I grew up in a modest town. Porterville, California. Population roughly 40,000. Mostly farmers. It’s a place that smells of cow manure. It’s the “armpit” of California, being the worst, poorest, most-polluted little valley in the golden state.

So when something better than oranges comes out of Porterville, it deserves to be recognized (because it doesn’t happen often).

And that’s exactly what happened this week: The online newspaper at Granite Hills High School (my alma mater) placed as gold crown finalists in the Columbia Scholastic Press Association awards for their online news site, The Grizzly Gazette. This is a national honor and a huge accomplishment.

Now their advisor, Evan Hackett, is looking for a way to send a handful of students to New York City to accept the award and asked me to chaperone. One problem: The school doesn’t have the resources or funding to pull that kind of money together last-minute (the awards ceremony is at the end of March).

We ask of you this: If you know of any organization that is willing to sponsor a few kids flying and staying in NYC for three days, please pass this on to them. These kids deserve to get out and see the world — to see how big their accomplishments are, and to know that after they graduate, there’s so much to move on to.

Only 60 percent of people in Porterville graduate high school, compared to 80 percent at the national level, according to the latest census information. Only 11 percent of people in Porterville get bachelor’s degrees. That’s less than half of the national average of 24 percent.

When the Grizzly Gazette won its first national award (NSPA National Pacemaker) under my lead as editor in chief, it was an unbelievably powerful and eye-opening experience for me.

The Grizzly Gazette staff after winning its second national award in Denver.

It was the first time I was able to see myself in the real world, beyond the little Tulare County bubble,  a feeling I best conveyed in my personal statement for my University of California applications that year:

The first thing we saw when we walked through the huge, glass, double doors were the chandeliers hanging from the ceiling—shimmering, dazzling, mesmerizing. We entered together, side-by-side, us against the rest of the high school world.

“We’re definitely not in Porterville anymore,” laughed Mr. Hackett, our journalism advisor.  I looked around at the faces of my fellow journalism students, my journalism family, and I knew they were thinking the same thing. Together we were exiting the little agrarian country town we came from and entering the real world.

It was April 20, 2006 and we were entering the San Francisco Hilton for the NSPA Journalism Conference. All of our differences dissipated away as we entered those huge glass doors. We were united, we were one, and all of the hard work we put into producing our online paper for the last seven months paid off as we stared down at our “Pacemaker Finalist” ribbons around our necks. They were our small tokens of triumph, our ultimate source of pride.

This was it. We made it. Our little online high school newspaper had placed as one of the top seven newspapers in the nation against some of the most affluent high schools in the United States. Our Title I school, in which eighty-nine percent of our students are classified as low-income, our east-side school, in which the rest of the town referred to as the “gang school” was finally being nationally recognized for our hard work.

There was never a moment in my life where I was more proud to be a leader. I was editor in chief and my family of reporters, photographers, editors, and designers stood behind me with full support. We were winners, not only of a national newspaper contest, but of all the goals and aspirations we set for ourselves.

As I stood, staring up at those chandeliers, gazing in awe at the thousands of students who filled the lobby of the hotel, and imagining the thousands more who were somewhere off in their hotel rooms, I knew that everything I questioned was worth it. All the hours of interviews after school, being squeezed in between my hours of homework for AP classes, golf practice, last minute deadlines, late-night breaking news updates, training the underclassmen on weekends—it was all worth it.

And there we stood. For this moment in time, we weren’t the “gang school,” and it didn’t matter that eighty-nine percent of our students were low-income. All that mattered was that we were winners.

Now I know I can do anything I set my heart to.  These students, my peers, were artists.  We started with a color palette of talents and a blank canvas, and by the end of the year we became Picassos, Leonardos, and Van Goghs. Together we have combined our individual pieces of art to create this masterpiece, our newspaper, on display for the world to see.

It was this one, life-changing weekend that made me decide on a future for myself. This life-changing weekend I learned about who I was, who I am, and who I want to become. My future is journalism.  My future is experiencing the joy of reporting facts to the community. My future is being informed and informing others. My future is real, and my future starts now.

After the journalism conference, after meeting with students from everywhere in the nation, I knew that I had a plan for my future. I walked out of that hotel on the last day of the weekend as a changed person. For the first time in my life, I knew where I stood in the world. I knew my potential, and to this day, I know that I am a leader. The first step of my life journey is almost over. The effort of my four years of high school is coming to and end, and with this end comes a new beginning.

The second year I was editor in chief, we won another national award and traveled to Denver. It was the first time most of us (myself included) had ever been out of state or flown on an airplane. It was equally as life-changing.

