This blog is meant to record my life experiences, the things that make up my most trusted philosophy. Whether it’s a cosmic revelation, a great day or a lesson learned, it belongs here.
I am a rookie journalist. I recently graduated from the University of Florida. I spent half of my time there reporting and editing for the independent student newspaper, the Alligator. I worked myself to the bone and couldn’t get enough of university politics. A sign of things to come!
I left the Alligator for a string of internships in 2009, beginning as an intern at CongressDaily (now NJ Daily) as part of my acceptance to the Washington Center for Politics and Journalism program. I fell in love with political reporting in a way I never saw coming.
That summer I spent 10 days in Jordan, a country I never dreamed I would see, on a press trip and spent 10 weeks interning at The St. Augustine Record, the aggressive newspaper of record in the nation’s oldest city. I wrote many feature stories, several of which can be found here.
2010 marked the start of my ongoing adventure at the St. Petersburg Times. I worked the pre-dawn breaking news shift for seven months. Mostly I covered lethal fires and neighborhood murders — including that time I interviewed a talkative man about his neighbor’s death, just days before police accused him of stabbing his neighbor to death with a stage sword.
I finished school and went back to the Times, dateline TALLAHASSEE. Now I cover state politics and government, and I also write stories for Politifact.com/Florida. How’d I land such a gig? Well, there’s a bit of paperwork and phone-answering I have to do too. The benefits — learning from the best in the biz from my favorite paper in the state — are worth it.
I hope this blog will help me to stay in love with my craft when the going gets tough. I am learning by the day how to improve my research and interviewing techniques, I don’t want to lose my style, my flair — the variable that makes you read something I’ve written and without even seeing the byline, makes you say, “That’s a Katie Sanders story.”
Not knowing you very well anymore, I can still pick out certain quirks and wit that have long been apart of your writing since grade school (that have much advanced since then of course) that point to no one else but you. You’re doing obscenely well at developing your own style and I’m looking forward to reading more of your stuff!