I wanted to do something new. It’s really that simple.

In September 2008, I left a radio job in San Diego to become WBUR’s first Web journalist. My job description was messy and unfocused. The station had no sense of direction on the Web. My boss just wanted to hire someone who “vibrated Web” all day. He had a vision and trusted me to execute.

A few months later I set out to build a new wbur.org, the one you see today. I was named Project Manager. At the time, a lot of people in the building thought this was a bad idea, a waste of resources: WBUR is radio. They were wrong, and I knew that.

I kept the team on an impossible timeline. I almost literally had to talk people off the ledge sometimes. Our gifted developer, Will Smith, wrote almost all of the code, a Frankenstein’s monster of PHP, ASP.NET, XSLT, and TLA. Will and I wireframed, planned, or decided almost everything you see on the site today. Our team of five launched in five months. It was a wild success, etc.

Since then, I devoted hundreds of hours to training radio journalists in the Art of Good Web. I storyboarded the iPhone app, created Hubbub, and took over our social media. The organization gave me a lot of room to experiment and play. The department has grown considerably and has an executive editor now. It is in good hands.

In other words, my work was done and I got bored. What’s next? I have a couple of irons in the fire that are hot, but my eyes are wide open. I’m taking this opportunity to be 25, have an existential crisis, and take some time to find my next adventure. And I do so with all the gratitude in the world for WBUR.