My lack of distinction between a busy, underpaid freelancer and a semi-busy, way underpaid general assignment reporter was exactly what got me the interview.

Two recent articles have highlighted the importance of ditching your preconceptions about what constitutes the pinnacle of getting published and start embracing online media outlets – especially if you’ve been dreaming of getting hired by print publications you’d never dream of paying real money to read.

The Atlantic just came out with an epic piece of multimedia journalism. Nadya Labi profiles Gus Zamora, an ex-army ranger who hires himself out to go grab kids who were illegally snatched and taken out of the country by one parent. Nadya follows Gus down to Costa Rica to observe the “rekidnapping” of kid number 55 and is actually in the car the child is recovered. Nadya gets the audio of the rekidnapping and takes photos just moments after the reunion. Partially because of the story matter but also because of her story telling, my heart was pounding while I read the article. Wow wow wow. Inspiration in word, audio and photo form. Read it here.

I reluctantly subscribed to Gawker two days ago, reluctantly only because my Google Reader feed is out of control and they are notorious for posting. A post this morning made my increasingly chaos-theory-proving Reader worth the headache.

A Gawker blogger made fun of an article in the Washington Post about a “generation guru,” a woman paid obscene amounts of money to explain to adults how us kiddos think and work and all that rot. Gawker pulled three excerpts from the article, with the longest one hitting 93 words. Unlike some reposting, however, the Gawker blogger put in commentary and analysis instead of just block quoting the article. Fair usage, right? Guess not, at least not for the Washington Post. The journalist, Ian Shapira, is furious that his hard work is being ripped off and making someone else money while pulling the best (ie funniest) bits and he said as much in a response on WP’s Outlook and Opinion page.
Gawker’s Gabriel Snyder brought the pain in her take on the whole thing to my utter de

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 artistic in nature—require talent and notoriety, which fruit from years of practice and climbing the ranks.

Journalism is not unique in this regard, although we like to victimize ourselves, particularly amid the current economic climate and media transformation. But actors, fine artists, designers, musicians, models as well as creative writers and the like all have to start at the bottom, working random jobs or unpaid internships–living on couches or in closet-sized apartments–until they build up their skills and

The only person I have been too tongue-tied to talk to since arriving in New York has been Dave Eggers, whose accomplishments are truly staggering. His latest awesomeness in written form is Zeitboun, a book about one Syrian-American man’s experience during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and his subsequent nightmare of an arrest. Eggers wrote from the Zeitouns’ family point of view, using their recollections and stories while vigorously fact checking. Like his last book, What is the What, Eggers uses a collaboration between personal narrative and journalism to tell the story. I swear to god, if Egger’s starts a new form of journalism, I’m starting an Eggers-based religion.

If that wasn’t enough, in a Salon interview that came out today, Eggers’ talks about working with students on printed media and how he has hope for the future of journalism.
The vast majority of students we work with read newspapers and books, more so than I did at their age. And I don’t see that dropping off. If anything the lack of

As an aspiring journalist, I often ask myself, should I go to journalism school? In fact, I’m thinking about taking the GRE in September and applying to a few schools this fall. But in today’s emerging field, the question deserves some thought before we all go rushing for more student debt to study a profession that’s in a state of disarray. I’ll admit that since graduating from college, part of me has longed to re-embrace life as a college kid, delve back into the buzz of campus life and study something that really interests me rather than a broad interdisciplinary major that doesn’t lead directly to any thing (I majored in Human Development. What’s that right?) But nostalgia aside, I also know that since I didn’t major in journalism, I could probably use some training in things like long-form magazine writing or to build skills in web, video, and television which I’m currently lacking. But couldn’t I also learn these things on the job? I’ve only had my Spot.us internship for a little over a month and

I recently moved to Northern California, among other reasons, to focus on journalism. Most people think I’m crazy for quitting a perfectly good (although temporary) job while millions are getting laid off to try my hand at arguably the most unstable profession in recent history– journalism. Thinking logically about these facts, most people are probably right. I am crazy. But, out of some strange compulsion perhaps, I feel like I’m right where I need to be: twenty-two years old, ambitious, living in the Bay Area amid a digital revolution.

That feeling was enhanced by a “Journalism Innovations” conference I attended last Friday. I heard about it through  Kara Andrade, a friend of my cousin, who is an organizer for Spot Us–a Bay Area startup that’s experimenting with community-funded journalism. The conference was a meeting of the minds between news veterans and innovation leaders, centered on one main question: what is the fate and future of journalism? Being new in the area, I went to the conferenc