The past three days have been a rush, not just because of the amount of schoolwork (the semester’s coming to an end, finally!) but because a video I made over a month ago for a project somehow went viral. It went on New York magazine, the Gothamist (twice, even), Buzzfeed, and the front page of AOL, among others. I’m amazed by how much buzz it got; New York Post did a follow-up article on Tracks, the 25-year-old candy seller who was the subject of the video, and did a short interview with me in the video that accompanied their article.

It’s interesting to be on the other side of the fence in terms of press coverage; I’ve seen bad examples of aggregation on sites that failed to credit me for the video and simply put screen shots, such as The Daily Mail. But then again, I’m not surprised. I also saw how the press tends to milk the most they could out of a story like that. I also encountered journalists who put extreme pressure on me to give them the number of my source so they could meet a deadline, and got very sulky when I couldn’t respond right away or gave it to their competitors first. I couldn’t exactly explain to an impatient journalist that no, I couldn’t get out of my media law class to talk. I hope to not repeat their mistakes when I’m working again.

At the same time, I couldn’t help but hope that my video could help me score a good internship (or job, why not) after grad school. I’m really excited to dive into more multimedia storytelling next semester; that video I did with Tracks was actually the first one I produced on my own, so I got very, very lucky. Being in the J-School is such a rich learning experience, I’m almost afraid for it to end.