It is always amazing to me how much of a difference a few months can make.

I started this blog in the spring of 2008. Throughout the end of my high school career and the beginning of  my collegiate one, I had one goal: to be a political reporter. The spring of my junior year, I ventured off to Washington, DC where I completed an internship with the online publication GalleryWatch as part of The Fund for American Studies political journalism program. At that point I knew: DC was the only place that I wanted to work.

Fast forward to spring 2009. I was graduating college. The journalism industry was in turmoil, with layoffs, firings and buyouts galore. The reality of student loans was hitting hard, especially given the credit crunch. I was looking into teaching certification programs, grad school… and had pretty much given up on finding a job in journalism.

Then it happened. I got a bite on one of the dozen or so applications that I sent out. The day before I took my last final exam, I got a call from the editor of the Ionia Sentinel-Standard, a small daily paper in central Michigan. Immediately following the exam, I drove up for the interview. Two days later, I had a job.

Twelve short months and I learned that DC wasn’t the only place I could love to work. My job in Ionia isn’t exactly what I had thought I wanted to do, true. And I’d still love to make it back to DC. But I realized that my true love was the journalism, not the city. So here’s a spot for my musings on journalism in a small town, life as a recent grad and the crazy, crazy world that we live in.