I want to give these kids an opportunity to experience that same feeling I had at my first journalism conference. They deserve to go on this trip. Can you help them pay the way? Contact me lauren.rabaino@gmail.com or comment on this post if you can.

Steve Enders, Cal Poly alumnus and senior product manager at Yahoo! News, gave a keynote lecture Thursday at Cal Poly’s journalism week and shared some interesting perspectives.

A few things Steve emphasized:

“I never thought I’d be where I’m at today. I graduated with an interest in newspapers. I wanted to be a reporter and editor.”

If you’re going to get into journalism, you need to be ready to change. It’s a constant evolution, and if you’re stuck in your ways, you’re not going to last long. Have an open mind. Accept new challenges. Steve’s career path is a perfect example of flexibility:

• He graduated in 1997 with a journalism degree
• After graudation, he worked at Metro, a newspaper
• After Metro, he switched gears to Click, a magazine
• Made a huge leap to television, working for Tech TV
• Finally made the jump to the web with Yahoo

• World’s No. 1 news Web site in terms of unique users to the site each month
• Only 10-15 employees on the editorial staff
• Processes 13,000 pieces of content every day
• About 10 percent is original content, the rest is aggregated

“Now we’re starting to care about, ‘Well, if you’re interested in a story, I probably am too and I’m going to read it.’”

Promote yourself using social networks that most people are already using and familiar with. It will drive traffic to your site, (it’s something I’ve previously blogged about; it’s good to know a professional agrees)

• Put your newspaper on Twitter
• Start a Facebook page for your publication
• Upload your video to YouTube

While Steve as a speaker did very well overall, I was disappointed with the low student turnout. Instead, random guests of the older generation (people who aren’t impacted by the changing industry) showed up and asked questions like “Can you track searches directly back to my name?” or, my favorite: “So, is it like deadline all the time?” Um, duh?

Students should have taken advantage of the opportunity to make an industry connection and get a glimpse into what the industry is like right now (what it’s really like, not what we learn about in class).

On a happier note, I had somewhat of an epiphany during the lecture. Although I’ve recently been pessimistic about journalism as a whole, something Steve said stuck with me:

“What an exciting time to be getting into this industry.”

That statement goes against a lot of sentiments I hear from professionals and peers. A fellow journalism major with a public relations concentration told me yesterday, “I’d be terrified to be in print journalism right now.” It’s the general attitude most students at Cal Poly — and the industry as a whole — have.  Sure, we’re going through a tough time, but it’ll come around, and aspiring journalists are going to be the people who fix it.

The industry isn’t dying. It’s changing. And the upcoming generation of journalists gets to redefine news and its delivery.

Richard Koci Hernandez seems to fit that description in the realm of multimedia.

I first met him at an ACP conference in San Francisco last spring. It was the most inspiring seminar I’d ever witnessed. He talked about breaking the rules and going against the grain. He shared his views on the future of HDV instead of DSLRs. His message was sincere and presented in a fresh way. Since the conference, I’ve kept a close eye on his blog and am always interested in what he has to say.

The following is the result of a recent e-mail interview with him:

The written version:

Where it started

When Richard Koci Hernandez took a family trip to Yosemite as a child, he saw nature photographs by Ansel Adams and his life was forever changed. Koci Hernandez took a Nikon FM film camera, which his uncle had traded his lawn mower for, and set out on a quest to be the next Ansel.

“I sucked, of course, and soon found my family members as better subjects than the rocks,” Koci Hernandez said.

At the time, he was in a Catholic seminary and wanted to help people. Because he loved photography, he felt journalism was the best way to continue to help society while doing what he enjoyed most.

“A little naive,” he admitted, “But that’s what got me started.”

Koci Hernandez attended Ventura Community College’s liberal arts program until 1990 and graduated from San Francisco State University with a BA in journalism in 1993. He started his professional career as a photojournalist in 1989 and has worked at the Ventura County Star, Kansas Wichita Eagle and San Jose Mercury News.

Taking the initiative

About four years ago in 2004, Koci Hernandez and another Mercury News photographer Dai Sugano embarked on a six month journey to teach themselves Flash, Final Cut Pro, CSS, HTML and more to create a multimedia site for the Mercury News.

“That’s the short version,” Koci Hernandez joked.

In a lecture at Berkeley in 2007, Koci Hernandez explained that he and the other staff photographers felt the need to create the site when there was no more room for their photos to run in print.

