A couple of weeks ago a group of The Wrangler staff went to the JEA/NSPA Journalism convention in Dallas. In between workshops where we learned about different aspects and techniques in Journalism we tried to get to know the people who came and where they were from; and while a majority were from Texas we did manage to speak to people from different parts of the States.

Jacob Kemp, who came all the way from Chicago, Illinois was a cool dude looking to improve himself and his school’s newspaper. As the manager of all of his newspaper’s social media, he had to take both news and social media classes. Our interview with him was cut a little short since he had to connect back up with his staff, but he left us with the reason why he decided to come, “We spent a lot of time with our staff in school so it’s nice to actually know them, so its like a really cool bonding opportunity I’ve never been to Texas before it seemed like a really cool event and I wanted to be a part of it.”

As our conversation with Kemp came to a close and we started to look elsewhere for interesting people we found Megan, and while we didn’t happen to get her last name she provided us with a lot of great information about why she decided to come.

Megan, a copy editor for her newspaper, is from the Austin area and is at the conference with her staff to improve themselves so that they could better represent their school. She was looking forward to being critiqued by some professionals and liked the workshops going on at the convention. Personally, she wanted to come because of the new experiences possible at a national convention compared to the state conventions she had previously been to and as long as prices stay low enough Megan plans on going to more in the future.

Madison Gomez straight out of Indianapolis, Indiana came to ready herself for a career in entertainment journalism. When she joined her school news in her Sophomore year she quickly became engrossed with it. Getting to travel and learning new techniques to help her in writing for her paper made it easy for Gomez to come to Dallas.

These are only a few of the many people we got to meet and interact with in Dallas yet they all reflect the variety of people in everyday life. Everyone has their own story and they choose how to tell it to the world; Jacob, Megan, and Madison all are very different but are brought together by a love for journalism.