Dan Wisniewski '08, Visit Philadelphia

At the time of this interview, Dan Wisniewski ’08 was a digital content manager at Visit Philadelphia. He previously worked alongside several other Saint Joseph’s English major alums at Progressive Business Publications.  

When did you realize you wanted to work in the digital sphere?

When I worked at Progressive Business Publications, it was an actual publication. If you were an HR Manager, you received it in the mail. Then, we eventually moved it online. I think I would’ve ended up writing in the digital sphere no matter what. All the stuff I was doing for freelancing was stuff that would end up online and also in print, so it wasn’t necessarily a decision that was made so much, as the inevitable thing.

Is there a different learning curve for trying to write web content over print content?

Yes. At Progressive Business Publications, I was using Quark. So I was writing into the actual template of the print, and that was kind of a nightmare. Writing for online now, I have to know HTML. That was a decision that was made maybe a year ago, and I thought, “There is no way I want to do this. This is miserable. It’s going to slow me down so much.” But now I am super excited about it because it means I know a little bit about the coding that goes into how all these pieces work.

For annual events that Visit Philadelphia covers, do you ever feel like you are saying the same thing over and over again?

We definitely do some repurposing. It is a small team. We have four people. We try to rewrite stuff when we can, and we’re able to use some of the information the communications and PR team put together since they work very far ahead for press. In terms of struggling to talk about the same thing in different ways, you just get used to it. The things that are interesting are always going to be interesting. You just have to keep trying different ways, and some work and some don’t.

You’ve been successful in what you do. Is it just being a good writer?

 It’s just working hard. The way that I got to be what I think is a decent writer is I just wrote all the time, and I read stuff all of the time. Naturally, you just get better at it as you keep doing it. That’s how I think I ended up where I am today.

Is there a specific area you enjoy working on the most for Visit Philly?

I really like history a lot, which is good because Philadelphia has the best history. Society Hill is like Disney World. It’s incredible. I also like craft beer, so I like writing about craft beer festivals and stuff like that. We should have a piece coming out soon on Uwishunu on the top 10 brewpubs to visit in a weekend.

— Lauren Carroll '16