About
“Jack of all trades, master of none is usually better than a master of one.”
This is the personal blog for Geoffrey Hing. I’m currently a Masters of Science in Journalism candidate at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. I was able to go to school because of a Knight Foundation-funded scholarship for programmer-journalists. I play music in the band Defiance, Ohio (and have played in Disaster and Pretty Hot) and live in Chicago.
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I am from
As I make more media that could be called journalism I feel that I need to avoid what media scholar Jay Rosen calls the view from nowhere. This is especially true since the music that I make and my past work in activism and advocacy definitely comes with a points of view and goals. I’m consistently frustrated by political labels, especially ones that sit on a continuum of left to right. The label radical as defined by Ella Baker, “getting down to and understanding the root cause”, is one description of consciousness and political action that still resonates with me:
I use the term “radical” in its orginal meaning – getting down to and understanding the root cause. It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.
That is easier said than done. But one of the things that has to be faced is, in the process of wanting to change that system, how much have we got to do to find out who we are, where we have come from and where we are going … I am saying, as you must say too, that in order to see where we are going, we not only must remember where we have been, but must understand where we have been.”
-Ella Baker, 1969
