one of them!
Eric:Yeah. I mean it was like, it was insane. It was just really, yeah, really insane how much people appreciated what Matt and I were trying to do.
Carrie:For people listening who don't live in an area where hurricanes occur, I grew up in Kansas where tornadoes were very frequent, but a tornado, like you get the warning, you go in your basement. 15, 20 minutes, maybe 30 minutes if it's, you know, a super long storm, and then you go back upstairs and you move about your day, right? Where hurricanes, I mean, it can be days and days and days and days of especially something like Harvey or, you know, Allison's a good example too. Something that sits, or you have this whole week leading up to it where you're not sure when it's gonna hit or if it's gonna hit, or how big it's gonna be when it does hit. So it's this much more prolonged situation where people are seeking information.
Eric:Yeah, that's right. I mean a hurricane sometimes it can develop really quickly and you get maybe a days or two of notices. But like with Ike, It was 10 days, and with Harvey it was six or seven days of notice. And so, yeah, there's a lot of hand ringing. You've got time to make preparations, but you don't have all the time in the world. And you've gotta balance that against, well, is this bad enough for me to go to the hassle of evacuating? Because as you well know, Carrie evacuating can be a real nightmare.
Carrie:Yeah.
Eric:It's pretty crazy. It's very stressful time for people. And so, the philosophy behind Space City weather was simply no hype. Like, we're gonna tell you what we know, we'll tell you what we don't know. You can just trust that we're gonna be there when you need us to be there. And you don't have to watch 30 minutes of TV to get the information you're looking for, right. There's no click bait. and it just proved to be really in times of high stress, people were looking for things that they could hold onto. And especially during Harvey where it felt like the world was washing away, we were there to, kind of help people say, look, it's gonna be really bad. I mean, this is gonna be flooding you've never experienced. This is what it means for you. This is what you should do. Here's when it's gonna get better. So by that time I had been doing this kind of writing for a dozen years, and I think the forecasting obviously is important, and we tried very hard to get things right, but I think it's as much or more the communication skills, right. The way, yeah, we write and are empathetic and when we live here, we're experiencing these same natural disasters. It just really seemed to resonate resonate with people. And so we just really kind of grew from there. Whereas like our biggest days, you know, in 2015 are now like our typical days today and where we reach a pretty broad audience. Like we created the app, I guess it was a year and a half ago. And it was downloaded a hundred thousand times in a few weeks. But I mean the only people that are really interested in downloading that app live in Houston, right. I mean, if you download, if you live in Kansas City, you don't, you don't need the Space City Weather app.
Carrie:Although I was telling my parents to read the Space City weather to see what was going to happen, like if we lost power or we lost our signal or something, we weren't texting. I was like, look at this weather, if you wanna see what's going on in Houston. Yeah, we a lot, because that's a great way to do that for relatives and stuff.
Eric:Yeah.
Carrie:Well, and I also appreciate how you guys are always like, especially when there's an event happening or about to happen, you're good about saying, you know, here's the update for the morning. We're gonna try to bring you another update around two o'clock, or whatever it is. So people again know they can rely on that update at a later time or a television. It's like, you know, stay tuned, we'll be back later and you don't really know other than the news at night, you don't really know when you can count on that information.
Eric:Yes. We have found that people are obsessively like clicking the website, expecting an update every five minutes or 10 minutes. Yeah, we found it she's much better to tell people, especially in times where like people are really concerned about things that, hey, You don't have to check again until four o'clock or six o'clock tonight or whenever. We'll update by then. I will say as a journalist, I always hit my deadlines on that, but Matt, who's not a journalist, so sometimes misses half of them.
Carrie:Oh, that's funny. Specifically with Space City weather and just developing this, like you said, you kind of been doing it for a dozen years and then Harvey's kind of really where it took off and kicked in big time. I think a lot of people feel like they're working on something for a long time, and it takes a long time for them to really see it either come to fruition or become what they want it to become. So, do you have some advice for people that really have to put in the work to gain the experience over a long period of time to where they're really prepared for that day to come, that it becomes something, perhaps bigger than what they ever thought it would be, or it gets put on a bigger stage?
