Marooned

I almost changed my mind on Friday, when a student asked me "who are you writing this for?" while I was researching an article on a student-run lecture series. I didn't know how to explain that I had left the Maroon, but was still writing articles at will. For who then, this blog? It seems like a compulsion, not a job, when I'm asking people questions with no strong idea where to publish them.

Oh yeah, to reiterate; I quit the Maroon last week.

I've wanted to be a journalist since high school, when a friend of mine and not- so-secret crush helped found a quarterly opinion journal. After that I interned with a local weekly newspaper, the La Jolla Village News. I liked feeling immersed in the News, the What Was Going On in my community, city, neighbors' front yards—The short version of the story is the same for every writer, I think: A few bylines, and I was hooked. The best part was going jogging on Thursday morning in my beach-side community and scanning the freshly rolled papers in the driveways for my name peaking out above a rubber band.

This is to say, I have much less sentimental value for the Maroon than I might otherwise. They didn't teach me how to self-edit, how to beg someone over the phone for Just a minute! or how to habitually write ledes on my way to classes. But the Maroon is the first place I wrote alongside and was edit entirely by my peers, and I disagreed with a lot of their editorial decisions. There are good journalists at the Maroon, this I'm sure of, but if there's a place on campus to do good journalism, this probably isn't it.

It would be in poor form to re-hash the problems I've had with my editors, especially when I have so much to be proud of: Like this feature story about dormcest on campus, and a story on the Kuvia Winter Festival that meant waking up at 4:30 in the morning last year. With so many deadlines I learned how quickly one could change the content and character of a piece by removing a quote or re-arranging a lede, and get lots of people very angry.

I have some new projects to get to work on; I won a grant to report on the 2016 Olympic Bid and its impact on the South Side, and I have another issue of the Midway Review coming out by the end of the month. You can also look for more of my writing on the Universitys' homepages, through my freelance work with the News Office.

But for now, as this blog post suggests, I'm all alone—unprotected by the Mastheads that I will continue to insist are essential to journalism even in this digital world.

Hopefully the Maroonatics will keep doing their homework, because I'll be reading—and writing, too.