Matt Thompson graduated with honors in English from Harvard College in 2002. He went on to work at the Poynter Institute from 2003-04 as the Naughton Fellow for Online Reporting and Writing. While at Poynter, he and his colleague Robin Sloan produced the Flash movie EPIC 2014, a picture of the media past set 10 years in the future, which was written up in the New York Times, the Financial Times, USA Today, the Guardian, on MSNBC, and elsewhere. He now serves on Poynter’s National Advisory Board.

Thompson was an online reporter/producer for The Fresno Bee, winning first- and third-place Best of the West awards in 2004 for his multimedia projects. At the Bee, he led an internal advisory committee exploring the paper’s strategies for acquiring new audiences.

He went on to work as Web editor for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where he led the creation of the Edgie-award-winning, socially networked arts-and-entertainment Web site vita.mn. While managing the development, community and production of vita.mn, he also managed technology and interactivity-related projects for StarTribune.com, from creating an internal taxonomy to transforming the online opinion section into a blog.