Note: I know this entire scenario is unlikely. Please humor me.
A few weeks ago, my friend Becky and I were sitting in the library, contemplating why everyone thought journalism was going downhill. We’ve both accepted that newspapers in their current form are becoming obsolete.
I’ve never been a huge fan of Valentine’s Day. Maybe it’s because I’ve never had a significant other on this day. Maybe it’s because of the excess of pink and red in the weeks leading up to it. Maybe it’s just because I’m bitter.
So, imagine my delight when I realized I was working on Valentine’s Day. I had agreed a few days before when an editor asked, “Can you work on Saturday?” I thought nothing of it until my roommate, who has been my V-Day date for the last two years, asked what we would be doing on Saturday.
When it hit me that I had agreed to work on the corniest day of the year, I started imagining what story I would have to write. Some old couple had been together for hundreds of years. A baby had been born at the stroke of midnight and his parents thought it’d be cute to name him “Val.” Or maybe, I’d be stuck covering weddings, with a bunch of happy people surrounding me for a few hours.
On that last one, I was right.
It seems like for the last few weeks, I’ve had to explain why I’m such a Twitter fanatic. While at the state legislature, a fellow reporter asked me to explain why Twitter was awesome to the president of the Nevada Press Association. At a SuperBowl party, I got into a debate with a fellow journalism student who thinks the application is useless and doesn’t understand why the fad is popular. One of my best friends (and yes, another journalism major) thinks that all the time I spend on Twitter is pointless.
What was the breaking point? I was reading a column from Time yesterday, and it irked it me when the writer said, “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I’ve finally found something more stupid than Twitter.”
So I’ve finally decided to defend it on my blog.
After reading this post on Soup du Journalism, I started thinking about what my “transparency bio” would say. Because folks, let’s face it, no matter how hard you try at being unbiased, you can’t help what you think or feel. You’re human and it’s a part of your nature. I’m a part of the group that believes that in order to be a great journalist, it’s better to just put it all that out there instead of pretending to be these machines who don’t believe in anything in particular.
Here’s what I’ve come up with:
