By Steve Eaton
Congrats to Jordan Hogan, who earlier this year helped thousands of people discover that their phones might be listening in on their conversations and feeding the data collected to marketers. The news story he wrote and reported for FOX 13 News in Salt Lake City on the topic won him an Emmy.
Jordan, who’s now a digital marketing specialist for Intermountain, worked for FOX 13 News for six years as a newscast producer. His last three years there he was a producer and a multimedia journalist, which means he shot, wrote, and edited his own stories most of the time.
Sweeps week is when Nielsen Media Research asks TV viewers to track their viewing habits. News programs often pack that week with stories they hope will draw in viewers and get them good ratings.
Jordan says during a sweeps week earlier this year the story he lined up fell through so he and his team came up with a new idea.
“We wanted to find out if our phones are listening to us without us realizing it, how they gather data on us, what they do with the data, if it’s legal for the phone to do that, and if there’s something you can do about it,” he says.
He asked one of his coworkers to just speak a key word he assigned her, which was “trampoline,” as she talked on the phone and while she talked with others. Another coworker was assigned to do searches for baby strollers online. And a third person was asked to just go shopping for house plants but not to do searches online.
Eventually all three people started getting online advertisements related to their assigned topics, Jordan says.
“It started as a very small thought and then morphed into a bigger story,” Jordan says.
It was his first “sweeps piece” and “long-form story” he’d done. The Emmys give out regional awards, so when Jordan was nominated for his award, he and his husband, Greg Brooks, went to a local watch party in downtown Salt Lake City to watch a live streaming broadcast of the regional awards show, which was held in Arizona. It lasted more than three hours.
“I was just so anxious and nervous because it was my first submission and my first nomination,” he says.
It was about an hour into the show the he was announced as the winner of a Rocky Mountain Emmy in the category of “environment/science/technology news,” he says.
When he came to Intermountain the Emmy allowed him to leave his old news job on a high note, he says.
“I was incredibly proud to come as far as I did, and to get recognized for the work I did,” he says. “There were people throughout my career who believed in me and I’m very grateful for them.”
Perry Gee, RN, recent won an award for a paper he cowrote about nurse burnout.
Cheers for Intermountain nurse scientist Perry Gee, RN, PhD, who recently received the 2022 Excellence in Practice Award for a publication he cowrote with two colleagues titled “Impact of nurse burnout on organizational and position turnover.” The Editorial Board for Nursing Outlook, the journal for the American Academy of Nursing, presented the award at the American Academy of Nursing 2022 Health Policy Conference last month. Dr. Gee’s paper is one of the most cited papers in the journal over the past three years.
Dr. Gee conducted the research for the project with colleagues at his former position at CommonSpirit Health and continued the work when he joined Intermountain as nurse scientist in 2018.