To become a journalist in this day and age, between the lack of subscribers for newspapers and the overall switch to the Internet, is getting to be harder. However, recent graduate of Mills, Bonnie Horgos, is proving otherwise.
Horgos, 23, a Santa Cruz native, now writes for The Santa Cruz Sentinel, where she started writing after graduating from Mills in December 2011. Horgos was a music major and a journalism minor. She was the Arts and Features editor for The Campanil as well as an invaluable member of the swim team.
Horgos was also a mentor to the current Arts and Features editor, Joann Pak. “Her intelligence, generosity, and curiosity always motivated me,” said Pak. “Without her encouragement and presence in The Campanil news room, I probably wouldn’t be here today.”
Horgos’ love for music didn’t fade after leaving Mills. Horgos is a trained opera singer and also plays a slew of instruments. She enjoys going to shows in Santa Cruz, and often reviews them for The Sentinel.
“My time at The Campanil was invaluable,” Horgos said, “Mills prepped me for my career.”
Horgos had three internships while at Mills, which ultimately helped her land her current job. She interned twice at The Sentinel, before her junior and senior years, and during her senior year, she interned at the Yoga Journal in San Francisco. Between her internships and writing as both a columnist and features writer at The Campanil, Horgos brought plenty to the table as a freelancer for The Sentinel for six months before landing a job as a staff features writer, where she did a lot of food and beer writing.
Horgos has written about beer multiple times for The Sentinel, in her column “Bonnie’s Beer of the Week,” and is known for being a beer connoisseur.
“I obviously really like beer,” Horgos said.
Which isn’t to say that it was a walk in the park for Horgos to get her job as a staff writer on The Sentinel. What really helped was her friendship with the features editor at The Sentinel. Horgos had heard that someone was leaving the paper, and she told the features editor that she wanted the position. However, Horgos had to convince The Sentinel to hire her. She showed them just how much they were paying her to freelance, which in comparison to how much her wages would be as a staff writer, were almost the same. So they hired her.
Starting this month, Horgos will be focusing more on news in Santa Cruz for The Sentinel, specifically government and education.
“I never really wrote hard news,” Horgos said. “It’s very important to have a news section, but it’s very cut and dry, which I will be doing more of in this upcoming journey.”
While this is a new step for Horgos in her journalism career, she’s optimistic that she will hit the ground running with her transition into news writing, and also with the future of journalism all in all.
Horgos thinks that the current and future generations of new journalists will front the move to newspapers moving online.
“We will see how long print will last. I think once the older people are gone, we will see more of a move towards online,” Horgos said.
Besides Horgos’ love for journalism, her Type 1 diabetes is also a passion of hers. Horgos is a counselor at the American Diabetes Association Diabetes Camp. She has been attending the camp since she was 12, a year after being diagnosed with diabetes, and eventually became a counselor. It’s a big part of her life; she even wrote about it in The Campanil in 2011 in her opinions piece “How diabetes camp changed my life.”
Music, diabetes, beer and journalism: Bonnie Horgos, everybody.
