Not Your Average Joe

According to Joe Donnelly, the value of journalism is “sort of no less than guardians of democracy.” Donnelly, now a professor at Whittier College, had what you could call a rocky start. After getting his degree from college, he entered “the real world” as parents like to refer to it as, and moved to Colorado. He saw himself “getting sucked into a rat race conventional world,” unable to figure out what he wanted to do. Sound familiar? So, he chose bartending. Eventually, his calling came to him through a group of local newspaper employees that came to drink at his bar after work. He always knew he was interested in writing, and started working for them soon after.

Now, I don’t know that much about journalism professors, but Joe’s done it all. He’s metaphorically dipped his toes into a wide variety of categories. He started out as a social justice journalist, and made his way to his current specialty- general journalism. But, because I know how interested you are in this, here’s a short list of everything he’s tried on for size:

• pop culture
• investigative
• advocative journalism
• police reporting
• feature reporting
• profile writing
• narrative journalism
• pretty much everything

Joe Donnelly believes that environmental journalism is the basis for everything, going as far as to call it the “life and death story.” In case you were asking this in your head here’s the answer: yes, Donnelly gotten in trouble his fair share of times for his investigative ways. He got kicked out of Santa Barbara because he attempted exposing an oil company’s offshore drilling scandal. If that didn’t surprise you, he also received death threats from white supremacists in Idaho! Yeah, you hard me right. Or read me right? Right?

Another key element, according to Joe, of journalism is curiosity. I believe it was Albert Einstein that said, “the important thing is to no stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing.” So yeah, you could compare Joe to Einstein. There are some similarities. If it weren’t for his relentless inquisitiveness he wouldn’t have had the opportunity to interview Ray Charles! Again, yeah… you read me right.

Now he’s settled down a bit more. He worked at Whittier’s rival school, Occidental College, as a guest teacher for three years. Coming to his wits, he joined the poet community and teacher journalism and the freshmen writing seminar.

If you’re interested and want to learn more about “Not-Your-Average-Joe” Joe, you can check out his works such as Slate, and missionandstate.org. Or you can join the 21st century and google him.