Ariel Valdez

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Ariel Valdez's picture

Bio:

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.

Recent Blog Posts:

Changing the way you communicate to become an effective communicator: a confession

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.
 

Enriching the level playing field

I recently had the privilege to be on a panel at the New America Foundation titled Digital District: Local News and Online Media Access in Washington. For me the highlight of the evening was getting to talk with bloggers like The Prince of Petworth and Veronica Davis, who do tremendous service for their communities just by blogging and serving as moderators, so everyday folks can voice their troubles.

A Summer Youth job well done in a changing community



Not long after I arrived at CentroNia I was asked by the magazine/design instructor if I could do a couple of workshops with the students working in the Summer Youth Employment Program.  For those of you not from D.C., the Summer Youth Employment Program, or SYEP, is a project of the mayor that gives young adults skills for future employment in the job market place, and allows them to do all sorts of work. Sometimes it's planting trees. Sometimes it's cool stuff like creating audio and video at a place like CentroNia.