Tessa Sproule

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

SKILLS

ABOUT TESSA SPROULE

My first job (aside from babysitting) was at a pioneer museum. I was 12, it was the \'80s. I learned how to make bread in a brick oven and how to tell stories. Literally and tactically. I especially loved the time I spent in the print shop, where there was an actual printing press and I got to place the type blocks.I decided that\'s what I would do - tell stories. That\'s what my dad did. He was a country music DJ.(An aside, but relevant: I was also obsessed with radios when I was little. I took them apart, but I struggled to put them back together again.)My mom, a psychology professor at Trent University, taught me that things might not be as they appear on the surface. She taught me to dig deeper, to think about the motivations behind why people think and say what\'s on their mind. So I went into journalism. I loved parts of it, but I was such an introvert, I knew I would never be really good at it. I like systems. Even then, I wanted to know how media works, so I dove into that. For more than a decade, I rode the waves of the early internet and then \"web 2.0\". That was pretty awesome.Until it wasn\'t. I left \'mainstream media\' for a while, working with some brilliant minds in the early AI startup world. We were a little too early. I\'ll have more to say about that whirlwind, but I\'m still trying to make sense of it all.Now I\'m back at CBC, my home. I believe media should serve the people. Media should entertain and inform. When it comes to informing, we\'re in a bit of a weird spot. Our information ecosystem is unwell. I am at CBC to try to help repair it. And to rebuild. I didn\'t play with dolls. I played DOS-prompted, word-based narrative games before they had names like \"Myst” (and eventually, thankfully Zelda).Now I find myself circling back, even more tightly, to a love of words, at the best time. Metadata (structured data about data) is the stuff that makes the expanding world of generative AI work. Today, my work is to help build an information ecosystem that can withstand disinformation and give citizens access to the verified, attributable information they need to make decisions about their lives.What a time to be alive and working in communications. It sometimes feels like our information ecosystem is polluted beyond repair, but I know we’ll be able to turn things around. If you’re interested in exploring solutions to combat the misuse of information and lift media literacy and democracy, let’s connect- Tessa