No matter who you are, where you are, or what you’re doing, one detail remains sempiternally true: The first semester of college is stressful. Values, work ethic, and even individual penchants are challenged by the labile nature of attending a university. When Allie Yazel and I discussed our beliefs of what journalism is and whom we hope to work for, our reveries flourished in our wide, dilated eyes. I believe my dreams didn’t change, but evolved. I went into our class believing that the definition of journalism is to bring light to the issues that are still in the dark. I still have this belief, but I understand the difficulty in it and thus appreciate it even more. Talking about controversial issues like terrorism or politics or the latest big-news murder trial, using credible and factual sources, maintaining an objective voice and still being sensitive to your audience, is pretty damn hard.
jesse jackson jr.
Jesse Jackson Jr. deserves a pat on the back. After having an affair with a waitress, being Candidate #5, and resigning from Congress due to his bipolar disorder and ongoing federal investigation 15 days after being elected, it’s hard to remember the once-promising political candidate he was; a rising star in Chicago, Presidential material, even. He tried, right? It’s not his fault all of these “false” scandals broke out! But, to quote Cassius, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
ellen carpenter
Ellen Carpenter is the quintessential journalist: professional, talented, and hard working. However, with the current title deputy editor of Nylon Magazine and previously an editor for both Rolling Stone Magazine and Spin Magazine, these cookie-cut definitions don’t, well, cut it. Ellen Carpenter is more than a journalist. She’s a mother, a music enthusiast, and “a theater geek”– above all, she is passionate.
people aren’t supposed to look back
“‘So,’ said Billy gropingly, ‘I suppose that the idea of preventing war on Earth is stupid, too.’ (Vonnegut).” War and literature are sanguinely germane to Kurt Vonnegut. Throughout the Vietnam War, he and postmodern authors analogous depicted the intergalactic—through the wonted use of space travel—as a literal and imaginative frontier to essentially homestead. In Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-five, space travel functions as an escape from protagonist Billy Pilgrim’s psychological problems, elicited from his particular and personal experience in World War II; thus metaphorically exemplifying the lives of the American people and the austere realities they faced in the 1950s through 1970s during the Vietnam War. Vonnegut’s science fiction novel, published in 1969, (Reiko, 1) creates literary escapism from subsisting with the experiences that Vietnam brought and continued to produce. The recurring theme in American science fiction—space travel—emerged from the post-depression period, epitomized in Slaughterhouse-five: Where celestial crossings and the fourth dimension symbolically imply forms of detachment from reality and the repercussions of war.
convince + create
“I wish I was your age,” Rick Kogan – yes, the Rick Kogan of the Chicago Tribune – says to one of Columbia College’s introduction to journalism classes that I happen to be apart of. A few of us twist around the plastic chairs to get a glimpse at the man of the hour. I am in the front row of a beautiful conference room with a beautiful view at WBEZ’s Navy Pier home, waiting to be enlightened. Truthfully, I had been doubtful: do I really want to be a journalist? This is a dying field. Rick Kogan walks up the isle with the confidence only a cultured, urbane writer can. “You’re in for a remarkable journey,” he says to our wide-eyed, diverse class. And so it begins.