A few resolutions for the new year

Typically, I’m not much for new year’s resolutions. I can be pretty fickle (ok, maybe a little impulsive).

I wrote a post a few months ago about goals, and a lot of those have stayed the same. However, some of these goals I’d like to expound upon. Besides, I know I need to get out of the living-in-the-moment mode a bit.

I have divided these up into personal and professional goals.

Personal goals

1. Keep running and stay injury free. Running is how I relieve stress. It energizes me. However, I’ve been dealing with a nerve injury for a couple of years now. It’s been expensive (and painful) to treat, but I finally found a doctor that I feel has put me on the path to real recovery. I haven’t felt better and I have a marathon coming up at the end of January. I’m going to kick those 26.2 miles in the butt!

2. Continue to strengthen my relationships with the people I love most. A couple of years ago, I went through a very rough time in my life. I hated myself and who I had become. I stopped appreciating the people that cared about me most.  I made some serious changes. I never want to go back to that place again. I love the life I lead now and all the people who are a part of it.

3. Get out of debt. I had to support myself throughout college. Thankfully, I had a full scholarship as an undergrad, but I had to pay for graduate school on my own. I have a lot of credit card debt and student loans that need to be repaid soon. I live on a budget now and have started to drive down a lot of that credit card debt. Pretty proud of myself for that, so I want to keep it up.

4. Make art. I don’t shoot photos or video like I used to. Granted, I would do it for the other gigs I had in the past and I had better equipment. I want to focus on shooting more, but with an eye toward art versus something journalistic.

Professional goals

1. Always make an effort to learn new things and see how I can become better at my job. Since I started working at the Statesman in August, I slowed down on blogging and coding in my spare time. However, now that I feel adjusted, I want to continue to explore different ideas in communication and technology. Sometimes a lot of my understanding of new technology requires me to ‘play’ with it on my own before I can apply it elsewhere.

2. Build a mobile app. It’s always cool to know how the backend of something works by building it yourself. I hope do this at some point in my spare time.

3. Redesign my site with a CMS. Last year, I was introduced to several CMS and now that I understand the front end, I want to know more backend here as well. Now that I FINALLY got my domain back and my site is horribly outdated, it’s a good excuse for me to start from scratch.

P.S. Don’t ever forget to pay your domain host like I did…it’s expensive and time consuming in the end.

 

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Questions regarding new media and how it changed the direction of my career

A good friend of mine, Carly Smith, asked me to answer a few questions for a newsletter she has to develop for a independent study course she is taking during her last semester of graduate school. I wanted to share a few of those responses. She had some great questions to ask that made me think about my education and career direction.

What is your current job?  How long have you been there?
I’m a content producer for the Austin American-Statesman. I have been there for about a month now.

Has new media become your main focus, or are you using it to compliment your original career interests?  (For example, public relations + new media, journalism + new media, technology + social media, etc.).
It’s a little bit of both. When I received my undergraduate degree in print journalism, it was at the point everything was beginning to change. I didn’t feel my degree was irrelevant, but I knew I didn’t have a lot of the skills necessary to be a successful journalist. I needed more, which is why I chose to go to graduate school and get a degree in mass communication-new media. While my job is in journalism, it’s focused more on new media and coming up with creative solutions to showcase a story with multimedia and other visual elements.

How has the world of new media altered your original career goals?  Have they completely changed?
It absolutely altered my original career goals. I suppose I always imagined myself getting a job at a newspaper as a reporter post-graduation and doling out stories on regular basis. Funny how that never happened, but I couldn’t be happier with the direction my career went. My first job out of college was as a multimedia producer for a news startup, and while I didn’t stay there long, I remember only writing up one piece. The rest was focused on site development, photography and video. Now at the Statesman, I don’t actually produce much content (contrary to my job title). My role is more about posting content to the web and deciding which stories, video or photos should be displayed more prominently. Granted I get direction from my bosses on this, but it’s pretty exciting to be a part of that editorial process.

 

So this leads me to ask all of you the same.

How has new media changed your career? Do you think you could have learned more about it in college?