Early in my career I was a print reporter for publications such as The Los Angeles Times, Copley Los Angeles Newspapers, and Variety. Then I was hired as a full-time faculty member in the Media Studies Department at Santa Monica College, where I am still working.

I love teaching journalism, but I also love doing journalism. Returning to the field recently to produce stories has helped me keep up with the ever-changing world of multimedia journalism.

I have been writing posts and producing videos for the the hyperlocal blog Santa Monica Next. Here’s a video I did about how the two children of Cambodian immigrants were transforming the Santa Monica donut shop started by their parents. I used my small Sony HD camera to shoot and edited in Final Cut.

More recently I am experimenting with mobile video production by using my iPhone 6 to shoot the videos. I picked up a lot of great tips at a two-day workshop put on by U.C. Berkeley’s Advanced Media Institute.

Here are a couple of the videos.

The Living History Tour at the Woodlawn Cemetery in Santa Monica

 

Santa Monica Airport Artwalk

A Back in the Newsroom Fellowship in 2015, when I was embedded at the Los Angeles Times for 10 weeks, was an incredible experience. I roamed from department to department, seeing firsthand how every aspect of a modern digital media company operated. I  created a blog to document the experience. I also reported as well. Here is one video I shot and edited on my phone while at the Times.

Here’s another one I made on a tight deadline on the morning after the church shootings in Charleston, South Carolina. For this one I used a small HD Sony camera and tripod to shoot the footage, and then edited it on my computer using Final Cut.

The Fellowship at the Times brought me full circle in that I had worked as a contract reporter in the San Francisco bureau of the paper when I first graduated from the Graduate School of Journalism at U.C. Berkeley. Here’s one story I wrote from that period about the escape and then recapture of two monkeys from the San Francisco Zoo. Later I returned to the Times as a contributor to the Arts section.

I was fortunate to travel to China in 2013 with several colleagues from Santa Monica College as part of the school’s global citizenship outreach program. I created several videos from this amazing experience. This one is more of a creative slideshow featuring images I took from Xi’an when we visited the incredible museum housing the Terracotta Warriors.