Entertainment Writers: My morning with my new heroes.

This morning I attended a Mass Comm. week event dealing with entertainment reporting. It was very informative and interesting to me, seeing as how this may very well be the field I want to go into. I’ve been writing for the University Star’s Trends section for going on a year and a half, so to get to talk to the writers that spoke was invaluable.

The panel consisted of three speakers, Gilbert Garcia, of the San Antonio Current; Dave Glessner, a freelance writer; and Hector Saldaña, of the San Antonio Express-News. Hearing from three different people, from three different backgrounds, writing for three different types of publications made this panel very diverse in discussion.

Saldaña started the discussion by telling the audience about how he got started doing entertainment writing, which was writing for the live music and comedy beats. If I could do something like that, that would be amazing. Live music and stand-up comedy are two of my favorite things in the world.

Glessner, who is actually a SWT grad (class of ’92), spoke about how he wrote as a side job, freelancing whenever possible. He stated that on very rare occasions can an individual make a good living from freelance writing alone.

Garcia, of the Current told the audience about writing for a weekly publication and writing more controversial articles. He said he once wrote an obituary for President Bush set years in the future speaking highly of Bush as everyone else was about Reagan at the time (this was around the time of President Reagan’s highly publicized death).

They then all shared their experiences about angry mail they had received for criticizing musical acts, or fictional obituaries. They also shared stories of proud moments and memorable interviews with famous people.

This event has reaffirmed that this is something I am genuinely interested in. And as I learned this morning, can be an fun, but will always be interesting.