Lobo staffers move on to next challenge
Maggie Ybarra
The Daily Lobo is losing its most hard-hitting news reporter this year.
Two-year Lobo veteran Maggie Ybarra is graduating with a degree in print journalism and a handful of reporting awards.
Ybarra said her passion for news is like an addiction.
"I love news. News is like crack," she said.
Ybarra became interested in journalism during her adolescence in Texas.
"I had a best friend who lived in Houston, and she one day surprised me with the news that she was a member of the KKK," she said. "That's a strange thing for your best friend to surprise you with, and the first thing I said was, 'Can I get pictures?'"
Ybarra said she attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting and discovered a possible angle for a news story, despite her inexperience in journalism.
"The thing that I noticed at that meeting was that, out of all the group members, there were about four people there who were (local penitentiary) guards," she said. "I thought that was an amazing piece of news, but I couldn't report it. I didn't know how to report anything."
Ybarra came to UNM and worked at Walgreens for two years before applying at the Lobo in 2007. Former Lobo Editor-in-Chief Christopher Sanchez recognized Ybarra's talents while they wrote together at an Albuquerque Tribune internship, and at the Lobo she became the assistant culture editor.
"I was a really bad writer to start with," she said. "I even had major punctuation errors."
Ybarra became assistant news editor in January 2008 and again in January 2009, and has received several awards during that time. This year, she won the Daily Lobo Reporter of the Year Award and the Hank Trewhitt Daily Lobo Alumni Award.
Two of her articles, "Lynch guilty of destroying flag," and "Rodeo clowns: the cowboy's cowboy," have won awards in the Communication & Journalism Department. She has also written for the Albuquerque Arts magazine and Local I.Q.
Ybarra is preparing for a summer internship with the Albuquerque Journal, and she doesn't know where she'll end up after that.
"I don't think that anyone should stay at any place longer than four or five years, because you become stale and you don't grow as a person," she said. "You don't have new adventures. You don't learn things."
Ybarra said she is concerned about a future without newspapers, a trend she said will impact other forms of media as well.
"If you watch the news enough, you'll realize that what local news stations do is they will take what's in the newspapers and make it their material," she said. "If newspapers die, that medium would be affected, too, because they'd actually have to do their own work."
There are many stories at UNM that have yet to be told, Ybarra said, and those will only surface through investigative reporting.
"I'm upset that there's more here that's never been gotten to," she said. "I hope there are other reporters here that will come along and dig that out.. There's so much under the surface of this University. It would blow your mind.""
