Building a soapbox

Ever since I was a kid, I enjoyed reading reviews. After the Sunday comics, my favorite section of the newspaper was the entertainment section, the one that reviewed all the new movies coming out that weekend. Every Friday I'd sit there and read every one, even for the movies I had no intention on seeing. It wasn't just the newspaper either; whenever an Entertainment Weekly or a TV Guide found its way into our house I'd spend a lot of time thumbing through the pages. I guess I always found the reaction that a piece of art can provoke to be as fascinating as the art itself.

There was always a part of me that envisioned that being a critic would be a fun job. I had written a few reviews of various things as extra credit projects, and while I don't mean to sound conceited, I think my writing was pretty good. (For those of you not born in the 1980s, "don't mean to sound conceited" is indeed a reference to the Baby-Sitters Club.)

But there were two main reasons that I never pursued journalism as a career. One is because I know that writing professionally is not nearly as glamorous as it seems. Heck, it's already taken me several attempts to write this introductory blog post. The other reason is because I knew that it wasn't the easiest field to get a job in. At least, not the kind of job I envisioned.

But things have changed over the years. Thanks to a little thing called the internet, you don't have to work for a newspaper or a magazine in order to have your voice heard. If you want a platform for your thoughts, all you have to do is build one yourself.

So here we go. Let's see if this lasts.