Blog Posts

  • The Wild West

    The Wild West

    There’s something so magical to me about a platform where you can watch a 5-hour-long documentary on the show Victorious, a video of someone playing Papa Louie games, The Notebook, illegal uploads of Spongebob, a how-to video on retiling your shower and the news. YouTube really is the wild west of the internet… and maybe…

  • Social Media Journalism is Here… so What’s Next?

    Social Media Journalism is Here… so What’s Next?

    For years now, journalists, scholars and that old guy shouting from his porch have said: “Social media is the next step for journalism.” But the truth is– maybe to our chagrin– that step has already been taken. Social media journalism is no longer ‘what’s to come’… it’s what’s here. It’ll come in and overshadow the…

  • An Unrealistic Standard

    An Unrealistic Standard

    It’s the first thing many of us learn in our first journalism class. Your intense news writing professor sits you down and tells you, “write objectively. Keep your opinions out. Report on just the facts.” So you follow their instructions, write all your articles and scripts as such. Then your third year of college rolls…

  • Print V. Broadcast

    Print V. Broadcast

    There are two very different sides to the news industry: print news and broadcast news. While we’re all journalists, we deal with different standards of tone, writing style, format, timeliness and many more factors. I’m a broadcast news person through and through. While my last post was about how much I love grammar, the truth…

  • A Love Letter to Grammar

    A Love Letter to Grammar

    Here’s a take: How you write is just as important as what you write. Let’s be honest, if your reading is too grammatically butchered to comprehend- your reader is long gone. AP style is a beast of its own. That’s the style used in journalism. While its features are not always used for easier comprehension,…

  • The User Needs Model

    The User Needs Model

    Looking past the demographic makeup of our audiences like age, race and political leaning- there’s a more important question we should all be asking ourselves when writing for news: “What does the user need from me?” It sounds so simple, but it’s the key to producing content people actually want to read or watch. The…

  • It’s Pronounced “E-van-jah-leen”

    It’s Pronounced “E-van-jah-leen”

    The name Evangeline means “bearer of good news.” Perfect for someone in the journalism industry, right? It seems the universe, or maybe her parents, knew what Evangeline wanted to do long before she did. In fact, she didn’t even realize reporting could be a career until junior year of high school when she began writing…

  • What *Makes* a News Site?

    What *Makes* a News Site?

    When it comes to news content, viewers may not first think of its presentation. If you’ve ever worked in a newsroom though, you know presentation is a big conversation behind the scenes. “Should we make this a breaking news banner?” “What graphic should we use?” “What’s the first thing someone accessing the page should see?”…

  • A Monster in our Newsrooms

    A Monster in our Newsrooms

    ↓ Download my White Paper Here! ↓ Well, here it is. The culmination of the past 7 weeks of research and reading on the topic of focus and attention. This is the first time I’ve ever written a white paper, and it was quite the undertaking.  I opted to write about how focus impacts work…

  • “Kids these days.”

    “Kids these days.”

    I’ve been feeling nostalgic recently. I think I’ve been feeling uneasy with the world. There’s so much going on that I won’t even try to get into right now, I just want to slip into a time where I wasn’t so tuned into the bad things happening all around. I mean I doubt the world…