John Bricker's 100W Blog

Documentary filmmaker Alexander Shebanow’s acceptance speech after receiving his Hearst Award at San Jose State on Thursday, Nov. 14 was concise and meaningful, adding context about the making of the film and expressing thanks to Shebanow’s collaborators. Shebanow thanked legendary journalist and executive producer of “Fail State,” Dan Rather, for taking a chance on his team of “no-name filmmakers” by providing funding and sharing their work with a wide audience. At the end of his speech, Shebanow dedicated his award to the victims of for-profit colleges who are tens of thousands of dollars in debt after graduating. “I hope that one day we wake up under a new administration in Washington that realizes the debt on their shoulders should be wiped away, and is the responsibility of that administration to protect the next generation of students from predatory colleges,” he said.

I did not have a traditional graduation experience with a gown and cap when I earned my associate degree in journalism from De Anza College in July. Honestly, I haven’t even picked up my diploma, almost six months later. Despite my disdain for the traditional trappings of academic graduations, earning my degree in journalism is my proudest accomplishment. During my two academic years at De Anza College, including summer classes during 2018, I worked very hard for the college’s student newspaper, La Voz News. Working for a student newspaper will always involve some fun times with new friends, but the work I did there was very difficult. As a reporter, opinions editor, copy editor and business manager, I learned valuable lessons about what makes a publication tick and how to avoid common mistakes I saw in my own writing and other student’s articles. I focused on journalism classes for most of my time at De Anza, but the main challenge I faced as a student was keeping ...

Getting to sit down with talented musicians and pick their brains sounds like paradise to me, along with writing reviews that can point people toward quality independent music. These practices are exactly what writers for Bandcamp Daily have the privilege of carrying out and are paid to do. I first found out about the Bandcamp website when I was 17 years old, while I was looking around for places to download music by some indie musicians I had discovered online. That search led me to those artists’ Bandcamp pages, where they allowed visitors to choose a price for their music or simply download it for free. From that moment on, I began to use Bandcamp as one of my primary ways to discover new artists, scrolling through the charts of new albums on the sites and trying out releases that musicians publicly recommended. One of Bandcamp’s best features is Bandcamp Daily, which posts daily reviews, interviews and features pointing listeners to new artists and exciting music. ...

Jennifer Wilson attended Everest College, a for-profit college that promised a degree that could give her relief from her grief and fear. After graduating Suma Cum Laude with $60,000 in debt, she found that her degree was worthless and that no one would hire her. Far from solving her problems, Wilson said added more pain and heartbreak to her life. "I felt like I went from one tragedy to another," said Wilson. In the 2017 documentary “Fail State” examines how for-profit colleges take advantage of students and have shaped American policy, crafting a gripping narrative by telling the stories of real people. Near the beginning of the documentary, Cornell professor Suzanne Mettle said is was rare to go to college in the first half of the 1900s. In 1940, one out of 20 Americans went to college. By 1977, this statistic had grown to one in four Americans. To respond to the growth in demand for higher education, for-profit schools began which were kept in check by go...

Because I am in the process of completing my first semester at San Jose State University, I will write about my favorite class at De Anza College, where I studied for two years and earned my associate degree in journalism. My marine biology class at De Anza College taught by professor Jason Bram is easily the best class I have ever taken. I took the class to fulfill my science general education requirement during my first quarter at De Anza College Professor Bram's passion for the material was obvious from the first day of class, when he warned that sometimes he would yell at us, just to express his excitement about the class and not at any mistakes we made. He also told the class that the university would provide a free camping trip to Cambria, California in order to study the marine life there and also goof off or have fun. The material was fascinating and I was good at it, given my experience studying biology in high school. The camping trip was the highlight of the ...

If I had to create a new class, I would design a curriculum about music journalism. This class is necessary because although we have journalism classes about how to write reviews, writing about music is often much more difficult for a beginning writer. Describing audio with written language relies on a deep understanding of what makes that music appealing and a talent for condensing the essence of nebulous details into easy to understand prose. Music journalism is more than writing reviews as well, including profile stories about artists, event stories about concerts and soft news stories about developments in the lives of music personalities. Students in this class would learn how to effectively structure and write music reviews, from the beginning of taking initial notes based on the music to putting together an engaging lead that captures the critic's opinion in an engaging way. This class would also teach students what kind of questions to ask musicians, based on what...