“I’m from the Northern Mariana Islands, which is a U.S. commonwealth in the Pacific Ocean near Guam. Rota is the island I was raised on. It has about 1,000 people on it now, and it’s about four miles wide and 12 miles long. I remember when I got into Cal, when I heard that there were 40,000 students, I was like, ‘Wow, that’s 40,000 islands.’
Rota doesn’t have a newspaper or reporter who lives there. It’s the reason I got involved in journalism in middle school. I remember writing my first piece in the sixth grade. I went to a very tense PTA meeting, where I passed out homemade business cards and interviewed people about complaints they had about the principal at the time. I wrote a story about it and published it on my own blog. People read it. A lot of people asked me when my next story was coming out. And I never stopped reporting.
I’ve probably produced a story every week since sixth grade. When I worked at the Saipan Tribune, I think I wrote about two to three stories per week. And for the Pacific News Center, I did about 70 broadcast stories for them, two-minute packages that I shot, produced and edited on my own