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 …

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, …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …