Changing the way you communicate to become an effective communicator: a confession
Ariel Valdez's Blog
I am a D.C. raised journalist, musician and radio enthusiast who has been lucky enough to work with public media’s greatest. My college studies were capped off by an independent study of expatriate journalism in Taipei. After college, I was fortunate enough to start a career in public media at The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. I soon moved to National Public Radio to help launch and shape Tell Me More with Michel Martin. In addition, I do freelance radio work that has been featured on WAMU-FM’s The Kojo Nnamdi Show, WBEZ-FM’s This American Life, and KUT-FM’s Latino USA. In my spare time, I am an avid ska guitarist, who is perpetually striving to keep up my Chinese and Spanish language skills, and can occasionally be found documenting the work of performance and slam poets.
If you need to know more about who I am, you can always check out my bio. But that doesn't really say a lot about my media consumption habits, so here goes with the confession: I hate texting. But that's slowly changing.
As I enter this fellowship and get to know the high school students CentroNia serves, I am being forced to examine the way I'm communicating, myself. I will probably give in soon and get a smart phone (who am I kidding, I'm kind of excited with the idea). I will also be making myself text a lot more. Frankly I am a little annoyed by texting because people seem to think they can do it surreptitiously, they do and expect it to be no big deal. But it's also the vogue, and the way to reach students-and instructors-here at CentroNia. It's admittedly very fast, very efficient, and comparatively silent. So I am stuck mulling over what texting means to me, in a "the medium is the message" sort of way.
Otherwise my time has been spent plotting out a lot of great projects, and I really look forward to sharing them with you in the future. And if you are interested in the PMC, and can make it out to a panel in DC next Wednesday, please come say hi. The panel at the New America Foundation will be about local news and media access.