Who Am I? Who Am I? Let's Find Out.

In 1962, Clare Boothe Luce, one of the first women to serve in the U.S. Congress, offered some advice to President John F. Kennedy.  “A great man,” she told him, “is one sentence.”  Abraham Lincoln’s sentence was: “He preserved the union and freed the slaves.”  Franklin Roosevelt’s was: “He lifted us out of a great depression and helped us win a world war.”  Luce feared that Kennedy’s attention was so splintered among different priorities that his sentence risked becoming a muddled paragraph.  (from Daniel Pink's latest book "Drive")

When we were shown Pink's video, I didn't know what to think of it.  Could it be possible to have only one sentence to summarize your life?  Only one sentence to show what the purpose is in my everyday life.


So…what do you think your sentence would be? 


Let's try and think about it like this.  What do you want people to say about you when its your time pass on?  If they could only do it in just one sentence, what would you want them to say?  How about a couple heart warming words thrown together to describe who you were?  Would you like that?  Probably not, what would YOU want that sentence to say about you? 

Would you want it to describe your accomplishments in life?  The type of person you were, if people actually took the time to get to know you?  How you treated those closest to you as well as those who weren't?  What you did to change the world around you for the better?  What would you want that one sentence to describe?


It's a tough thing to think about huh?  You only get one sentence to explain who you are...

So once again...what’s my sentence?

My Sentence is:

"I am an ambitious person who, when all else fails, knows that I will

succeed at changing the minds of those who doubted me."

Being a better journalist and financial difficulties

My area of interest is the News part of Journalism.  It is something that I am most interested in because I think that everyone needs to to get the news, no matter how they get it.  Reading blogs is not only a way for people to share their opinions and thoughts about everything, but it is also a great way to get news about anything related to journalism.  It is kind of cool actually.

The two blogs that I read were Ricochet by Chrys Wu and Eat Sleep Publish: thoughts on the future of publishing by Jason Preston.  In the first blog by Chrys Wu, I saw a pretty cool time lapse video of snow build up on a picnic table.  It became a internet sensation on December 30th, it has received over 2.5 million views so far and that number continues to grow.  This time lapse video was important in this post because it shows that even though putting a video like this on your blog is cool and all it isn't a solid way to get views for your own personal blog.  Photographer Chase Jarvis is credited with saying, "the best camera is the one that you have with you."  There is also a a tutorial for how to not let weather ruin a time lapse video that you can make.  Another blog post that I read about was one about how to become a better journalist.  An important part of being a journalist is leaving room for yourself to improve your craft.  The approach that was used was pretty good, the posts that I read through started by the author talking about his personal life and a story of some sort to lead into the topic of the post.  I really liked the picture that came with the post, it shows that you are never too young or old to learn something new.


The other blog that I read was Eat Sleep Publish: thoughts on the future of publishing by Jason Preston.  This blog talked a lot about how autocorrect can change the entire meaning of something as it did for the American Airlines tweet, saying that it was going to send doctors to haiti but actually didn't mean that at all.  But the post that caught my eye more than the rest was one about newspaper circulation.  The chart in the post showed how The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Daily News, The New York Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal newspaper circulation has decreased drastically over the last 20 years of their existence.  Though all of the newspapers have stayed above 400,000 it still looks like they are going to decline in the years to come.  There were some other posts talking about what the author thought about publishing in previous years and then again what they did in today's society.  


None of the blog posts that  I read had any labels which was kind of weird to me, because you would think that there would need to be at least a couple labels so people know what they author is talking about.  But to me, I think that both authors did a good job at getting to the point in each post so that they wouldn't need labels to help the reader.