Meet a Pro: Eric Deggans

Eric Deggans is the lucky man of the hour. I'm at a supposedly intimate meeting with this certain pro, although with all the ANNOYING BACKGROUND NOISE it doesn't feel very intimate to me. I can barely hear him; it's not bad to be soft-spoken, except in places like this.

Apparently he wrote for a music magazine, so I asked him about how I would break into the video game magazine industry. He told me to start online with a blog and work my way up. MAN, everyone is pushing blogs today! I think when I get home I'll update mine.

Deggans talked about the difference between magazine-writing and newspaper-writing. Interesting, and kind of informative... I would still much rather write for a magazine, so my mind hasn't really been changed. Actually, it's just been reinforced.

I really like that Deggans made an effort to go around the table and have us all talk about where we are in journalism right now, and what we want to do in the future. That made it feel a lot more intimate, despite the background noise, which was as prevalent as ever.

I, of course, managed to speak about myself as little as possible. Yeah, I write for my school newspaper. Yeah, I kind of hate it. Yeah, I think the stories are boring. My interests in video games and anime are too specific? Yeah, that sounds about right.

Deggans said to try and 'jazz up' my stories; if I think they're boring, make them not boring. I don't get why everyone says that like it's nothing; it's really not that easy. Some things are just boring to me. I figure if I can't cut it in the world of high school journalism while writing stories on subjects I think are snooze-worthy, then how would I ever make it in the world of REAL journalism? This is why I don't want to write for a newspaper, but a magazine. Magazine writing is so much easier because it's much more fun. There are many rules in place for newspaper writing that make it impossible for me to make mundane subjects fun.

Still, I appreciate the sentiment. It's just more motivation to work hard to get a good job writing for a good magazine, like EGM or GamePro. I really don't want to have to write for a real newspaper. I don't know if I ever could.