Eric:The two pieces of advice I would have is number one, you really do have to work at whatever your craft is to get the experience and knowledge and know how. There's things that I do now in five or 10 minutes that would've taken an hour, 10 or 15 years ago, or there's, yeah, there's judgements I can feel very comfortable making now. You know, a snap judgment. Like for example in Space City Weather, Matt and I created this flood scale, which helps set people's expectations for how bad a particular rainstorm is gonna be in terms of flooding. Now that's really presumptuous. because the National Weather Service does like flash flood warnings and things like that. And we're not trying to step on their toes, right. But we feel like we understand the community and you know, we have enough confidence in our ability to sort of forecast that we can help say this is gonna be a category one flood, or category five flood or whatever, sorry. We don't use categories. We use sort of stage flood stage 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, mm-hmm. And like I never would've had confidence to do that or, or would wanna have done that 10 or 15 years ago. But that's the kind of thing that comes with experience. You just sort of have to build up that knowledge over time. You get much better at what you do. You become confident. You can do more because you can do it faster and more efficiently. And you do it better if you put the effort in. And the second thing is, seize the opportunities that come along. I had had a number of different job opportunities in the past when I was to Chronicle and in Ars, and, you know, you've gotta make sure you don't make the wrong choice. Like for example, way back in 2003 or four, the University of Houston came to me and they wanted me to do some due public relations for their science research programs, basically. They offered me a nice bumped salary and, you know, a different work environment and that kind of thing. And I considered it very seriously. And if there hadn't been an editor at the Chronicle at the time named Wendy Benjamins and I might've taken that job, probably would've. And none of this would've happened, and it would've been a huge mistake, I think. At the same time, when this sort of pretty small website called Ars Technica, which was like, my wife is like, what, what website? Hmm. My family was like, what? Where? You're gonna work online? I did take that opportunity. It turned out to be amazing for me. By taking that job then I could start Space City Weather on my own. And so basically like, you know, I'm getting paid twice for the writing. Actually quite a bit more than twice for the writing I was doing at the Chronicle, cuz I'm getting outta the weather site. I have my space reporting site at our Technica. That's the real value of the work I was doing. And it wouldn't have been realized unless I had taken that leap, six or seven years ago. Life will bring you opportunities. The challenge, I think is recognizing them. But to achieve things, you have to step outside your comfort zone. As I say, I'm kind of introverted and, kind of risk averse. And so leaving the Chronicle was a big decision for me. It was hard to do, but in hindsight it was absolutely the right thing to do. In life, you know, if you wanna be successful, I think you have to work hard at whatever you're passionate about, and then you have to seize those opportunities when they come along.
Carrie:Yeah. Did you see what Space City weather has become? Did you kind of see that? Is this kind of what you envisioned? Is it more than you envisioned? Like where you add on that type of scale for yourself?
Eric:Well, it's funny, first of all, I would never have envisioned that Space City Weather has become what it has become. I mean, people absolutely love it. And it's a couple nerds sitting behind their keyboards, right? That's basically what it is. But at the same time, you know, I did have this idea back in 20 10, 20 11, that there was this online digital space, become the digital meteorologist for Houston. And that that opportunity was there for the taking. So Matt and I had been able to take it. I feel very confident in like, I don't mean this to sound cocky, but like we kind of own the online conversation about weather in Houston. Yeah. It's interesting, you know, after the Valentine's freeze of 2021 mm-hmm. which busted everyone's pipes, knocked power out, and was, you know, a real disaster. The University of Houston did a survey of people to find out where they got their news about that. The aggregate of the TV station. So everyone, Fox 26, abc, cbs, all that was something like 55% of people had gotten their news. But then there was this second bucket at like 18%. There was the Chronicle in there, all the radio stations, the state of Texas websites, and then Space City Weather. I was like, wow, I'm par with these, all the news organizations in Houston when it comes to weather news. And so I thought that was pretty interesting. I mean we reach a lot of people, and I thought that opportunity was there, but you know, did I think I could succeed on capturing that on my own? Absolutely not.
Carrie:So the freeze you were just talking about in 2021, you also published a book in 2021. So can you tell us a little bit about that and how that came to be and what it's about?
