From Brooklyn to Florence

A new job posting has been buzzing around the twittersphere for a couple of days, and it looks pretty cool. It’s for the Managing Editor job at Change.org.

Wait, isn’t that my job?

Yes, it is, but after next month, I’ll be moving on from Change.org* to a new job as Online Campaign Manager at Free Press.

The move is very bittersweet. I came on board Change.org almost exactly a year ago, charged with helping build a network of more than a dozen blogs, written by experts and activists, that would get people engaged and catalyze change.

Here’s how I loquaciously described the project last year:

There’s a magic combination between people who are passionate about a lot of things on the web, which can act as an engine of social change, and other people (the experts) who live and breathe a particular issue. How do you reach out and build a community around that?

Since then we’ve hired 20 bloggers to help build those communities, and in large part, it worked. The blogs have become must-reads, injecting themselves into ongoing online conversations. Also, we launched the hugely successful Ideas for Change in America contest, which attracted thousands of new readers to the site. I couldn’t be happier with the way it all turned out, and Ben Rattray’s got some more tricks up his sleeve that will soon make Change.org even more robust and essential.

Now it’s on to Free Press, an organization I’ve long admired and can’t wait to work for. Starting in less than a month, I’ll be working on all of their online campaigns, which strike at the heart of the media reform, net neutrality, and broadband access movements. These are the issues that got me interested in online advocacy in the first place, so getting a chance to work on them every day is a bit like coming home.

Speaking of home, that’s about to change too. Free Press has two offices, one in Washington and one in Florence, MA, which happens to be Nicole’s home town (their offices are about a mile from where she grew up), and we’ll be moving up there in June. I’m looking forward to it. Florence is actually part of Northampton, a wonderful, progressive, smarty-pants town with plenty of New York ex-pats. We’ll be able to get a house. And a dog.

I’d be lying if I said the prospect of moving out of Brooklyn didn’t freak me out — it does. But in the immortal words of a friend of mine, New York isn’t going anywhere.

*I’ll be moving to an advisory role at Change.org as Senior Editor.