What’s on your desk?

Kylie Robison is The Verge’s senior reporter covering artificial intelligence. Previously, she worked at Fortune, where she covered Twitter; before that, she covered software developer culture (“a beat,” she says, “I made up and loved”) for Business Insider. “I’ve always been obsessed with technology in an extremely online way,” she adds, “and The Verge is filled with people who are on the same wavelength.”

We asked Kylie to tell us a bit about her home office setup.

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Kristen Radtke is The Verge’s creative director; she works with the art team to create the visuals for stories and custom features. “Before this,” she explains, “I was art director for the small arts and culture magazine The Believer, and in a previous life, I worked in independent book publishing.”

We asked her to show us her home office, and she graciously obliged.

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David Pierce is The Verge’s editor-at-large. What is an editor-at-large? It means, he says, “well, nothing. I write stories and make podcasts, and I write a newsletter called Installer, but mostly, I spend a lot of time trying to convince people to like to-do list apps as much as I do.”

We asked him to tell us a bit about his workspace.

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Jess Weatherbed, news writer for The Verge, started her professional career in a way she describes as “a bit strange for a journalist” — in prosthetics and wig making. However, she was no stranger to tech. For around 16 years, she’s been using drawing tablets to support her design hobbies, everything from digital illustration and animation to 3D sculpting. “I initially learned to build computers to support my nerdier gaming hobbies,” she says, “and my love of tech and gadgets has grown from there.”

We asked Jess to talk about her workspace.

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Joanna Nelius is a recent addition to The Verge’s staff, having joined us a little over a month ago to become our new laptop reviewer. But while she’s been reviewing laptops, desktops, and PC hardware for her entire career, she is also going to report on broadband and education. “I’m particularly excited to start reporting on the latter two,” she says, “because that’s what I used to cover when I wrote for Gizmodo and ended up falling in love with those beats.”

In fact, Joanna’s background is in creative writing, literature, and teaching. “But with the current chaos surrounding generative AI,” she explains, “and the push for more tech courses, including digital media literacy in cash-strapped schools, it feels like I’m in the right place at the right time.” She is also working on a memoir and several short stories.

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Victoria Song (known to the staff as Vee) is The Verge’s senior reviewer, covering all things wearable, health tech, and fitness tech. She says, “I’ve been on this beat for almost seven years now. Before The Verge, I was at Gizmodo doing the same thing. Before that, I was at PC Magazine and had a stint as a laptop reviewer before pivoting to the wearable beat.”

And before that? “I cut my teeth at The Yomiuri Shimbun, both in Japan and in their New York City bureau. In Japan, I was an editor for their English-language edition and coincidentally ended up as a junior reporter in New York when I moved back home — though the role was more like a stringer, reporter, and translator rolled up into one. I covered everything ranging from #BlackLivesMatter protests and the annual UN General Assembly to factories in Baton Rouge that made baseball bats favored by Japanese players.”

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Nathan Edwards has been at The Verge for about a year and a half as senior reviews editor, editing reviews and managing part of the reviews team. He also works on our buying guide program. He adds, “Aside from a couple of short freelancing stints, I spent most of my career before this at Maximum PC (RIP), a print magazine, and then at Wirecutter, where I worked for seven years. So it’s been reviews and buying guides and writing about consumer tech pretty much the whole time.”

He took some time to tell us about his workspace.

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Kate Cox is one of two senior producers running the Decoder podcast here at The Verge. Before she joined The Verge last summer, she had a decade and change as a reporter and editor covering tech policy, consumer tech issues, video games, and occasionally, nerd culture for several outlets.

She took some time to tell us about her workspace.

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Tom Warren is a senior editor here at The Verge who covers “mostly anything Microsoft, PC, and console gaming.” He recently redid his home workspace and offered to tell us about his new setup; impressed with its practicality and neatness (which is nothing like mine, but let’s pass over that), I immediately took advantage of his offer.

Here’s some of what Tom has to say about his new work-at-home environment.

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Alex Heath is deputy editor at The Verge who works with our creators team and covers Meta along with the social media industry more broadly. Covering Meta in-depth has also led him to cover augmented and virtual reality. He’s also the co-host of the newest season of Land of the Giants, Vox Media’s narrative podcast series on the tech giants. This season is, of course, all about Meta.

Tell us about your desk.

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As Alice Newcome-Beill describes herself, she’s currently the “commerce / deals writer for The Verge, 35 years old, a Scorpio, and a chaotic neutral.” With the other members of the commerce team, she helps handle The Verge’s daily deals posts and newsletters, in addition to maintaining the “best deals” announcements and other buying guides across the site.

Tell us about the two desks in this space. Where did you get them, and where in your home have you placed them?

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Between stints at Engadget, Gizmodo, and CNET, Sean Hollister became part of the small group that co-founded The Verge back in 2011. He has worn a lot of hats in the past decade: reviewing products, running the newsroom, training and editing new writers, putting spicy editorials on the site, starring in a few videos, liveblogging, and shaping coverage where he can. He’s currently a Senior Editor.

