I was born in 1979 to a Thai mother and a Willie Nelson clone.

The 80s happened, I grew up and then tried to sort things out.

In May 2008 I graduated from the University of Central Florida with a B.A. in Journalism (and a minor in Political Science), something I’d wanted to do for a very long time. It took a while to get there, but I am proud to say I earned every bit of it.

Before embarking on a career in journalism I’d washed dishes, been a fish monger, sold clothes in a department store, carried mountains of luggage for Disney Cruise Lines, slung drinks to pie-eyed gamblers on a casino boat, spent a stint as a semi-professional dancer at a night club, sold books, pedaled a bike cab, fixed computers, and handled transactions and system updates for a $300M asset community bank.

In 2004 I took a pilgrimage with my mother back to Thailand and lived in a village ten hours away from Bangkok for three weeks. I ate strange foods, talked with relatives in halting English accompanied by my own form of hand signals and saw ancient Thai ruins. It was an eye-opening experience that changed the way I view the world. Basically, we’ve got it pretty good here.

From November 2007 to July 2008 I worked as an online producer for the Orlando Sentinel in Orlando, Fla. It was there that I learned first-hand how the online world and the journalism world unite, for both good and ill. I learned a lot at this job and from the wonderful team that ran OS.com.

In June of 2008 I accepted a position in the gorgeous city of St. Paul, Minn., as an Associate Editor for Online News with Minnesota Public Radio, the nation’s second-largest producer and distributor of public radio programs.

I have always been interested in creative writing and journalism, even since high school. I wrote a prize-winning short story in the second grade and was an editor at my high school newspaper. This interest developed into a fierce blog addiction in 2003 after being introduced to Livejournal through a friend. 3,000+ posts, and three blogs later, here I am, still on the Internets.

The birth of the online journalism world has allowed me to combine these interests into a career path that I never thought possible. I want to explore this new and emerging medium and understand how journalists, that most noble profession, can properly use these tools and technology in order to inform the public, educate, foster democracy and above all, tell the truth.

Compiled here on stevemullis.net is everything that I have written since 2003 and will continue to write from here on out. Some of it is bad, some of it is good and some of it embarrassing, but all of it is me.

Welcome, and happy reading.

- Steve M. Mullis Jr. © 2008