Collegiate Journalist Shares Love of Craft with Media students at TIP

Article by Katie Eisel and Gunner Strietzel/Photo by Dan Weitzman
M&M Staffers

Brittany Binowski, a rising senior at the University of Georgia, has an outstanding love for journalism that came to her from out of the blue. Beginning as early as elementary school, journalism has followed her all the way to college.

“Journalism is just something I was meant to do,” said the 21-year-old magazines major from Conyers, Ga.

Binowski spoke Friday morning to 18 students in the Media and Message course at Duke TIP at UGA.

In elementary school Brittany recalls printing a newsletter for the kids in her class called The Kids News. “I just wrote little articles, like Beanie Baby of the month, or the meaning behind the holiday,” Brittany said.

By the time she was in high school she decided to join the yearbook staff. This was the first time Brittany actually had to work with a team of people to make a final publication. This is the course that got her thinking about taking some journalism classes in college.

Brittany decided to be an English major when she arrived at the University of Georgia, but she quickly realized after applying for a position at The Red & Black, the University’s newspaper, that English was not the major Brittany wanted to pursue. It was journalism, specifically in the field of magazines.

Once her first article was published in Athens Living, Brittany decided to switch to a journalism major instead.

“After talking to some of my friends, and people that I’d known that had been English majors, they really didn’t know what to do after they graduated. I wanted to find something a little more feasible for when after you graduate, and I felt like journalism was kind of it.”

Her first article published all on her own, as opposed to being published in a school paper, was in the Athens Banner-Herald. The article was released to the public on December 19, 2008, and it was about the graduation at her school. Titled “Grad gets chance to express herself”, the article is about how only one person, Abi Oyegun, applied to represent the graduating class.

Brittany’s first real job was at UGA’s paper, the Red & Black. She started off in the editorial department as a staff writer, and, of course, there were some down sides to being a writer for the Red & Black. In her opinion, the worst thing about being a writer for her school’s paper was the fact that she was a student writer, so she had to balance her job with her schoolwork.

“The biggest problem for me was being a student journalist. I was taking sixteen credits so I didn’t have a lot of free time” Brittany explains.

Brittany applied for a position as Recruitment Editor in January 2009 at The Red & Black and actually did not get the job the first time. She said this about the situation, “I actually didn’t get it because they said I didn’t have enough experience, which, on hindsight, I don’t think I did.” But when The Red & Black had an opening for Recruitment Editor in May they let Brittany know, so she put in another application and was hired.

She said it was tough to balance her schoolwork and writing for the newspaper, which required her to write at least 3 articles a week. The process of writing articles included calling people that had information, was also hard for Brittany, especially the first time she had to do it.

Brittany also thought there were some really great things about working on the newspaper.

Brittany said, “Seeing your work published, I love that, in the paper the next day which is great!” She said the other great parts about working for The Red & Black were being informed about your community and getting to learn new things.

Brittany now has a summer internship in Conyers, her hometown, writing for their daily newspaper The Rockdale Citizen.

“I applied for The Rockdale Citizen to be an intern there. Basically what I did was I went on the Web site and found the publisher’s email address and emailed her.” Brittany says explaining how she applied for the internship. Lucky for her, she was accepted to be an intern for The Rockdale Citizen. She started off by writing cut lines, briefs, and area students, but quickly caught on, landing her a news story about the new organic food store that opened in Conyers, Ga.

Brittany has since seen several differences between The Red & Black and The Rockdale Citizen such as the size. She said, “It’s much smaller,” about The Rockdale Citizen which only has four employees compared to 50 at The Red & Black.

She enjoys writing for The Rockdale Citizen, she said “It has a close knit, community feel.”

There are also small perks that come with writing for The Rockdale Citizen, such as having her own desk and computer which wasn’t the case at The Red & Black.

When asked what role she thought journalists played in society Brittany said, “To be a watchdog for the public.” She said it’s their job to get the news and information out for the people.

Hoping to become part of the staff at a newspaper, local or national, Brittany excitedly writes article after article in hopes of landing a job at a higher newspaper like The New York Times.

Brittany Binowski obviously has a love for journalism that will only get stronger.

“I wouldn’t say I picked journalism, journalism picked me.”