AskaNewYorker: Hi Jennie, tell us about yourself. Where do you hail from?
Jennie: I’m an army brat. I spent a lot of time in Germany growing up.
My folks settled out in Denver. And a long, long , long time ago I moved to
New York.
AskaNewYorker: Do you consider yourself a native New Yorker?
Jennie: I do, but somehow no one else does. People are constantly asking, “where
are you from?” Maybe there’s a little bit of the islands in my voice
because I have Caribbean backround. Maybe I just don’t look, talk, walk,
or act like the average New Yorker, but that’s ok with me.
AskaNewYorker: Do you speak German?
Jennie: A little.
AskaNewYorker: What’s the Caribbean flavor about?
Jennie: Part of my family is from Barbados. It’s different down there.
Very different. I was there a few years ago. One of my aunts who lived in the
Bronx for a while went back to Barbados bought a farm and was celebrating her
100 birthday. So I went to visit Barbados for the first time, and it is amazing.
I mean the water; you get into the water and never want to get out again. So
I think it’s probably something in you, if you have that in your blood
even, that recognizes it and when you get back there it feels like home.
AskaNewYorker: Who was your favorite elementary school teacher and why?
Jennie: I can’t remember any of my elementary school teachers, not one.
I went to a different school every nine months until my junior year in high
school and then went away for summers in between, so I can’t quote one
teacher. That’s probably why I had to become one for a while. I taught
college journalism and film and TV production in New Jersey at Rutgers.
AskaNewYorker: What are you doing currently?
Jennie: I think they call it pursuing your bliss. If anyone would ever had
asked me anytime in the past thirty years what you really want to be doing I
would say traveling around the world making movies. So right now I’m traveling
around the world making movies.
AskaNewYorker: Where do I sign up? Sounds amazing. Who do you work for?
Jennie: It’s a start-up. I’m creating a TV company from scratch,
from the bottom up, called Pulver Television. It’s an internet-based TV
company. We’re creating as we go along, starting out with the huge archive
of the most fascinating people in Telecom. I have a background in telecom. I
wrote a book about DSL called “DSL,
a Wiley Tech Brief.” So, it’s kind of a natural fit. I work
with a big conference company that had 15 conferences around the world of this
year. We just came back from Sweden and Berlin, one of my favorite cities. So
it’s just an amazing opportunity and I work with a visionary.
AskaNewYorker: Who is this visionary? I just have two words for you Ben:
Jennie: Jeff Pulver. …he sees TV,
like ‘I see dead people’. He sees television but he sees a different
television for the future and I couldn’t agree more. We’re creating
television people want to watch on the internet. So I’ve become a general
contractor. To build a studio is like building a house. You start from the ground
up. So it’s the floors, the walls the sound proofing, the lighting, the
electrity. Then you start building out the environment. So you have to be a
designer a construction engineer, an electrian and everything else in between.
But it’s fascinating because the technology is changing so fast. I was
talking to this switcher dealer yesterday and we had such a meeting of the minds
because what’s happening in the technology is for example: You see this
big machine that has lots of sliders and lights on it and it looks very grand
but in fact that’s not the device doing the work. Under the table is a
computer and the big switcher is just an interface for the computer. It’s
only there because people are use to using this big machine. And so very soon
now the technology will change enough where you can do the same thing with a
touch screen. You can do it now. Some companies get it. But most people who
are using the technology, particularly if they are in a union and are trying
to protect their jobs, don’t get that is machine is not doing the job.
So when you’re working digitally, there’s this wonderful thing that
happens once you master the technology itself where your ideas become an interface
and you can get your ideas on tape seamlessly. So we just switched over to using
Macintosh computers to use final cut pro. We we’re doing Windows. Adobe
is fine. At least they took over Flash. That’s an amazing acquisition.
So that’s like half of the planet of graphics. So cool. Every thing is
on one little chip. The whole video mixer that can run a whole TV station is
on one little chip. So it’s all working through a computer. The heart
of our control room will be a touch pad computer like your laptop. I could sit
on the stage run the cameras and the mixer from a touch screen.
AskaNewYorker: How did you get your current job with Pulver
Media?
Jennie: You know I’ve always been told that you get the job that you
want by already doing it. This could not be truer. Six months before I started
working for Jeff Pulver I was invited to speak at a IP TV conference. For some
reason the person who was hired to do the audio recording was missing and I
worked in radio before, not a problem, I’ll record the conference for
you. And I noticed it was at Columbia. And so I offered because I love video
and it’s what I want to do to video one session for free. To make a long
story short, that experience multiplied into doing video for a foundation. Jeff
Pulver was a patron of the foundation called the Marconey Society. It’s
a cavalcade of stars in technology and communications. And Jeff saw my work
and he invited me to come and talk to him about working for Pulver TV.
AskaNewYorker: So the moral of the story is?
Jennie: Be in the process of doing what it is you want to be doing.
