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Why You Should Follow Humans of New York

Her Campus Placeholder Avatar Leighton Meyers
Her Campus Placeholder Avatar Indigo Baloch
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Chatham chapter.
News outlets these days are very distant. They rush to publish the first story on any current event, producing a shoddily written, usually typo-laden, 300-word article that covers the shallow basics. 
 
The instant reporting of social media has made journalism problematic—either you write really, really fast and publish immediately what you can crank out in 15 minutes, or you’re a few days late to the conversation and produce a lengthy, well-researched piece. When you compare a lengthy Atlantic feature that you can easily spend half an hour reading fully to an NBC article that has two-sentence paragraphs and only four of them, there is a clear difference in how journalism has evolved in diverging paths. The authors for the Atlantic obviously can’t crank out these articles in 10 minutes at 2 am. Sometimes journalists are in such a rush, they forget to slow down and remember the humanity involved with reporting. 
 
 
If drudging through objective, short news snippets just isn’t giving you the picture you want, there is a solution: Humans of New York. 
 
Humans of New York started as a pet project of photographer Brandon in 2010, after he got fired from his job in finance. It started simply, with mere photographs, but they evolved into interviews and interesting stories to accompany the photographs. He’s written a New York Times Bestseller book compiled of the stories he’s accumulated, and he shared them to nearly 16 million followers on Facebook. Comments have even been circulating about a petition to get him a nomination for a Nobel Peace Prize. 
 
 
Humans of New York further evolved, and Brandon has traveled around the world to document more than just New Yorkers. Currently, he’s documenting the lives of refugees in Europe, and you should pay attention. The stories he posts on Facebook are not what you will find in news outlets at all. They are raw, powerful, and embody much more than the plain-language “refugees found dead in truck, exact count unknown” type of headline you get from news outlets. 
 
Brandon’s expeditions into relevant culture topics definitely deserve the read if you can stomach the realizations he presents
 
 
Photos screenshotted from the HONY Facebook.
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I'm a creature of talent, and by talent I refer to the amount of Hot Pockets I can eat in a single sitting. A senior in the creative writing program at Chatham University, I'm currently doing my tutorial on the abusive dynamics in Fifty Shades of Grey and the potential cultural impact of glamorizing those behaviors as an ideal love story. Humor is my forte, but you'll find a lot of dark writing if you search me on Amazon. (I know, what an accomplishment to be on Amazon!) I've had my writing published by Torrid Literature Journal, Five Poetry Magazine, Heater Magazine, the London School of Liberal Arts, Life in 10 Minutes, and I have a couple poems coming out soon in If and Only If.
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Indigo Baloch is the HC Chatham Campus Correspondent. She is a junior at Chatham University double majoring in Creative Writing and Journalism and double minoring Graphic Design and an Asian Studies Certificate. Indigo is a writer and Editorial Assistant at Maniac Magazine and occasionally does book reviews for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. She is also the Public Relations Director for The Mr. Roboto Project (a music venue in Pittsburgh) and creates their monthly newsletter. During her freshman and sophomore year, Indigo was the Editor-in-Chief of Chatham's student driven newsprint: Communique. Currently, on campus, Indigo is the Communications Coordinator for Minor Bird (Chatham's literary magazine), the Public Relations Director for Chatham's chapter of Sigma Tau Delta, and a Staff Writer and Columnist for Communique. She has worked as a Fashion Editorial Intern for WHIRL Magazine, and has been a featured reader at Chatham's Undergraduate Reading Series and a featured writer in Minor Bird. She loves art, music, film, theater, writing, and traveling.