Tech and politics need a translator — at least according to Jamie Corley and Christyn Lansing, founders of The Bridge.
Corley and Lansing have worked in both worlds — each of them, for example, has served as press secretary for a US senator (Bob Corker and Rob Portman, respectively), while Lansing was also communications director at Politico.
They told me they got the idea for The Bridge when Corley moved to San Francisco, and they realized there was an opportunity to create a newsletter that helped people from both industries understand each other — particularly as politics intrudes into tech and vice versa, thanks to issues such as driverless cars.
“DC and SF are very similar cities with highly ambitious people on opposite sides of the continent,” Lansing said. “The problem is, they don’t even understand each other. The Bridge is going to fix that.”
They compared The Bridge to theSkimm, which boils down the day’s news into a newsletter aimed at millennial women. Written by Corley and Lansing (at least for now), The Bridge goes out every Tuesday and Thursday morning and includes a rundown of both political and tech news, conveyed in a friendly style and with links to further coverage.
Corley said the focus is on helping professionals in both industries understand the “cultural nuances”: “We kind of think of it like Veep meets Silicon Valley.” (They also include job postings and event listings.) You can read the most recent newsletter here.
This might seem to be the perfect time to launch something like The Bridge, thanks to all the discussion around the election — except the election saw the defeat of the candidate backed by most of Silicon Valley, and some writers (including me) have argued that the results represent a rejection of many Silicon Valley values.
“If you’re confused by the results of [the election], you need The Bridge that much more,” Lansing countered. She noted that the newsletter is nonpartisan, and said, “Irrespective of who is in the White House these issues that we mentioned are really coming to a head.”