Still in school.
Educator. Journalist. Author. Speaker. Student-media adviser. Pop-culture nerd. Lifelong learner. Still asking the question that makes certainty sweat: How do you know?
The Deadline Plate: a YA time-travel mystery about student journalists is Book One of The Chronicle Keepers. Four young reporters land in 1887 New York, where Nellie Bly’s reporting and the historical record are at risk.
Not a résumé. A set of lenses.
The job titles matter because each one changed the way I understand stories and audiences. Journalism made context impossible to ignore. Photography made the edge of the frame visible. Broadcasting made timing and sequencing part of meaning. Technology kept changing the shape of what could be told. Teaching made the audience impossible to abstract.
Before the classroom, the path ran through entertainment media, MTV/SonicNet, Disney, communications, photography, early internet culture, and educational technology. The rooms changed. The question did not: What is this story asking the audience to notice, believe, feel, or forget?
“With news literacy, young people are able to use their rights and advocate for their interests more effectively. That is why I support Eric’s work.”
Mary Beth Tinker
Student free-expression advocate
Start wherever you are curious.
Each thread answers the same two questions: How did this shape the way I tell stories? What did it teach me about the way people receive them?
Forever Learning
Why journalism education requires being comfortable saying, “I need to learn this too.”
Superheroes Welcome
How comics, Star Wars, Disney, music, movies, and memes teach story grammar before we call it media literacy.
Follow the Story
How environments, signs, attractions, brands, and ordinary public spaces quietly direct attention and meaning.
The Medium Keeps Moving
Every new platform changes distribution, audience behavior, credibility cues, and the kind of story that gets told.
Facts Need Context
Selection, verification, framing, and presentation are not decorations around facts. They are part of meaning.
Inside and Outside the Frame
What a camera includes, excludes, sequences, scores, and emphasizes changes what an audience experiences.
Same Story. Different Rooms.
What MTV/SonicNet, Disney, music, and a turn on NBC’s Weakest Link taught me about platforms, production, and audience expectation.
Where those lenses meet.
Everything I Told You Was True and the WATER Check grew out of the same realization: a story can use true material and still produce a false understanding.
Better questions, not automatic distrust.
Media literacy should make people more capable of investigating claims, not merely more suspicious of everything around them.