What are your motivations in becoming a journalist?

As a child, I loved to read anything and everything I could get my hands on.  My mom taught me to read when I was about four years old and I can still remember the very first book I read all on my own. It was a Dr. Seuss book that was probably only about 10 pages, but that memory and the feeling I had is still very lucid.  As I've grown older, my love for reading has never vanished, although the pressures of life do make it much more difficult to find the time to read.  Now, much of what I read is the news or  other various articles online, but that early love of reading taught me how to be inspired by what I encountered.

One day, a couple years ago, I was reading Reader's Digest and came upon an article about a huge Hollywood producer who gave that life style up to go build homes and schools for underprivileged children in Cambodia.  For some reason, inexplicable to myself even now, it gave me the inescapable desire to, not only accomplish something like this, but to find others like this man who were doing incredibly inspiring things, and write about them.  Since that day, I've cut out or printed dozens and dozens of articles or pictures of anything that inspires me or explains something really well.  As I look through this amalgam every once in awhile, I'm filled with a desire to tell these stories, and maybe even invent a few of my own.

Scott Neeson and the children in Cambodia 

In our book, The Elements of Journalism, they once described journalism as "storytelling with a point." I've always admired people who were pragmatic and straightforward, but I also always valued imagination.  To me, journalism can be a perfect blend of these two things.  I know I will face many obstacles before I might write about what I wish, but I also know, any struggle will be worth it.