Tell us a little about yourself. What do you like doing at The Verge?

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Makena Kelly has covered politics since the onset of the Trump administration when she was living in Washington, DC; she added tech policy when she began working for The Verge in 2018. The staff here caught a glimpse of her workspace recently during a Slack discussion, and after everyone admired how attractive it was, we knew we had to feature Makena on our next “What’s on your desk?”

What do you cover here at The Verge?

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Video is an important part of The Verge, and Vjeran Pavic is an important part of our video team. His official title is senior video director; for the most part, he’s the one behind the lens creating videos and photos for our site. He is also (unofficially) our in-house drone expert. His workspace at home is deceptively simple; we asked him for a tour.

Tell me a little about yourself. How did you get to The Verge?

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Antonio G. Di Benedetto is relatively new to The Verge, but he brings with him a load of talent in a variety of specialties. Besides being a commerce writer, he is an experienced photographer, a tech experimenter, a gamer, and a fountain pen enthusiast.

Someone that diverse in his interests has got to be pretty interesting himself. We asked Antonio to talk about his desk, his tech, and his work.

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When you have a tendency to collect stuff, it’s difficult to create a detritus-free space in which to work. It’s even harder when you have to do it on the fly because you’re suddenly working at home rather than in an office. Adi Robertson, senior reporter for The Verge, has actually managed to do that, and in this chapter of “What’s on your desk,” she explains how she has organized a place in which she can concentrate and do her fabulous reporting without distraction.

Tell me a little about yourself. What is your background, and what do you do at The Verge?

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If you’re a frequent reader of The Verge, I’m sure the name Chaim Gartenberg is known to you. He’s been reporting and commenting here for years on everything from the latest AMD Ryzen processors to the new trailer of The Witcher, and has become a familiar sight on videos as well.

Chaim recently moved to a new space, which means he got a chance to set up a new space for working at home. We asked him to talk about it.

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Podcasting can be a fun and incredibly creative field — but also a very demanding one. Your skill set not only has to include familiarity with a variety of audio hardware and software, but you also need imagination, a good feel for what will sound good to your audience, and a very sensitive ear.

Andrew Marino is The Verge’s senior audio director, and is responsible for producing almost everything you hear in our podcasts. We asked him to show us his desks — both of them — and tell us a bit about them, and about himself.

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As we slowly emerge from the pandemic, many companies are figuratively shaking themselves off, taking stock, and hiring for new types of positions. The Verge is no different; it has recently hired Brandon Widder to be its senior commerce editor, a brand-new title for our next chapter. We asked Brandon if we could take a look at his home workspace, and this is what he showed (and told) us.

Tell me a little about yourself. What is your background, and what do you do at The Verge?

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If you’ve read a review, a gift guide, or a how-to on The Verge, then you’ve read something that’s been assigned by, edited by, or written by Dan Seifert. A longtime presence here, Dan’s knowledge of tech is vast and impressive — and is reflected by the number and quality of the devices you can see here in his home office.

Tell me a little about yourself. What is your background, and what do you do at The Verge?

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If you’re not a writer or an editor, you may not appreciate how important copy editors are to publications. They are the ones who keep us from making fools of ourselves with bad grammar, bad spelling, or bad sentence structure; they also often act as fact-checkers. If you do a lot of reading on a variety of sites, you can usually tell which ones use copy editors and which ones do not.

Adia Watts is a copy editor for The Verge. Like the rest of the staff, she is currently working from home, and we asked her to talk about her workspace.

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There are a lot of topics, both serious and fun, that are out there to be covered by The Verge, and it falls on our news writers to cover them: from coronavirus and space exploration to YouTube and Super Nintendo World. Mitchell Clark is one of those writers; among other articles, he wrote one of the best explanations you can find of what exactly NFTs are. We took a look (remotely via photos) of Mitchell’s desk and asked him some questions about his stuff.

Tell me a little about yourself. What is your background, and what do you do at The Verge?

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The Verge lives on news, and Jay Peters is one of the news writers who keeps it going — searching out the latest info about what’s going on in technology, entertainment, and culture, and writing it up for the site. As with the rest of us, Jay has been doing most of his work from home over the last year — here’s how he manages it.

Tell me a little about yourself. What is your background, and what do you do at The Verge?

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Working from home has its advantages, but one of the problems that many people have to face is trying to find enough space in a crowded environment. Jon Porter, who is the London-based news reporter for The Verge, has had to be especially resourceful in putting together a place where he could report, write, and review.

We talked to Jon to find out how he’s managed to do such great reporting out of a small space.

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Moving to a home office sometimes means making the most of a little space. Taylor Lyles, a writer at The Verge, is one of those who has used imagination and tech know-how to create a great working area out of a small part of her room. Here’s how she did it. (And if you’re curious, a list of her tech is at the end of this article.)

First, tell us a little about yourself. What is your background, and what do you do at The Verge?

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