Project: Video tutorials showing journalists how to quickly build touchable, 3-D computer graphics for news.

David Sarno, a Los Angeles native, took a journalism path that by today’s standards is somewhat unusual. He began his career at a website crafting a daily digest of the nation’s newspapers. He ended up working at a newspaper, writing about the Web. As a columnist, reporter and early blogger for the Los Angeles Times, he wrote extensively about the rise of digital culture over the last decade as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Google became not just central but inescapable in everyday life. Before the Times, he joined the Huffington Post in its infancy, where he got to participate in the building of a scrappy media startup that soon became one of the nation’s best-known news sites. Earlier in his career, he wrote the now-retired “Today’s Papers” column for Slate.com, where he got a crash course both in the way the country’s biggest newspapers covered the news each day, and in how to write for the Web. In 2004, he earned a master’s degree in English and fiction writing from the University of Iowa. Sarno’s undergraduate degree is in computer science, from Yale.