Amy Senk shed light on the life of both a print and electronic journalist for Electronic Communication students at Cal State University Dominguez Hills late last month. A semi-accidental journalist turned stay-at-home mom turned CEO, Senk – founder of CoronaDelMarToday.com – did not mince words when it came to discussing how she ended up on the path of an electronic journalist.
“I majored in journalism because I thought it would be a good degree to have, it would look good on my resume, and I totally fell in love with it,” Senk told the class. After years of grinding out hard news stories, she got married, had a child, and essentially retired from journalism to pursue her new love in life – being a stay-at-home mom. “I did not miss [working in journalism] one bit,” she said.
However, Senk was soon thrown a curveball when her husband was diagnosed with stage four blood cancer and found herself at a crossroads. She had to decide what she would do if she were to become a widow and have the full responsibility of providing for the family completely on her own; she did not have to look too far either to find her inspiration – her next career move laid right outside her front door.
If the URL of her website was not a big enough clue, Senk is the founder, CEO, and webmaster of CoronaDelMarToday.com, which is essentially an online newspaper dedicated to Senk’s current city of residence, Corona Del Mar, California. On its homepage, the website is described as being “born out of the desire to bring daily journalism coverage to our community, which is small enough to be overlooked by bigger publications but interesting enough to need its own voice.” Senk, however, describes its inception in a bit more of a blunt manner.
After having a friend design the website, Senk put her years of journalism experience to use investigating all the unreported news that Corona Del Mar had to offer, slowly started acquiring advertising, and watched her site grow in popularity and readership. The city of Corona Del Mar itself has approximately 6,000 homes and “on a good day,” according to Senk, “I might get 1,000 hits.” However, even with her website becoming more popular and lucrative than she anticipated, Senk is still quite realistic with her expectations.
Senk also imparted some sage advice to the Dominguez Hills students listening – foremost of which was to continue down the path of electronic journalism since, as she sees it, print journalism should be a thing of the past. ” I think newspapers should be dead now,” Senk said matter-of-factly. “I think they’re here to stay but I don’t know why you’d want to kill a tree, give people 24-hour old news, deliver it to them with fossil fuel engines, and have [them] get ink on their hands. Online publishing is the way to go.”
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