August 2008 Archives

In Clay Shirky's "Here Comes Everybody," he compares the state of journalism today to the late 1400s when Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, thus replacing the sacred role of the scribe with the technology of mass reproduction. Today, legacy journalism sources find themselves competing with the rise of Internet accessible user generated content in the form of blogs, citizen journals, etc.
 

Cartoon by Dave Walker.  We Blog Cartoons.

As I was leaving Prototypes Women's Center, which houses Women's Re-entry Court participants in Pomona, California, a bumper sticker plastered to the outside of a conference room caught my eye: "Well behaved women rarely make history."

I think this quote from Laurel Thatcher Ulrich captured the spirit of the re-entering facility: the rebellious spirit of these women as unique and separate to the vast majority of society coupled with a new sense of self-empowerment with this position. As we sat in front of a selected group of 8 women from the facility, we listened to the stories of how they came to be in the position they are now: abandonment, rape, drug addiction, abuse, Grand Theft Auto, prison, multiple arrests, etc. 

The first thing that drew me to journalism was the writing aspect. As an undergraduate at Columbia, I majored in English Literature and Creative Writing, so I was usually immersed in various forms of fiction and poetry rather than studying the practice of journalism. My interests in journalism developed out of the fact that journalists tell stories that aren't just metaphorically, but also literally true. I like stories and pieces of journalism that make you think and bring you into a world or event that you would otherwise not have known it existed.