Eric:Yeah, so I've been really passionate about space flight and writing about space news for the decade prior to that. The thing that had most excited me about it was this commercial space flight because private companies were coming along and trying to do some of the things that NASA had done, but try to do them faster or less expensive. And they were having some success and some not. But the most interesting and dynamic company was SpaceX. And so I'd been really interested in SpaceX, but they'd been hard to crack. They had a small communications team. They didn't really spend a lot of time talking to the media. But I remember in 2018, February, 2018, it was the first Falcon Heavy launch. And I was, they picked a couple, three or four reporters to go out to the launch site and interview Elon Musk at the launch site. And so I did that and it was the first time I'd met him, which was obviously an experience.
Carrie:Oh. So wait, how did you get that? You just got an invitation?
Eric:I was landing at Orlando Airport, two nights before the launch. And SpaceX communications guy called my cell phone and said, Hey, what are you doing tomorrow? I guess they had picked me out cause I had been at Ars Technica for two and a half years at that point. Had written Pretty good stories about the space flight industry. Elon had seen that, and wanted to meet me, and so I guess that was one of the ways I was up there with like the New York Times and, CS and a couple other publications.
Carrie:Well, that's huge.
Eric:Yeah, it was cool. It was pretty clear at that time, especially watching that rocket take off as like this was the world's most powerful rocket had been built by a private company. And they had launched the Carta Mars. Where did this company come from? Like, where were their origins? Why had they succeeded when others had failed? And so that kind of led me to the idea of writing a book about that. Elon basically agreed, and, he sat down and did several long interviews with me and then said I could talk to anyone at the company. Basically, I had access to everyone who was at SpaceX in the early days and, and just sort of wrote that story of the first six years of that company, they almost failed. Their first three launches of the Falcon One Rocket were failures. Everything was riding on the fourth launch, which I probably very improbably actually reached orbit. And so it was just kinda the story of those really desperate early years and the people who made that happen. And it was pretty colorful cast of characters. I had always wanted to write a book and, as a writer you think, well, that's kind of the pinnacle. It just turned out that I got to write a book about something I was like, absolutely, super interested in. And opened a lot of doors and it's been a commercial success too. But it was all happening like in the early 2020s. Right. Space City weather was taking off. I was writing this book on liftoff and it just felt like I had in my late forties, I had really made it after basically two decades in journalism.
Carrie:Because you were interviewing Elon Musk directly and a lot of the people within that company, did you feel pressured to write the book a certain way? Or did you really feel like you had the freedom to write things the way that you saw them?
Eric:Oh, I had the ability to write things exactly the way I wanted. They had no write of review or anything like that. It was totally my story.
Carrie:Has that made you wanna write another book, or are you looking to do that?
Eric:Yeah, I'm actually working on a couple follow up projects. It's hard because there's a lot going on. But I'd like to write a book about the Falcon nine Rocket, which they've made reusable, which is really interesting. Working with another person in the space industry who's very dynamic, young, making changes, about a future book. And then Matt and I wanna write a book about flooding.
Carrie:Oh wow. Particularly about this area or just in general?
Eric:Well, it's gonna have elements of this area, but also sort of be more broadly applicable, but absolutely very much grounded in Houston. The experiences we've had and others have had here, sort of looking back at flooding and then forward for what that might mean. This is a very embryonic idea. we're not very far along, but yeah, all of those projects are kind of in the works. But there's a lot to balance.
Carrie:Absolutely. I think a lot of people are scared to think about the multiple job, multiple gig kind of situation. You know, I think we see this a lot more in creative fields, right? Where people are writers or they're artists in some capacity and they're balancing different jobs or different gigs to kind of round out their career profile and make things work for themselves. So do you have any advice specifically for people who are maybe hesitant to go down that path or some encouragement for people who think that they might end up in that kind of space?
Eric:Yeah, I mean, I think in year 2023, with the internet especially, you can be doing multiple jobs. Especially because so much can be done remotely and I think that the value of a second job or a side hustle, whatever it is that can really be a passion project. And maybe you've got your steady job or whatever, where's your main salary or insurance or whatever comes from. But then there's this other thing you're working on. Like, at this point in my life, I could step away from Ars Technica and just focus on space city weather and make a living from that. That was my side hustle, right? But I like the space writing piece of it, too. So I don't want to give up either of them. That's part of taking opportunities as they come along. You know, whatever your passion is, maybe try it out on a small scale and, and slowly build it. I think people ought not be averse to that unless they don't want to, you know, I mean, it is hard work, right? I mean, I get up every day at five 30 or 6:00 AM to work on a weather post every day. And I roll right from that end into Ars Technica. So it's nice. Most days I work pretty, pretty long hours. And some people don't wanna do that, and that's fine. I mean, I'm fortunate to enjoy what I do. But I absolutely would agree people, to have a second job if it's something they're interested in and might ultimately grow into their dream job.
