Jon Hickey

Evans School alum Jon Hickey (MPA ’08) is a freelance videographer and website designer in Seattle. His degree project landed him an invitation to the upcoming conference “YouTube and the 2008 Election Cycle in the United States” at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He shares his thoughts on the value of an MPA degree, the future of digital media in public policy, and the inspiration behind his work.

Your name has become synonymous with innovation at the Evans School, and the work you’ve done in combining digital media with policy analysis has even inspired the creation of a new award. How did your interest in the cross-section between these two fields develop? I guess I’ve always been interested in digital media. My dad did a lot of videography and is a computer programmer, so I kind of picked that up from him. And then it just naturally fused with my interests in political science and the Evans School in general.

While most student degree projects are done in hard copy with dozens of pages of text, you chose to do yours entirely online by starting the website E-Campaign Trail and presenting your findings through videos uploaded to your YouTube channel. What inspired you to do it in that format? I wanted to study how YouTube was influencing the campaign, and the more I thought about how I would write this it just didn’t make sense to do hard copy. There’s no way I can say, “Hey this video here was a big turning point in the campaign, but you have to go to your computer and go to this link to watch it.” So, the best way to really present this project was to be online, to really be a part of what is going on.

Did the process of getting your analysis and your data differ from what you were expecting or from what you noticed other students getting? Yeah. There aren’t many people you can go out and interview or read books on to find out about this because it’s so new. A lot of it’s pretty original research. There’s not a big literature review on what’s going on. But there was still a lot of manual data entry because I was interpreting videos. So I couldn’t just pop in a crawler to do all my work for me. I had to go through the process everyone else has to where they’re taking a survey and have to hand code everything.

You’ve applied your talents to making your own YouTube videos outside of the Evans School. One of those being the first winning video for the National Association for Schools of Public Affairs and Administration’s MPA/MPP YouTube Challenge. I was wondering where your inspiration came from for that piece, titled Crossing Lines: Immigration Reform in America? Every summer there’s a big issue, and immigration was it that summer. That’s not to say it’s not now, but last summer I think it hit its peak. And it’s something I have a pretty strong opinion on, and I just wanted to communicate that.

The concept for it was really simple, and I noticed some of the judges commented on your ability to synthesize it down. How did you come about choosing to talk about immigration policy in this way? Actually, I had just finished reading some Kurt Vonnegut, and the way he would simplify things down to a point where it made it seem ridiculous kind of inspired me with this video. On top of that there’s another video I’d seen that talked a lot about evolution and it used very simple phrases and terms to connect things.

Given the current trends in digital media, what groundwork do you see being laid for civic engagement and policy analysis? I see a little bit of empowerment of the younger generation. It’s becoming much more grassroots and maybe populist in some sense. And it’s incredible what average people at home are able to make with technology now. All those people are engaging with politics. It may not be in a traditional way, but it’s a new way that I think is exciting.

Do you think it takes away from the focus on the issues, or do you think that it helps? I think we lost focus on the issues a long time ago. So, I don’t know if that’s necessarily a worry for me. I think it does provide a new way to present your ideas on issues though, because candidates have so many more options now. Before you had the media, so you had quick sound bites and couldn’t really get into detail. But now you have a different avenue to really talk about the important things, and regular people at home can make comments on them and have debates with people online.

And speaking of YouTube, tell me about Evans School Rap and Love Memo. [Laughs] Yeah, those were a lot of fun. The one great thing about the Evans School was the community and that we have something like a talent show.

Outside of great fodder for comedy, what do you think will be the most lasting things you take with you from your MPA degree as you move forward in your career? I think it’s this blending of digital media and I guess just the degree in general. I got into what I’m in now because of the Evans School. I was lucky enough to be at a school that did encourage creativity. It wasn’t overly academic. It’s a hybrid. There are definitely strong academic factors, but it’s also very applied and I don’t think I could have done this sort of thing if I’d gotten a political science master’s.

In being an applied degree, are there things that no matter what you end up doing, your studies at the Evans School helped prepare you for? Definitely. All these little things we learned are important everywhere. I always get a weird look when people ask what my degree is in.

“Yeah, I got a Masters of Public Administration.”

“[Nodding head] Oh yeah. [Shaking head] I don’t really know what that is.”

So I tell them it’s essentially business school for the public sector.