I am a writer and editor who specializes in making technical topics reader-friendly and entertaining. I draw on expert insights to illuminate engineering and technology and advance industry transformation.
In 2022, the American Solar Energy Society cordially brought me on board as the editor in chief of Solar Today, a trade publication with an outstanding reputation and a loyal readership. Since then, our team has received feedback from a media expert that I have increased the subscription value of our publication by $10 per year. I have been pursuing newsworthy topics and working to increase the magazine’s impact. I streamlined the magazine’s production, reorganized our workflow, and strengthened our ethics and accountability using best practices from the mainstream media.
I reported on physics, engineering and applied math for Popular Mechanics for a year in 2022-2023. This adventure led to me seeking out other technically challenging topics to cover. I am now contributing to Ars Technica, The Bent, Supercluster and Offsite Builder. I am also reading books about physics and energy regularly.
Yale University previously invited me to do media entrepreneurship there as a contractor, where I ran two student-powered news sites, Clean Energy Finance Forum and Conservation Finance Network. The second site was co-branded with a nonprofit.
These publications accelerated their respective industries by publishing news, op-eds and explainers about practical solutions. Close to 45% of the articles in Clean Energy Finance Forum dealt with improving socioeconomic justice in energy. We collected performance data showing that around 90% of our survey respondents took at least one practical action based on the news we sent them.
I began doing solutions-oriented journalism for these projects before I knew that there was an international organization called Solutions Journalism Network. SJN later put a “hot shot” profile of my work on its website.
Staying current with digital innovation is important to me. Over the years, I have learned from the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas, Poynter, the American Society of News Editors, the Online News Association, NewsTrain and the American Society of Business Publication Editors. I integrate these insights into my everyday work throughout the workflows and products that I manage.
I also integrate diversity-friendly media practices into my projects. I grew up on the South Side of Chicago, where I became interested in engineering and wrote my first news articles. The environment where I lived was affected by steel mills and other pollution. This motivated me to care about urban sustainability and brownfield reclamation.
Before I knew I could create media for a living, I spent years building machines and learning how to design them. I began studying mechanical engineering in college because of my interest in energy conservation. Since then, I’ve operated tools in machine shops, built hybrid race cars, designed cooling systems for power electronics, and assembled plumbing and industrial equipment to manufacture fiberboard.
After working as a mechanical engineer, I completed a graduate program in science and environmental journalism at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My thesis explored the fact checking and environmental justice issues raised by news coverage of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
During and after grad school, I edited news and publications to help build diversity-friendly teaching practices in science, technology, engineering and mathematics for a nationwide outreach program.
To learn more about the media industry and my beat topics, I do ongoing professional development and networking. If you’re interested in talking shop, you are welcome to send me a message via LinkedIn. You can also view my clips there. Due to the popularity of social media, that page is my primary website now.
Kat Friedrich 