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I’m proud to announce my debut as a contributing weekly SoCal Focus columnist for KCET television’s website!
This all transpired in the past few weeks when, one Friday, I received a rejection letter from a job I had recently applied and interviewed for. I though I would land the job, but I got the email instead. Then, not even half an hour later, KCET website editor Zach Behrens messaged me on Facebook and asks if I’d be interested in writing a weekly column for the website for the next couple months, covering the Asian/Pacific Islander community. Earlier this week we sealed the deal, and I wrote my first piece on Tuesday night, to go live today.
My first column is on the 10th anniversary of the City of Los Angeles’ designation of the Historic Filipinotown district. Incidentally, it comes exactly 10 years to the day of the 2002 designation.
On Tuesday, I rode my bike to Temple Street, Union Avenue and Beverly Boulevard to take a few pictures. Honestly, I could not find a “cityscape” shot that looked like a good representation of what is Filipino in Historic Filipinotown (hence the main message of the column), so I took a picture of the Filipino American history mural at Unidad Park along Beverly.
What’s interesting is that this is the first journalism-related gig for me in a long time. It doesn’t pay a whole lot, but I can’t even remember the last time I was paid for writing in a journalistic setting.
I must say that writing for a large audience (much, much bigger than the handful of people who read this blog) got me a little nervous, yet at the same time motivated me. I must have spent about 6 hours writing the piece, which involved lots and lots and lots and lots of hitting preview mode to make sure everything looked right.
When I was in college, I gained a moderate amount of fame as a columnist of the campus newspaper, the Daily Trojan. It was fairly unconventional, brutally honest and in fact, it was very much like a blog, even though it was in print.
About 17 years ago, in my senior year of college, my dream was to be a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. This is probably the closest I’ll ever get to that.
I’ll have lots of fun doing this. So look for me every Thursday on KCET.org!
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