Missions: Life, liberty, profit and pursuit

Once, long long ago, I was kicked out of my sixth grade journalism class. Why? Because I wouldn't follow the rules and write ledes. So I moved over to a junior high school independent study: the literary magazine. I ended up editing it, then edited the high school lit mag, Edda, my senior year. I followed English, and comparative literature across the Atlantic Ocean to Scotland, where I discovered passions for well, everything.

And then I ended up at Brandeis, a non-Jew suddenly living next door to hordes of Orthodox men and women who spent Saturdays praying and Sundays (as well as every other day of the week) studying. I fled to a journalism internship in London, at Earthmatters, learning that my penchant is for unbiased, unspun journalism. And I found it, finally, during senior year, when I chased a boy into the offices of the Brandeis Hoot. I ended up staying for the writing - and the glory - publishing a tiny, independent newspaper on a shoestring with a crew of awesome people.

In late 2007, I moved to Kaunakakai, Hawaii, for a stint at the now-defunct Molokai Times, covering what came to be the biggest socioeconomic crisis to hit the island in recent memory all the while learning the ins and outs of the newspaper industry, from editing in AP Style to fussing with the numbers backside to win government contracts for advertising, while working on the island's only radio station, KMKK 102.3 FM.

These days, I'm a grad student at Medill, doing the media management program at Kellogg and studying with the best and brightest young journalists in our field.

And I'm spending most of my time contemplating the journalism problem: the layoffs of those who really know how to do the reporting, but don't know the technology; the face of a changing industry whose revenue model is collapsing; a recession that is rocking the foundatins of our society. It's meta. It's interesting. It's a problem. Like almost everyone else in the industry, I think the future of journalism lies in the intersection of social media, reliable reporting and an audience-based payment model. I'm working on where.

In the interim, I'm freelancing, reporting and photography for the likes of chicagoist.com, the Chicago Journal and anyone else who'll pay me to do what I love doing - usually from a hyperlocalized perspective.

What I look for in a story is the background, the face, the perspective that no one else in the mainstream media has used to color an issue or an idea affecting, well, the rest of a community, an area, a group - whoever the audience is, and attracting the attention of those who need to know.

It doesn't really matter what it is - I want to get to the root of the endemic and the systematic problems happening to the people of the communities I reach - and I want to find that solution for the story. The question for me, always, is "Who cares?" And, more importantly, why?

My goal, always, is to drive my audience: readers, writers, thinkers, viewers, through the story to the end of the copy - to force awareness of the whys and the wheres and, well, to make the public care about an issue, an event, an idea. And I think that between the copy I write and the photos I use to illustrate and color the edges of a story help to keep that audience there, with me, to the end.