Somer has spent over 20 years in online media or media-related start-ups. She left a budding career in photojournalism to explore “this new web thing” in 1994 when she helped spearhead digital content for the Gainesville Sun, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, and the Miami Herald. In 1999, she moved west to run product for Knight Ridder Digital, leading the team that built the company’s centralized content ingestion and publishing system. The platform, along with several other social-based innovations, enabled the team to publish before, during and after the storm when Hurricane Katrina hit in 2005 and took Knight-Ridder’s Biloxi paper offline. The combined print and online coverage won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service Journalism. After Knight-Ridder, she leads product teams and drove strategy at several companies, including Zvents and AT&T Interactive, eventually moving to Quantcast this year to help grow the Measure product for publishers.