Regina Garcia Cano
Regina García Cano didn’t always realize she would one day become a journalist.
While contributing to a children’s page for a newspaper in her hometown, Mexico City, at age 12, she learned about an opportunity to be part of a teen-run radio show. She hesitated — she wasn’t that interested in the program, or in the hourlong commute — and intentionally performed poorly in her audition. But she was selected to be part of the program anyway.
To her surprise, said García Cano, 21, a junior majoring in newspaper journalism at Kent State University in Ohio, the program increased her passion for journalism. While helping to produce a children’s program that explained the events of Sept. 11, 2001, she learned the importance of letting everyone — even children — know the facts surrounding difficult situations.
Before her work at the radio station, García Cano said, she had always been attracted to print journalism. As a child, she would religiously read the newspaper that her father brought home daily. If she didn’t have time to read it all, she would save it and read it later.
During her first three years at Kent State, she has worked at the student newspaper, the Daily Kent Stater, for four semesters. She has covered academics and minority affairs, and has been the campus editor. This coming semester, she will be news editor.
While interning at The Chautauquan Daily, a publication of the Chautauqua Institution, a vacation site in New York, García Cano covered visual arts. Mostly, she says, she enjoys working on enterprise stories.
“I like writing on deadline,” she said. “But when you devote more time to your stories they can turn out much better.”
García Cano said that ideally, she’ll get a journalism job in the United States after college, then eventually go back to Mexico to help improve journalism there.
In Mexico, she said, the press is “biased or afraid to get attacked” by violent gangs. So the media “doesn’t cover a lot.” She, for one, hopes to change that.
A version of this article appeared in print on page 12 of the Tucson 2010 edition of The New York Times Student Journalism Institute.