Even before I knew how to read, I was fascinated by storytelling. This led to a childhood and adolescence spent devouring every text I could get my hands on. This love of stories was the one constant through my early years in college, informed my career, and inspired me to return to school to seek my graduate degree. I am applying to graduate school so that I can bring my lifelong passion for storytelling to the study of multimedia techniques and current innovations in the dissemination of stories.
My parents were readers, and I wanted to be like them. Their stories enthralled me. Every book showed magical worlds, glimpses of people and ideas I had never encountered before. A story’s genre or format did not matter: I absorbed books, comics, television shows, stage plays and movies. They were all of the same piece. No matter the presentation, a story was a look into our dreams and humanity.
Not content to consume stories passively, I create my own work alone and in collaborative settings. I’ve been writing short stories and novels since middle school. In college my favorite courses were fiction writing, play writing and now the study of rhetoric. My academic work led to the study of how stories are created, distributed, shared by the audience, and how the process evolves due to new media.
I’ve had two academic careers. My first time through college was disappointing: I did not understand what I wanted to achieve. Despite my interest in literature and writing, I continually changed my direction. I fixated on majoring in Sociology or Child Psychology, often before I even enrolled in the courses. Eventually I accepted that I was not focused on school and left.
Despite my lack of professional plans, since high school I have had an interest in journalism as a way of sharing stories of fact. During several semesters I wrote a column for the university paper. Journalism was one of many potential majors.
I had an opportunity to work at the Lawrence Journal-World, updating the paper’s bare-bones news site. I started my career in online journalism during the field’s infancy. While covering elections, disasters, and daily events, I found that the means we used to bring the news online had a major impact on the shape of those stories. The stories were immediate, had great initial impact, and could be more in-depth than a few column inches in newsprint.
For twelve years, I used new media technologies to bring immediate, useful and deep context to our stories. I trained producers to capitalize on multimedia and taught reporters how to gather the news for online. Some days, I would show a crime reporter how to use a video camera, a photographer how to write text, and an editor how to combine everything for the web.
Twelve years of this career has inspired me to return to school. My passion for storytelling has combined with an appreciation of how a story’s format can affect the audience. Multimedia and the internet opens doors for creators and audiences alike. We are still only at the beginning of the new era of creative endeavor. Stories may now generate narratives through text, blog posts, photographs, video clips and incorporate forums and comments. Artists can reach audiences through social media networking, becoming their own distributors.
I have been a different student since my return. I know exactly what I am trying to achieve. My experience with the development of online media gives me insight into how storytelling has moved from copying traditional media to a web page to become a means of bringing together multiple works to create a cohesive whole. I want to share my understanding with students, fellow academics, and in consultation with creators and companies who need to reach audiences in a time when traditional media is losing its grasp.
In short, I want to tell stories about how we are telling stories now and in the future.
