About Me

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Me, with fellow CMU football writer Justin Berndt in the Indiana University press box, Fall 2008.

Me, with fellow CMU football writer Justin Berndt in the Indiana University press box, Fall 2008.

My road to journalism began as a 10th grade student at Swan Valley High School, where my language arts teacher assigned us to write a sonnet, a 14-line Shakespearian poem with a specific rhyming sequence.

This was probably the first homework assignment I actually liked doing – to the point where I wrote about 15 more sonnets. Then dozens of poems. I wrote in haiku, tanka, free verse, you name it. I used it to express myself on paper and simply to give myself something to do.

In high school, teachers and counselors always held seminars and class sessions on career choices, telling you to do what you love doing. I considered this love for writing as my calling. So I chose journalism as a career and Central Michigan as my college, one of two accredited journalism colleges in the state. This was in 2005.

Here’s the funny thing about all of this. I was waltzing into Mount Pleasant, Mich., with the intention of writing, particularly in sports. What I gradually came to realize, beginning as a staff reporter at the award-winning Central Michigan Life, the campus newspaper, is writing only is the outer skin of journalism. I entered college knowing nothing about the heart of it: The reporting. The “watchdog” role. The storytelling.

In my four years since, I have worked my hardest to learn every tool and skill necessary to survive in an ever-changing industry. I am not just a writer like I sought to be four years ago. I now own a digital SLR camera with two lenses to work with photography. As football writer at Life one year ago, I supplemented my reporting with a blog and weekly appearances as host of SportsLine, an online video program covering Life sports. As online editor the following spring, I began thinking video and Soundslides, asking myself, “How can we make our stories better with multimedia?” Even as a copy editing intern at The Grand Rapids Press, I thought every day about how I could best package stories with a variety of elements and lay them all out on a page.

Just this past summer, I took on the challenge of single-handedly rebuilding cm-life.com, using a new content management system (WordPress), and using it to reinvent how Central Michigan Life’s news operation works on a daily basis.

There are many different ways to tell a story in today’s age, and many different techniques journalists can use to make those stories the best and most informative they can possibly be. There are many who fear of the future of journalism, an industry as uncertain as it is essential. I embrace it.

~Brian J. Manzullo

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