UConn Journalism Student Nikki Barnhart Wishes She Could Rate Life on the Pitchfork Scale

When I tell peo­ple I’m a jour­nal­ism major, they auto­mat­i­cal­ly think I mean I want to be a reporter — con­vey the cold hard facts, the who, what, when, why of a crime scene, of break­ing news. But that’s not what I have in mind. I’m much more inter­est­ed in the art of telling sto­ries, of tak­ing some­thing apart and exam­in­ing it. Going beyond the sim­ple questions.

My jour­nal­is­tic heroes are Joan Did­ion and Chuck Kloster­man — I’m inter­est­ed in analy­sis, and long-form, lit­er­ary journalism.

I’ve always loved the New York Times Mag­a­zine — for its fea­ture sto­ries, it would pair amaz­ing pho­tographs with intro­spec­tive pieces on why cer­tain trends are occur­ring — it’s human­is­tic and inter­est­ing. But I won’t pre­tend my tastes are always so sophisticated.

I come under major flack for this by my friends, and I know it’s non-sen­si­cal, but for a jour­nal­ism major, I’m not usu­al­ly too up on break­ing news — unless it’s in the music world. Pitch­fork is prob­a­bly the news site I hit the most, look­ing for yet anoth­er defin­i­tive list to rock and anger the music com­mu­ni­ty. I get most of my news on Face­book and Twit­ter — on Face­book, I like the con­ve­nience of see­ing what’s trend­ing. On Twit­ter, I fol­low var­i­ous music blogs, as well as sec­tions of the New York­er, The New York Times, and NPR that I am inter­est­ed in (usu­al­ly music and arts). (Should I even men­tion the Onion? Actu­al­ly, I think we can ana­lyze a lot about cur­rent cul­ture by what we choose to satire.)

I am tak­ing this class because I know this is the direc­tion the indus­try is head­ed. Anoth­er com­mon qualm of the pub­lic: why are you a jour­nal­ism major, isn’t it going the way of the dinosaurs, won’t it be com­plete­ly defunct and use­less in a blink of an eye? Absolute­ly not. Peo­ple will always need news, always seek news (of what­ev­er kind.) We just have to con­stant­ly adjust how we are deliv­er­ing it. Online pro­fi­cien­cy is absolute­ly vital, and I’m actu­al­ly sur­prised UCon­n’s cur­rent cur­ricu­lum does­n’t offer more cours­es acknowl­edg­ing this. I expect to become more pro­fi­cient, and hope­ful­ly become adept at all dif­fer­ent pro­grams so I will know the stan­dards of the industry.