“You were lucky if you came back and you got one photo in the paper,” he said at the lecture.

Tireless hours went into learning all the basics on their own. The Mercury News was very anti-multimedia at the time, so the photographers set out on a journey of their own. After presenting their mockup to the Web team, they, once again got a negative response. They were told that hosting their photo site on the newspaper’s server would “crash everything.”

For $9 a month out of the photo budget, they bought the server space from an outside company to host their work. The result was MercuryNewsPhoto.com — a site that housed photography and multimedia projects by the Merc staffers.

“This was not for glory, we never got anything for it. We did it all on our own time,” he said at the Berkeley seminar. They never promoted the site, but quickly started to see the number of pageviews go up. When the stats were high enough, the Mercury News agreed to start linking to some of the photographers’ work from the main site.

Two years after MercuryNewsPhoto.com launched, Koci Hernandez’s title was changed from “staff photojournalist” to “deputy director of multimedia, photo and video.” As of 2007, the site was getting 100,000 visitors a month — half the newspaper’s circulation.

“When I realized that the future of newspaper was an online model, I knew that photographers and their images — mixed with audio — was going to be a valuable way to inform the public and tell deeper stories,” Koci Hernandez said.

Newsroom to classroom

In August 2008, Koci Hernandez made the leap from the newsroom to the classroom. The National Photographer’s Press Associated reported in August that he left his deputy director of multimedia job at the San Jose Mercury News to accept a Ford Foundation multimedia fellowship at the UC Berkeley with a goal of developing digital news sites for under-served communities.

When asked if he made the switch to get out early before the journalism industry goes up in flames, Koci Hernandez said, “Kinda, but not really.” He’s a newspaper optimist and said he still believes in a strong future for journalism.

“I guess I have a naive vein in me,” he said. “But I thought I might actually be able to ‘save’ journalism or do something positive in my new role here at Berkeley, more than I could have by staying at a newspaper.”

He’s currently teaching the J200 class– intro to reporting — to help maintain community news sites through multimedia, audio, video and interactive production. The switch from newsroom to classroom has been easy.

“I was already teaching in the newsroom, so it was a seamless transition,” Koci Hernandez said. The best part, he admitted, was that students still see the world of journalism as a glass half full. But, he still misses the daily grind of newspapers and the rush of deadline.

Winning an Emmy

In reflecting on his journalism career so far, Koci Hernandez said his favorite and most famous work was a multimedia production he co-produced at the Mercury News before he left. Titled “Uprooted,” the video chronicles the story of two families as they were evicted from their mobile home park to make way for new development. The piece recently won him and former colleague Dai Sugano an Emmy. Even though it was created collaboratively, Koci Herandez said it’s his best work.

“Good things are done in groups,” he said. “No one is an island in this world of multimedia.”

HD video instead of DSLR

Koci Hernandez regularly attends conferences and gives lectures on the use of HD video instead of traditional still frame photography, a technique he’s switched to in recent years.

“I woke up one day about three years ago and had a personal epiphany,” he said. “It’s not about the tool, it’s about the image. It’s not about what brush I used to paint the picture, it’s about the picture.”

With that in mind, he left behind the world of DSLR and moved on to HD video.

“Video is just still photography on speed. It means I have the fastest motor drive around,” he said.

But his innovative epiphany hasn’t gone without resistance from traditional photographers.

“Everybody is afraid of change,” he said. “Mostly, people are afraid of picking up a tool they are not familiar with and failing to make great images right off the bat.”

He said the process of getting better is about failure, and that the experiences he’s most proud of are the times he picked up a camera and failed.

One the side

In his spare time, Koci Hernandez maintains a blog at MultimediaShooter.com which provides tips and tricks for producing multimedia. He also shares interesting productions there for inspiration to others. He enjoys spending time with his family and is currently building a real, working, old-fashioned photobooth with his daughter for her 11th birthday party.

The future of photoj

As for the future of photojournalism, Koci Hernandez said there will be fewer traditional opportunities, meaning fewer jobs with newspapers and magazines.

“We are living in the most visually stimulating culture that feeds off images of all kinds,” he said. “There will be opportunities around, but in areas we might not be used to entering or have yet to be created.”

He is convinced that the industry is at its most creative and innovative peak in history and that student journalists shouldn’t be discouraged.

“The industry has been preaching doom and gloom for years,” he said. When Koci Hernandez was in school a decade ago, people were telling him the same foreboding stories of a dying industry that many students are fearing now.

“If you want to tell stories bad enough . . . if you have the passion, you will get work, I promise,” he said.