A great post by Jamelle Bouie gives a very detailed explanation of how tech writing works, how people break into the business, and how all of these things maintain the status quo of white male writers. You can read the entire post here, in the meantime here are a few choice excerpts:

…minority students may not have the resources to afford unpaid internships and other jobs that provide a valuable path to jobs in media. “Minority students on campus — whom I’ve talked to about this — always claim that they simply can’t afford to not get paid for a whole summer,” he says.

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By Anthony Gutierrez, Cadre Media There are some video projects you’ll always want to entrust to a professional like (shameless plug) Cadre Media. But filmmaking today has evolved to a point where just about everyone has the tools and expertise to produce simple videos and to make them look and sound great. In today’s post I’m going to go over a few basics to help you do great video work in-house and I’ll also address a few common mistakes I often see in political videos. 1.) Have a plan.… more

Latinos at South by Southwest’s Interactive conference are becoming a bigger part of the event this year as the second annual Social Revolución and associated Revolucionario Awards get underway. The event launched last year and included a blogging component that highlighted Latinos in technology at SXSW, as well as an awards show that honored several different Latinos and organizations for their contributions to the tech and social media space. This year organizers are hoping the event can bring in more people — last year there were 140 nominees from the U.S.… more

Teenage boys, especially low-income ones, are often typecast as problematic regardless of race. Although the problems facing low-income young men are great, Oscar Menjivar and the people at UrbanTxT are seeking to change this by teaching these young men how to code and work with technology. Rather than allowing these boys to fall for the temptation allure of gang life or an apathy toward education, Menjivar’s team has established a program which gives boys a chance to learn valuable technology skills and teamwork, while encouraging them to earn good grades in school, and to advance as strong, career-minded men with college aspirations in technology.… more

Derechos Herencia is a Spanish app for iPhone/iPad and Androids that includes menus for different law enforcement agencies specifically with information about deportation and immigration laws. These menus include info about the Border Patrol, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, as well as local police. The app was created by a 21 year-old undocumented immigrant, Deyvid Morales, with help from Subsplash. According to The Salt Lake Tribune, Morales created the app after a personal experience with immigration officials.… more

A study from the National Center for Educational Statistics recently looked at the educational attainment of Latino and Asian immigrants, and undergraduates who had immigrant parents. The study compiled data from the 2007-2008 National Postsecondary Student Aid Study. The study, “New Americans in Postsecondary Education,” found that immigrants’ educational attainment rates lag behind the native-born U.S. population. According to the study about 23% of all undergraduates were immigrants, 10%, or had an immigrant parent, 13%.… more

A recently published paper by Microsoft employees is taking a close look at Twitter usage during the Mexican drug wars. The paper, “The New War Correspondents: The Rise of Civic Media Curation in Urban Warfare,” written by Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Danah Boyd, Emre Kiciman, Munmun De Choudhury, and Scott Counts analyzes hashtag use by people in four cities in Mexico, tweet volume in periods of peace and violence, as well as an analysis of the rise of civilian public information officers in the Twitter world.… more

Emerson Collective, a group chaired by Laurene Powell Jobs, and filmmaker Davis Guggenheim launched a new platform for undocumented youth to tell their stories Tuesday. The Dream is Now provides these youth the opportunity to upload videos and tell their stories as undocumented Americans, view, listen to the stories of other undocumented Americans. It also provides an avenue to advocate for immigration reform like the DREAM Act, and to share links to these stories online through social media.… more

By Christie Thompson, ProPublica When Reddit co-founder and internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz committed suicide last Friday, he was facing up to 13 felony counts, 50 years in prison, and millions of dollars in fines. His alleged crime? Pulling millions of academic articles from the digital archive JSTOR. Prosecutors allege that Swartz downloaded the articles because he intended to distribute them for free online, though Swartz was arrested before any articles were made public.… more

This post is republished with permission from Latinopia.com. I live on the Internet, so, sometimes my perspective on things can be a bit warped. How some people have managed to avoid Facebook and Twitter escapes me, for example, but then again not everyone works in the media industry. But, being that I do occupy the digital space so often, there’s a very stark and obvious problem that I frequently encounter: just like real life, Latinos are not as populous online. Let me define what I mean a bit more.… more