By: Anthony Herrera, SPJ member
Being a quiet individual is hard when immersing yourself into a conference like the Excellence In Journalism, but at the end you will be filled with pride knowing that you stepped outside of your comfort zone in order to get answers to questions that have been eating away at your soul.
I attended EIJ seeking answers to questions about my future and the future of media and at the end I felt at ease on both subjects.
The future of media, according to different discussions presented at the conference, can be seen through two lenses, the need for more interaction between journalists and the people in the community and the need to be its own watchdog to ensure truthfulness and strong ethics.
The communal aspect that SPJ encouraged calls for allowingmore information about the journalist to be provided to the audience, to put a face to the words in a sense.
This would be fascinating to see play out, especially in New Mexico. I think that many organizations already implement this by having discussions that are open to the public.
Another aspect of the conference I enjoyed and truly benefited from was the vast array of graduate schools from around the United States.
Granted, many of my peers and influences have given mixed reviews about attending graduate school for journalism, but it helped me further analyze the pros and cons of attending a graduate program.
Throughout the conference I attended about 15 different discussions that were moderated by fascinating and influential individuals. The topics ranged from education, immigration, producing news, podcasting and healthcare reporting.
Anthony Herrera is a senior at the University of New Mexico
