PHOTO LOCATION: Joe Jost’s (Long Beach, California).

My full name is Dylan Robert Nelson Crabb and I was born in Santa Ana, California.  I spent the first 14 years of my life in Long Beach, California, a port city on North America’s western coast.  After junior high school, my mother moved me to Taos, New Mexico, where I let the shroud of the big life change cloud my high school experience; I hated all four years as a student at Taos High School.  I am now an alumnus of New Mexico Highlands University using my limited skill set to make a living in northern New Mexico.

I’ve held a desire to work in the news industry since high school when I used my junior Career Day to visit the local newspaper (The Taos News), there is no doubt about the radically different nature of that industry today compared to just two and a half decades ago (when I was growing up during a state of relative peace during the 1990’s).  Newspapers and television networks were once the gatekeepers into the news industry but they are becoming less and less relevant in this new era of digital communications.  The ability to publish information is becoming more available to the general public, I believe that is a net positive for a democratic-republican nation like the United States of America.  I believe in the ideal newspaper, a sociological tool for informing large groups of people with the intent of self-governance.

Computers are becoming more sophisticated every year, cell phones are becoming cheaper and more available along with internet connections and a majority of citizens now live and work as they are connected to the largest and most extensive network of information ever created by humans.  Our republic should be flourishing but instead we’re floundering – higher education is becoming more difficult to finance for the average American, job markets are becoming more cutthroat every year, and home ownership is becoming harder for Americans to attain.

I want to be a part of news media because I believe it’s what I was born to do even though it took me some time to come to that realization.  I want to write news and help people make logically sound decisions as citizens of what might be the greatest nation ever created in human history.

My view of the so-called “American Dream” is essentially a person’s right to be left alone (I value privacy very highly), the ability to live as one wishes without physically harming another person.  To be clear, I am not an anarchist; the purpose of a government is specifically for this aim: geographic security and personal autonomy for each citizen.

“If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make a change.” – Michael Jackson, Man in the Mirror.