Former Echo editor writes, travels, blogs
Beth Ponsot (center), poses with her co-workers from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Erich Schwartzel and Deputy Managing Editor Mary Leonard after winning the prestigious award for "Best Specialty Site" at the Online Journalism Awards in Boston on Saturday, Sept. 24. Ponsot designed and maintains "Pipeline" a website tracking the Marcellus Shale boom in western Pennsylvania.
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Young alum Elisabeth Ponsot ’10, spent the summer after her graduation as a multimedia intern at a Western Pennsylvania newspaper, The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. As her bosses kept extending her internship first one month, then the next, she was hopeful for a job offer and things were looking up when she put it all on the line by committing herself to a three-month backpacking trip through Southeast Asia in late 2010 into early 2011.
It was good news on both fronts: she had an incredible experience traveling, and she was offered a job—on her last afternoon as an intern.
Looking back to her years as a Colby student, Elisabeth—better known as Beth by her friends and professors—was always a traveler and a journalist. The government major from Queens, N.Y. spent both her first and her sixth semesters in France—Dijon and Paris, respectively—and worked for The Colby Echo, as News Editor and, later, Editor-in-Chief, during her time on the Hill.
Ponsot likes to have all of her ducks in a row. She’s organized, motivated and a self-proclaimed perfectionist. The trip to Southeast Asia was risky, somewhat spontaneous and way out of her comfort zone, which is exactly why she chose to do it. Her boyfriend, Will Price ’10, who is half-Chinese, was heading to law school at New York University in the fall of 2011, which he just began, and convinced her that they’d never have that kind of chance to travel again.
“Every morsel of my being was saying it’s too risky. But that’s sort of why I did it—because it’s so out of character...let me challenge myself to see if I can do something like this.”
While abroad in the “most beautiful and culturally interesting places I’ve been,” Ponsot put her newly acquired multimedia skills to use on a blog project called “74 Days” with the tagline “Two recent college grads head east….Way east” (www.74days.com). Both she and Price chronicle their journeys through New Zealand, China, Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore with breathtaking photos and witty tales. One of the most touching stories is when they discover Price’s ancestral home in a remote village where they shared no language skills with the locals. Price’s family, the Wong’s, had long believed the village to be lost. Ponsot said, “[Will and I] had so prepared ourselves to not find it and to be completely lost…we hadn’t prepared for what we would do if we would actually find it….This changed the entire narrative of his family’s history.”
So she is glad she took the leap to go. “People ask a lot, what was your favorite place or thing that you did. There was a lot I took away from it—one was the appreciation of travel and having time to walk around and see things. The appreciation of not having an agenda….But I learned a degree of going with the flow that I didn’t have before that.” Ponsot also said she gained a deep appreciation for “the diversity of humanity.”
In addition, she found blogging to be a fruitful experience. “There’s a lot of ways to do a blog wrong and I’m happy with how ours turned out.”
Now back in Pittsburgh, Ponsot is doing big things. She works as a Post-Gazette multimedia producer, and she is one of the main forces behind Pipeline, the newspaper’s specialty site on Marcellus Shale news (http://shale.sites.post-gazette.com/), launched in February 2011. She serves as social media editor there.
Just last Saturday, Sept. 24, Pipeline won the incredibly prestigious prize for Best Specialty Site at the Online Journalism Awards, which, Ponsot said, some have called the Online Pulitzer. Ponsot, who traveled with Pipeline Editor Erich Schwartzel to Boston for the ceremony, said that winning was a complete shock, and that the experience was “unexpectedly awesome” and “very validating and fabulous.”
Judges sang Pipeline’s praise, calling the project an “innovative partnership on a very important story” and “a hard and an admirable journalistic endeavor.”
Ponsot offers a word of advice for the undergrads of her alma mater: build your online profile. “Start cultivating an online personality now—a professional online personality. Employers do not want to see anonymity online anymore,” she said. Take the time to get yourself out there, especially if you’re interested in a career involving multimedia, she advises. Twitter, LinkedIn, blogging—Ponsot recommends it all and said it’s essential for success.
She, herself, recently started a new blog, titled “Banter and Bananas,” on her new online portfolio, www.elisabethponsot.com.
Now that she has been profiled in the Echo, her former home at Colby, she said she can die happy—she didn’t have to wait too long. It’s only been 16 months since her graduation and she said she feels like she’s hitting her stride. “Being a real world adult is not that bad,” she promised. “I actually like being a real person, it’s a lot less stressful [than college].”
Allison Ehrenreich '12
