Ali Breland
Technology reporter
The Hill newspaper
Education
The University of Texas at Austin
B.A., Philosophy
Podcasts
0:30:0816: How Hustle Helped Tech Journalist Ali Breland Scale The Hill …Newspaper [Main T4C Episode]
Ali Breland is the Technology reporter at The Hill* newspaper where he writes and reports 3-5 news stories a day. To get to where he is now, Ali cut his teeth at The Alcalde (UT Austin Alumni Magazine) as an editorial intern. Outside of that, he hustled to interview artists..
Career Path
Interview Highlights
“I try to network with people who I sincerely do like and want to have conversations with. So then it becomes less about networking and just establishing relationships with interesting people who also happen to have these professional goals that you want to aspire to have.”
Best Career Advice
“The more you practice something and the more you do it, the better you’ll get. I think that I had a good instinct coming in, but there’s just a radical difference between my work about a year and a half ago to what it is now. And that’s just from doing so many stories and just pushing myself.”
Career Challenge
“I‘ve dealt with difficult situations, I’ve had bosses in the past who initially were disappointed with my level of progress. And it had just so happened that I had done all of the work that I could do, and in that moment when they were talking to me, I didn’t have much to show for it, but literally within days all the work I’d done prior finally manifested itself. And I had three scoops, three really good scoops, in a week that were better than anything I’d done before, because I’d been putting in all the time and the hours. And in that sense, working hard, working my way through it, really paid off.”
Skills
Social Media, Blogging, Music, Writing, Politics, Journalism, Copy Editing, Hazardous Waste Management, Microsoft Office, HTML, Final Cut Pro, CMS, Photoshop, Facebook, Storytelling, Public Speaking, Acrobatics
Professional Interests
The University of Texas at Austin, NPR, The Brookings Institute, Tejas Club, Plan II Alumni & Student, Daily Texan Alumni, Boğaziçi Üniversitesi
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