"Suzanne
Yada
portfolio
news report opinion ing writing design
Suzanne
Yada
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx • San Jose, CA 95116 • xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx • suzanneyada@gmail.com
Objective
Pages I designed:
To gain full-time summer employment or part-time employment during the school year that will allow me to expand on my experience in editing, writing, design and planning while focusing on my studies at San Jose State University.
Work Experience
Copy editor 1/2009 - Present SHiFT Magazine, San Jose, CA Editing and assisting with design for a startup magazine that will be sent to business leaders in the Silicon Valley with an interest in social responsibility. Intern/Social media strategist 10/2008 - Present The Public Press, San Francisco, CA Drafted a social media strategy for the startup nonprofit news organization and am directing implementation. Helped with design and marketing for events. Assisted with grant writing and strategic planning. Working with business students to develop business model. Editor 4/2008 - 1/2009 Visalia Times-Delta, Visalia, CA Built a supplemental targeted publication for Visalia’s daily newspaper on downtowns in Tulare County. Wrote, designed and coordinated photos for the quarterly tab insert. Radio host/marketing coordinator 10/2007 - 4/2008 KFSC-LP 94.1 FM, Visalia, CA Hosted, produced, edited and scripted weekly radio show about the U.K. culture. Recorded interviews over Skype and edited in Adobe Audition. Also set up social networking Web site and helped nonprofit radio station promote itself, raise funds and organize events. Copy editor 5/2004 - 12/2007 Visalia Times-Delta, Visalia, CA Helped proofread, select stories, edit, write headlines and lay out pages for Visalia’s daily newspaper. Designed broadsheet pages, section fronts and A1. Uploaded paper to web and managed web comments. Shot and edited weekly videocast for two months. * I took 8 months off in 2005 to work abroad in a cafe in Nottingham, England. Editor in chief 4/2004 - 1/2005 Fusion Multimedia, Visalia, CA Editor in chief for local youth magazine, published every two months. Controlled content and design, managed staff, edited and proofed submissions, coordinated writers and photographers. Met with 10-20 teens to brainstorm and direct stories. Editor in chief 8/2002 - 5/2004 College of the Sequoias, Visalia, CA Editor in chief for weekly newspaper at College of the Sequoias. Managed staff, developed workflow, designed front page and news sections, assigned and edited stories. Customer service / Proofreader / Graphics pre-press operator 6/1999 - 8/2002 Premier Color Graphics, Visalia, CA Proofread graphic designers’ work to customer specifications. Promoted to pre-press operator; took graphics and output them for press. Learned color separation and traps, press specifications, software and pagination.
Education
San Jose State University, San Jose, CA • 1/2008 - 05/2010 (expected graduation) B.S. in Magazine Journalism, minor in Business • Cumulative GPA: 3.75 College of the Sequoias, Visalia, CA • 8/2002 - 5/2004 A.A. in Journalism • Cumulative GPA: 3.65
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Skills
InDesign • QuarkXpress • Illustrator • Photoshop • Audition • FinalCut Pro • Audacity • Social media • Saxotech/Publicus • NewsEditPro • HTML • RSS • Typing: 55-65 wpm
Suzanne
Yada
news design
Suzanne
Yada
report ing re
eporting
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MorMon v. LDS
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10 girls, a guy and
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he Applied engineering meeTing is hAlfwAy done, And someone Asks, “CAn Anyone volunTeer This weekend?”
Adam Worsham flips open his MacBook and pokes at his iCal, already stuffed with opera rehearsals, tutoring, voice lessons, babysitting and 12 units of classes going towards his mechanical engineering major. Oh, and a peppering of items labeled “church.” Just then, a young woman in San José State University’s Vagina Monologues interrupts the meeting to sell vagina-shaped candies. “Heaven help us the day they sell penis pops,” a student sniggers after the volunteer leaves. Soon everyone is laughing except Worsham. But the 26-year-old is not being holier-than-thou he just happily waits for the meeting to get back on track. Worsham is a fresh convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). And with this religion’s focus on modesty — even spaghetti straps are discouraged — you would expect a more offended response. But Worsham lets it slide. “It doesn’t really bother me,” he says. “I’ve been a member for four years. I know that stuff comes up. But it’s difficult because it really is something that’s special, personal and private. It’s not necessarily my religious beliefs, I’ve just always felt that way about it.” Worsham did not grow up in a religious household, he says, but he’s always been spiritual, so the transition into the LDS church was easy for him. “About the most difficult thing I had to give up was my chai tea lattes,” he says.
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hurch members are expected to refrain from alcohol, premarital sex, drugs, tobacco, immodest clothing, swearing, tattoos, multiple piercings and — seriously, coffee and tea? “The Word of Wisdom tells us not to take any substances that would cause addiction to our body,” says biochemistry student and lifelong LDS member Amory Baker, 25, referring to a set of health guidelines church founder Joseph Smith wrote in 1833. Although Mormon is a common nickname for the church, it’s not preferred. “We don’t really like calling it Mormon because there’s a lot of groups associated as being Mormon,” Worsham says. He says his nephew once mistook his church for the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a sect whose polygamous
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compound was raided in April. The mainstream Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints does not allow plural marriages. Many of its members consider that to be the most common misconception about their faith. The second? That they aren’t Christians, they say. “It’s because we don’t have crosses,” says Baker. “For them the cross is a symbol of their Christian beliefs... For us, our symbol that we are Christians is the lives of the members.” Baker, Worsham and about 40 to 50 other LDS members hang out at the San Jose Institute of Religion, a tidy building a few doors north of campus at 66 South Seventh Street. Religious classes and events happen here, as well as a Sunday service for a young single adult congregation, or “ward,” as they are called. That’s how Worsham found out about the church. He was invited to attend a singles’ ward near De Anza College, but things didn’t go as planned. “The singles’ ward kind of felt like a meat market, and I didn’t think religion was about that,” he said. “I didn’t like it. I thought [the church] was something that I didn’t need right now, but then I met Lizzy.”
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singing and theater passions, guided him to his own understanding of Joseph Smith. “That’s something I wouldn’t have been able to strongly say a year after I’ve been a member,” he says. “I would have said, ‘I don’t really know how that all works out.’”
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n addition to the Bible, the church teaches that the Book of Mormon is another God-given scripture, in which Jesus Christ appeared to the Native Americans after he died in Jerusalem. Latter-day Saints believe Joseph Smith translated the book in 1827 when he was 21.
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lizabeth Hatch was preparing to leave as a missionary to Thailand when the two met. He was asked to sing at a private school graduation; she was asked to play piano. They found they had a lot in common, but three months later Elizabeth had to leave for her mission. Adam wrote her “these beautifully written little letters” every week for the year-and-a-half she was away. Adam attended church with Elizabeth’s family while she was in Thailand and was impressed with the people who “did everything they could to set their lives on the right path,” he says. “I never actively tried to convert him to my religion, it just happened that way,” Elizabeth says, whose last name is now Worsham.
Mark Thomas, a 58-year-old software engineer and the president and co-founder of the Atheists of Silicon Valley, says that is “just preposterous.” “Joseph Smith had all sorts of strange stories,” Thomas says. “He reportedly found these gold-gilded pages, he hid behind a curtain and had another person translate while he looked into a hat to see the words, and it came out with some strange mixture of modern and an Old Testament style of writing.” Worsham admits Joseph Smith’s story was hard to swallow at first. But it was divine intervention, he says, that led him towards joining. “When I read the Book of Mormon and heard the story of Joseph Smith, I was asking God if it was all true. I received an answer that was just, ‘Follow me.’” Worsham pauses. “That was the most comforting and powerful feeling I had ever had,” he says. “It was as if I’ve been given the biggest hug of my life.” Just two years after joining the church, Worsham found himself playing Joseph Smith in a larger-than-life pageant about the very stories he was questioning. The pageant, up until its discontinuation last year, took place annually at the Oakland Temple. Worsham’s experience there, using his
homas strongly disagrees with the church’s claims. “[The Book of Mormon] told the story of some tribe of Israel who came to America and became the Native Americans,” says Thomas, a webmaster for godlessgeeks.com. “Of course it’s not supported at all by genetics, which shows very clearly that Native Americans were originally Asians.” Whether Mormonism is a cult or a Christian church doesn’t make much difference to Thomas – it’s “all lies,” he says. “Mormons are nice people, but they’re innocently sweet,” Thomas says. “Religion can do that protect people from the real world and keep them relatively childlike.”
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orsham says he purposefully avoids keeping a blind, childlike faith and actively questions his beliefs. “One of my favorite things about being a convert is that I can play dumb and I could ask any question I wanted,” he says. “That’s really opened a lot of doors to understanding and allowed me to love what I believe and objectively challenge what I believe on a daily basis.” He says the church has blessed his life in numerous ways. “I really found that I have a specific purpose here, that I’m not just some arbitrary number here on Earth,” Worsham says. “It’s your obligation to become the best person that you can, to become a pillar in the society and to help people.” And it is that belief that allowed him to search through his cluttered iCal until he finally had a spot for the oftenunanswered question, “Can anyone volunteer this weekend?” A
After 3 years, Kelly Hauert returns to head downtown Visalians group
Ask Kelly Hauert about her vision for downtown Visalia. Go ahead. Ask. She’ll tell you straight up that she doesn’t have one, doesn’t need one and will never need one. Fine for the rest of us to say, but coming from the freshly hired CEO of the Downtown Visalians and Alliance? The city must be doomed. “Downtown belongs to the community, not me,” Hauert says pointedly. “If it’s my vision and my plan, what do I need the board of directors and the community for?” Hauert speaks with an energy that bubbles over to everyone within earshot of her office, which is plunked in the center of Church Street and certainly within earshot of a swarm of people. Her vigor is contagious, and Hauert fully realizes the effect. “A lot of the time I go to work in downtown revitalization, I’ve been asked to because of my energy. It creates excitement with people who are already excited,” she says. Perhaps there’s a reason the people in Visalia were already jazzed – it could have been left over from Hauert’s previous stint as the executive director of the alliance from 1997 to 2005. She and Visalia parted on friendly terms. “I didn’t leave because there was anything wrong or bad, it’s just after I’ve been here for seven years, it was time for someone else to come in with fresh eyes.” But Hauert didn’t know that in three years’ time, those fresh eyes would be her own. “So I was in Arizona, minding my own business, and I get this call,” she says with a laugh. It was the Downtown Visalians and Alliance on the other line. Jan Minami had recently resigned her executive director position, and now the alliance was looking for a chief executive officer to fill her spot. Hauert felt honored Visalia thought of her. “I’m excited to be back and get that phone call, it’s the highest compliment,” says Hauert, who took the position Aug. 15. “I’m walking into a very, very committed group of community members. All they were looking for was organization management and a few more ideas.” A couple of ideas Hauert has been kicking around with the groups involve strategies on Funding growth By Suzanne yada Editor, Explore Central Valley Downtowns pumping new life into an anemic economy. “Business owners say the economy will go back up. Property will go back up too. But what we’re going to do is make that happen a lot faster,” she says. “We can do nothing if it will happen, but our job is to create. We’re going to be an economic machine.” An important tool for keeping the downtown machine churning is known as the Property and Business Improvement District, which collects cash from downtown property owners for maintaining buildings and developing infrastructure. Every year the PBID raised $425,000 for things such as business development, administration, safety programs and cleaning, Hauert says. But there’s a sunset clause built in with every PBID, giving a specific timeline for the funds to be collected and used. “This [current] district will be up in 2 years,” Hauert says. “We’re in the midst of getting ready to go in front of the property owners to see if they want another district.” The “creative class”
emphasizes that it’s not up to her to concoct a plan for the youth of Visalia. She’d rather hear it in their own words. “It’s not going to be enough for 40-, 50-, 60-year old people to decide what will be good for them,” Hauert says. “It’s going to be incumbent upon us to engage people in their teens, 20s and 30s to tell us how to create the downtown they will incorporate. If we’re going to sit around and do what us old people think, we’re not going to hit the mark.” What’s changed in three years?
PBIDs are not the only tool Hauert plans on using to keep downtown thriving. The secret to a long-lasting downtown district, Hauert says, is working with the younger “creative class,” a term coined by Dr. Richard Florida to describe a type of knowledge worker whose creative skills are an economic boon. Hauert says the creative class is asking for things like walkable, eco-friendly environments where they can live, work, play and shop in the same neighborhood. And catering to the creative class has broad support in the downtown community. “Whenever I mention it to people [in Visalia], I was expecting a big question mark from them. But instead I see a lot of nodding heads,” Hauert says. “They get it.” The younger generations bring new challenges and demands, Hauert says, and it’s important to figure out new ways to lure them out of their rooms. “Shopping for the creative class means you can sit in your jammies and order anything you want anywhere in the world. So what’s going to excite people and get them downtown?” she asks. Plenty of hypotheses abound, and Hauert rattles off a few: Networking opportunities, social opportunities, participating in the local community, even exercise. But she
Though Hauert hasn’t been gone long, plenty has changed. Her first days on the job have been spent trying to familiarize herself with all the new businesses and owners downtown, and getting reacquainted with the duties of her job. “What I was really afraid of is that when I came back, people would expect that I would pick it up just like that, and it takes time,” Hauert says. “There’s just so much that needs to be done, but everyone’s been wonderful and understanding.” She even ran across some changes downtown she never thought would happen. “That Plunkett Coin Co. clock? I’d bet five thousand dollars that clock would never be fixed. And to my surprise, it works! And the storefront had been refurbished,” she says excitedly. But some things remain the same. “It’s hard for me to walk down the street – I know a lot of the people here,” she says. “I once went down the street to visit one merchant, and I didn’t get back to the office for two hours. And out of it came a prospect for a new business.” With someone so entrenched in the downtown scene, how does Hauert spend her time away from work? “I play golf, I hang out with my dog, and then I come back downtown,” she says. “I like it here, it’s a fun place.” There’s one marked difference from her former home in Kingman, Ariz. “I’m finally going to have some good food,” she says, laughing. This article was published Sept. 12, 2008, in Explore Central Valley Downtowns, a quarterly publication inserted into the Visalia Times-Delta.
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Live music pumps life — and funds — into Central Valley downtown areas
In a tough economy, live music does not go away – it just plays smarter. Throwing a concert doesn’t seem like the best thing to do in tight financial times, but live music is one way to give an electrifying jolt to the economy, and downtown areas are a perfect venue, local promoters say. “When we have a concert, we bring in people from out of town,” says Dan Humason, a promoter at the Hanford Fox Theatre. “At night when downtowns are usually dark, we turn on our neon signs and crank up the theater. It gets new people who’ve never been to downtown.” Humason says some of his bigger acts, such as George Strait, Wynonna and Gordon Lightfoot, bring in people from all over the state, pumping outside dollars into nearby restaurants and bars before and after the show. Aaron Gomes, a Visalia promoter, sees the same thing. He frequently books nationally recognized bands that draw in plenty of outof-towners. “They’re having dinner, they’re shopping, they’re going out of their way to go to Visalia,” Gomes says. “It really lures people from all over the place, even people from San Diego, and it turns Visalia into a hot spot for music and making it a hip community.” That reputation, Gomes says, adds tremendous value beyond the immediate financial impact. He’s even seen it reverse some of the “brain drain” – the tendency of collegeeducated residents to move away from the Central Valley and never look back. “I personally know about four or five people who moved back to Visalia because of the culture here,” he says. “It’s partly because of [the bands] but partly because the community itself is invested in music and the arts. They’re spending the money to be there, and we’re able to pay for the bigger names because attendance is great.” The city of Lindsay is beginning to fully appreciate the value of live music and entertainment. The McDermont Field House, a warehouse-turned-entertainment-complex that is owned and managed by the city, has just begun offering live concerts, including one for Mexican singer Pepe Aguilar on Sept. 13. “This would be our fourth big concert Smaller communities tap in By Suzanne yada Editor, Explore Central Valley Downtowns we’ve had,” says Gary Tomlinson, who handles marketing and promotions for the McDermont Field House. ..."
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