This month, I made a major life change: I started graduate school.
For the past three years, I've been working full time as a writer and editor, and occasionally freelancing. I decided to make the leap to go back to school because I found a new program that specializes in cutting-edge digital journalism, and I'm happy to say that I will be part of the inaugural class of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism's Social Journalism program.
What this means for me on the writing front is that I will now be freelancing. I already started writing for Fusion, and will hopefully start for one or two more outlets soon. If you would like me to write for you, please email me at rachel at riogringa dot com.
There's been a lot of chatter in the last few years about whether blogs are dead. And the reason I've kept up mine is because I am firmly in the "not dead" camp. I think that blogs are simply digital destinations, and as long as there is an audience for my work, I'm going to keep writing here.
The Washington Post's Chris Cillizza put it well:
"The idea of a blog — or blogging — that works is reported analysis told through a variety of textual and visual mediums. You could call them — as newspapers tend to do — "analysis" pieces and run them as articles. You could call them — as the graphics world does — data visualizations and run them as infographics. The bigger point is: It's journalism, on the Web. It doesn't matter what word you ascribe to it."
Over the past few years, given my work schedule, I have only had the time and energy to post about 2 to 4 times a month. I hope to be able to keep up a similar number of posts, but I have yet to see what my schedule will allow. In the meantime, please follow me on Twitter at @riogringa, where I share information on Brazil daily.
I'm incredibly grateful for the following I've built up over the seven and a half years I've been writing here, and I hope to continue for a long time to come. Through what I learn in my graduate program, I hope to improve what I'm already doing. So stay tuned.
Image: Logan Campbell/Flickr.
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