Why Wash

I just realized that I have not yet related why I chose to call my blog the wash. So I am going to try to get through this quickly and concisely. First off, everyone knows and will not argue that regular washing of almost anything is effective at showing it's true nature. A car's color is most vivid when clean, a mirror is most reflective when free of gunk and junk, etc. My meaning and purpose in creating this blog - though it was for a class - was to be able to take some free time to discourse of things which confuse me or in the very least consume my thoughts. So I will now do my best - being free from class obligations - to relate thoughts and ideas through this blog for the enjoyment of you. Thank you for joining me as I attempt to wash through the muddles of my brain and the things I see around me.

Blog 3: Interview of a Professional

Tim Treager has worked as the editor at the Whittier Daily News since 2007. Before that his work experience had ranged from shooting pictures of the Dodgers and Los Angeles Raiders for a sports page in Burbank, to covering the 1992 L.A. riots from the site of Rodney King's beating. When Sonny Bono, the famous solo career singer and more famous for his duet career with Cher, skied into a tree at the Heavenly Resort in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, Tim Treager was the first person to break the story and was on Larry King the next morning. In summation, his career as a journalist has been variant and exciting. When I asked him what his philosophy of journalism was he quickly responded that it was "always changing," but the constants for him were his beliefs that what he did as a journalist always came back to a journalists role as "the fourth estate," and the "gatekeepers." Treager says that what is important to realize about journalists now is that they need to become producers of "value." What he means by this is that when roughly fifteen years ago newspapers began to publish stories online people still paid for the printed paper. Now almost all content can be reached online for free, causing papers to loose money and jobs to suddenly disappear. "If it's free, it has no value," Treager says, "we need to shut down the website today, and bring it back online tomorrow and charge a monthly fee for it." Treager realizes that once you put a price on something, it has value, its worth something. Noting interestingly, Treager said, "cities with no news papers have less volunteers." This fact shows that newspapers have an obligation to make changes so that they can avoid continual job cuts, as well as a need to be aware of their impact on their communities.

This leads me to my next point, Tim Treager's views on religion in his experience as a journalist. Treager says that he is not what he would call a religious person per se, but that regardless of his feelings towards the subject he knows it is important. This is because of his audience. Whittier, California is a city founded by Quakers and comprised still of many Christians and other religious sects. It reminds me of the joke about a Starbucks being on every corner, in Whittier, their is a church on almost every corner. Their is a Masonic Temple next to the Daily News headquarters even. Now to digress, due to the overwhelming amount of religious - mainly Christian - readers of the Daily News, they run a weekly page devoted entirely to religion. You have to "play to your audience," Treager tells me. And since he knows the affect the newspaper can have on the involvement of it's community in service, Treager says that it is one of his main goals to constantly be "beefing up" the religion page in order give them the coverage they deserve.