tjdegroat dot com

Wanderlust

tjdegroat — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 20:41:07 +0000

About three years ago the travel bug bit me — hard. Since then I’ve made it to Mexico at least once a year, including a rewarding nine-week trip in early 2009, to Spain twice and, earlier this year, to Argentina (with a quick jump across the río de la plata to Montevideo, Uruguay).

This passion for travel reflects my continued desire to master Spanish (Italy, Ireland: I’d love to meet you in person, but no se habla español). It also has pushed travel-related writing to the top of my journalistic career ambitions. As a freelancer, I’m solely focusing on stories about my travels right now and am excited to finally have published a trio of articles based on my experience in Mexico City. One is a first-person narrative about my time in the fabulous Condesa neighborhood, another shares my favorite food finds and the third offers tips I learned while taking Spanish classes. Check them out on the updated clips page.

Filed under: Journalism

A Decade of Blogging

tjdegroat — Sat, 27 Mar 2010 06:51:05 +0000

This site was born in the spring of 2001, when I traded College Ave. in New Brunswick, N.J., for College Ave. in Oakland in an attempt to fast-track my journalism career. But my blogging effort actually began a year earlier, with a site I’ve tried to keep completely separate from this one, with mixed success. Why bother, especially when Google is such an unforgiving gossip? I guess I figured it was better to have a personal blog that did not in any way ‘taint’ my professional site, but it’s become increasingly bizarre to maintain the wall between the two. It’s been like having two close friends who, despite being in my life for 10 years, never have met.

Well, tjdegroat.com, meet vignette.org, once an old-school blog I updated as many as a dozen times a day (a la Twitter) and now a place where I occasionally share personal videos and photos but more often stick to discussing travel (next up: 5 weeks in Buenos Aires) and language learning. I’ve often thought about shutting down that space and moving everything over here, but for now I plan to stick with the distinct properties … although now we all can hang out together.

In other news, I recently spoke to friend Matt Baume about freelancing and I’ve been spending more time putting together posts for the Digg blogs, which you can check out here.

Filed under: Me

A New Beginning

tjdegroat — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 00:42:23 +0000

This site began in 2001, when I was preparing to leave Rutgers a year early to try my luck as a full-time writer based in the Bay Area. I was sitting in a computer lab in the journalism building when I laid the foundation of the site, which received only one major upgrade between then and now (my 2003 drive to freelance full-time was aided by Ben Jenkins‘ lovely, clean and simple design).

Finally, after stumbling upon a WordPress-themed blog (randomly run by the owner of a Spanish-language school in Minnesota), I’m ready to reinvest some time into this site. The goal is to create a space for occasionally showcasing professional projects and for providing a base for the myriad links that make up my increasingly expanding online footprint.

Posted in Me