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 matter. My eyes were glued to the screen. Check the videos out here. This is a story that needs to be told.

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 process.

So, if I haven’t already made this clear in previous posts, I’m broke. Consequently, I’m also very cheap in terms of the equipment I use for reporting. To record audio, I still use an old-school tape recorder or an $80 voice recorder that attaches to my iPod, which I bought four years ago to record lectures in college. Both of which have been doing an adequate job, aside from the times my iPod is full of music and doesn’t have space to record. But what’s not broke, I can’t afford to fix. That is until

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

To follow up with my previous post about going to journalism school in this time of great change, I wanted to share a Media Shift blog post I recently read about American University in Washington D.C. becoming a hotbed for new forms of journalism. With the Center for Social Media, the J-Lab, which studies interactive journalism and an Investigative Reporting Workshop, it seems as though American University seeks to be the “new journalism” hub.

I’m not sold yet. Personally, I think there’s something to say for adapting old-style journalism into a new age–one which is still figuring itself out.

But it’s good to know what’s out there in case my mind changes. For those of you asking yourself these same questions, it may be helpful to watch the videos and read the comments on the post. Then come back and tell us what you think about American University and journalism school in general. I need guidance…

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

In response to my previous post, I decided to work on a fun project yesterday in honor of World Oceans Day. As someone who was born and raised by the sea, the smell of salt water and the strip of blue to my West means more to me than your average American. This sentiment is reflected in the countless number of ocean shots I have taken in my lifetime all over the world. Here is a slideshow of some recent photos I have taken of the Pacific, from San Diego to Santa Cruz, to give you a small glimpse of my relationship to the Ocean blue.

It was five minutes till 9am and the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF was already brimming with 20 and 30 somethings eager for the daylong Wordcamp San Francisco to begin. While I noticed scattered heads of gray hair, the vast majority of attendees were young; many of whom wore glasses and scanned their laptops and iPhones before the first speaker took the stage. I overheard the group behind me discussing how long they had been blogging and what they write about. A blonde girl to my front left quickly updated her Twitter page as the young Asian man to my right checked his Buddy Press. All the while, I was sitting alone with nothing but a notepad, asking myself what I was doing there.

I was reminded when Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, took the mic and began his talk on “How to blog without killing yourself.” He started off by reiterating all of the opportunities blogging provides (besides just attending geeky camps) and he opened up the process behind his high-traffic personal

My networking attempts seemed to have paid off a few weeks ago because I just became the new “Resident Blogger” for Spot.Us, the Bay Area community-funded journalism project I mentioned in my most recent post.

It’s an unpaid internship; we just gave it a new name, but it’s a job that I sought out for the mutually-beneficial potential it has for both me and the organization. In general, I have mixed feelings about internships. I’ve had only one that I think helped me, and I’ve heard of far too many that turn talented young people into glorified slaves for little to no pay and irrelevant job experience. This one, on the other hand, will undoubtedly enhance my blogging and multimedia skills while also offering tremendous possibility for networking, increased exposure, and learning about the industry and issues of the Bay Area. How did I get this internship? I simply asked for it.

Backing up a bit, I met David Cohn, Kara Andrade and the Spot.us crew at a fundraiser/party the night before the May 1 journalis

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