Carrie:Yeah, you never know.
Eric:You never know.
Carrie:Well, looking back over your journey, do you have any big picture life advice for students? You know, thinking back to the space that you were in as a student and realizing that the degree you started in the career path you thought you might have been on, you know, you decided that is not what you wanted to do, but you formed this other path where you really are utilizing it all, right? And you were able to put all the pieces together, in this really incredible puzzle. Do you have advice for students that's helped you over the course of time, along your path?
Eric:Yeah, I've heard people who quibble with this advice, but I believe pretty firmly and certainly have inculcated it in my daughters. You know, I think that you should follow your passions as a student. And career wise, because you're more likely than not to end up doing something that you're really interested in. And then you're eight or 10 hours a day or more that you're working on something maybe doesn't feel like a job and more feels like a calling. And so I think it's really important to follow your passions and follow what you're interested in. And maybe, yeah, you're not gonna get a very well paying job the first couple years, but as you figure things out, you're just much more likely, I think to be successful at something that you're really passionate about and want to put the hours and effort into. Like for example, I obviously write a lot. Infrequently I'll pick up a contract writing assignment to write about something. Or like in the distant past I used to write news articles that paid really well for a medical journal. But it was just like pulling teeth to do the interviews and write up the stories. And it wouldn't take me that long. It would work out to like a couple hundred dollars an hour compensation for these articles, but I just didn't enjoy it. So I can't imagine like that being my job every day. Right. Because yeah, it pays well, but it's miserable while you're doing it. When I'm writing about space or weather, it's something I'm super interested in. So it's like, yeah, I want to get up, I want to do that. I wanna see when it's gonna rain. I wanna see if we're gonna get another cold front. And I wanna see if that rocket launch is gonna happen, and I wanna write about it and explain to people what's happening. Having done those contract assignments and still doing them from time to time, it's like, man, you know, if I had to work like that every day, doing stuff I wasn't interested in, that would be a pretty not great life.
Carrie:Yeah. Well, Eric, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your story with us. It's been really fun to hear your story since I've been a fan from a distance for quite a while, and I know a lot of people that will listen are as well. So thank you so much for being with us today.
Eric:Well, thank you, Carrie. I hope everyone who's listening to this, you know, finds as much joy and and happiness in their career as I do. You are always asked like what the meaning of life is. For me, I'm not sure exactly who said it, but I think the meaning of life is to find your gift. And the purpose of life is to give it away. I really feel like with Space City Weather, I'm embodying that because like, it took me 15 or 20 years to find out that my gift was sort of communicating to people about weather and disasters in very trying times. You know, on Space City Weather, we freely give it away. We try to reach people wherever they are. It's been really interesting to sort of realize that, you know, as I almost turned 50 years old, that I've kind of found the meaning of life and it's just, it's very fulfilling. So I would hope that people listening to this can ultimately get to that point. And it's not a straight road, right? It's many twists and turns along the way. But you just gotta find your own path.
Carrie:Yeah. And can you tell everyone where they can find you and Space City Weather?
Eric:Yeah. I mean, Space City Weather is just spacecityweather.com. And all the social channels. We have an app. And then you can find me on Twitter@sciguyspace, and all my space writing at Ars Technica.
Carrie:Thanks so much.
Eric:Thank you.
Do you know someone I should interview? Please DM me on Instagram@pathsinprogresspodcast and let me know who I should talk to. I would love to hear about how these stories are impacting your journey. Please follow Paths in Progress wherever you download your podcasts and leave a review to let me know what you think. You can also follow us on Facebook and LinkedIn at Paths in Progress Podcast. Our music is by John Grimmett and the artwork is by Edgar Alanis. Thanks again for joining me today.