About
Short version:
Daniel Victor, 25, is a community host for TBD, a yet-to-be-launched website that’ll cover local news and sports in Washington, D.C. He most recently spent four years as a reporter for The (Harrisburg, Pa.) Patriot-News. Before that, he wrote for the Centre Daily Times while attending Penn State, and also enjoyed a summer internship at The Wichita (Kan.) Eagle.
He does not take himself too seriously, so writing in the third person feels very strange to him.
Longer version:
It all started with a cute girl in his ninth-grade journalism class.
He had zero interest in the class. He did have interest in her, though. So when she begged him to join her on the newspaper staff the following year, he had no choice but to follow.
They eventually had a one-week romance, ending with her dumping him for his best friend, but he forgave her. Because of her he had discovered, quite by accident, his apparent calling to the world of journalism.
He eventually became editor in chief of the Lions’ Digest, which was named the Most Outstanding High School Newspaper for 2002 by the American Scholastic Press Association.
Once he got to Penn State, he begged for as many writing assignments as the Centre Daily Times would be willing to give him. His work there included a summer internship, a few years as a reporter/columnist for a youth-centered publication, and one semester as a three-days-a-week staff writer.
But it was his summer internship at The Patriot-News after his sophomore year that allowed him to eventually fool his editors into hiring him after graduation in 2006. For 2.5 years he covered the Hershey area, an experience highlighted by the creation of a Ning network for his beat as part of Jay Rosen’s beatblogging.org project. He also covered Pennsylvania’s role in the Obama campaign, during which Howard Dean told him that he “look(ed) like a blogger.”
His favorite story is one he refused to write. He’s eager to experiment, as he did with Central PA NewsVote. With this blog, he seeks to offer real-life, actually-doing-it, not-just-talking-about-it examples of how reporters can be using the Web to find stories and make stories better.