A man’s voice sounded from inside the short white school bus. “Free tea!” the voice declared to the outside world passing by. Guisepi sat perched on a cooler, tending a kettle of tea. He looked so comfortable in his makeshift kitchen of storage tubs and wooden shelves that you could actually believe he had spent the last four years trekking up and down the West Coast serving free tea.

Jackie and I are bringing in the new year with a ladies road trip — Road Trip 20Fem as we’ve dubbed it– from Santa Cruz to Eureka, CA with two of our old roommates from San Diego. On day one, we already got into a muddy situation, literally, after we took a wrong turn trying to go kiwi picking at the Swanton Berry Farm U-Pick stand North of Santa Cruz off Hwy 1.

Now that my brain has stopped feeling like a fried egg, I’ll share more about my experience applying to the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. The application was pretty standard for the most part–an online application, three letters of rec, two transcripts, a resume, two personal statements, and NO GRE SCORES!
The toughest part for me was the personal statements, seeing that writing quality and the ability to make a compelling case in few words are weighted more heavily for a journalism program. The prompts were really vague and contradictory …

Serena Renner recaps the events leading up to her decision to apply to UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism for Fall 2010.

Got some extra time? Like to write? I just heard about a few opportunities for all you bloggers out there, which could help you gain experience and exposure while you’re in between jobs, freelancing or trying to figure out what to do with yourself.
Change.org is hiring full-time bloggers to write about social causes from human rights to environmental issues to social entrepreneurship. Best of all, positions are paid and your posts would be viewed by over a million users. Check out the ad here.
MediaBistro also recently launched a user-generated blog …

I was recently interviewed by Tanja Aitamurto, a journalist and researcher from Finland who’s studying Spot.Us as a case study in new forms of journalism. For those of you unfamiliar, Spot.Us is a journalism startup pioneering “community-funded reporting” in the Bay Area. Basically, freelance journalists (or the organization) will pitch stories on the Spot.Us website and tap the public as well as news organizations for micro-donations to fund projects and pay reporters. Raising money through donations from the public is also known as “crowd funding,” and Spot.Us is experimenting with …

In the process of applying for a reporting internship with the Center for Investigative Reporting, I came across “The Price of Sex: Women Speak”–a multimedia expose of Russian and Eastern European women, who were victims of sex trafficking. The project produced six videos that beautifully weave photography, video, music, text and first-person interviews to illuminate the horrifying but all-too prevalent experience of modern-day sex slaves.
This is the kind of journalism I want to one day produce–the gripping, heartfelt stories of injustice that draw people in through sight, sound and subject …

It’s been a long time coming, but the investigation into school food that I’ve been working on, in collaboration with Spot.us and the Santa Cruz Weekly, was finally published yesterday–on newsprint, even! I must admit that it felt good to see my byline in black ink after about a year without being published in print. I’ll provide more background on my experience freelancing through Spot.us later today, but for now, check out the article online here.

I don’t know about you, but my life is pretty hectic right now. I apologize for being completely MIA from this blog; today was the deadline for an article I’ve been working on through Spot.us about school meal programs and the challenges in offering more nutritious food, which has been sucking up all of my time. More about that to come shortly, but alas, it is out of my hands — at least for the moment — so let’s talk about some of my audio mishaps and discoveries throughout the …

In the past few months, I’ve thought a lot about work—working to live as we all do to sustain ourselves but also the concept of working to work. By this I mean the creative pursuit so many artists undergo: to work just enough to meet one’s basic needs but also reserving enough free time to realize one’s true ambitions. In a perfect world, we’d all get paid a living to do what we love, but in case you haven’t noticed, this is not a perfect world and many fields—especially those …