Joseph Barkoff

[he/him, and I prefer dude to sir]

This is a work in progress. Thank you for reading.

Being a good journalist is like being a good chef or cook. It is about producing a balanced agenda-less product.

I began cooking in local pizza restaurants when I was 14 and worked in the restaurant industry as a chef, manager, cook, waiter, barista and busser. I have cooked in some of the nation's top 100 restaurants.

Because one job never seemed to be enough to make ends meet, I have an eclectic resume of work experience including work as a "freezer boy," responsible for retrieving all of the meat to be processed, packaged or sent out daily in a meat packing plant. As well I have performed in office environments where I have acquired the ability to troubleshoot office equipment at an IT level. I can build you a PC to rival and Alienware rig and have been Mac proficient since they were still just apples.

I have experience being a second engineer, drum tech in a professional studio and have worked in a winery.

I was an apprentice carpenter for a man who never had anyone last longer than a month working with or for him. I was with him for over two years, before I went back to school at the Santa Rosa Junior College in 2012.

My life has some twists too.

I attended The Heritage School for Boys in Calistoga, Ca. from age 11-13. Then Harker Academy in San Jose, Robert Louis Stevenson High School in Pebble Beach, Aragon in San Mateo, and Aptos where I was a ward of the state in a foster care group home, and finally Santa Rosa High School in Santa Rosa for my senior year 1991-92.

I was in the Navy from 1992-95.

After the Navy I worked in my first fine dining restaurant as a cook and fell in love with agenda-less cooking at Willowside Cafe in Santa Rosa.

There was no signature flavor for the chef or the restaurant. The agenda was the food, and like a brilliant editor, he would create a new menu every week, relevant to the area and calendar.

My job was to take what he wrote on the menu, using the skills he taught me, to fabricate the items assigned to me, not unlike having a beat.

After working there for a third time he told me my plates were always more beautiful than he imagined them when he wrote the menu.

My job as a journalist is to give voice to the voiceless as well as tell accurate stories of what I am assigned. This requires balance, not unlike creating a well rounded plate with texture, depth and flavor.

I fell in love with journalism when I took my first course at Santa Rosa Junior College. The writing style was what I was missing my whole life.

In my second semester, I was voluntold "I was coming to the paper," after finding typos in the first issue of the semester.

I walked over to the building and originally thought I would write some food reviews but saw the cameras and said I could use them.

I saw on the budget someone was writing a story about a fox living on campus, and I felt the story deserves a photo.

Publication was Sunday night, so Friday at midnight I set up a blind with two angles  in a choke point on campus where my research pointed to the most sightings.

When the sun began to come up I went back in the newsroom to lay down for a moment across an empty desk and when I heard noise from a baseball game a couple hours later, I grabbed the cameras and went back outside to cover what ended up being a full preseason scrimmage.

They made me the photo editor that Saturday and I worked as photo editor for four semesters, including one semester as both photo and sports editor.

While I could operate a camera then, of course, I had a long way to go to get where I am today.

I graduated SRJC in the spring of 2015 with an AA in journalism.

After Santa Rosa Junior College I transferred to Western Kentucky University in the fall 2015 and graduated in spring 2019 with two BA's, one in photojournalism and one in journalism with a minor in military science and I was the first civilian to complete the WKU Army ROTC course where I covered everything from football to war games and all the details between.

I am as comfortable covering the sidelines of basketball as I am on a fence line in rodeo, or with a special needs child in a loud school assembly.

I enjoyed being able to do a series on women in South Dakota's prison and felt honored when I was allowed past the roadblocks onto tribal land to cover the tribe who felt they needed roadblocks for safety from COVID-19.

I belong to both the National Press Photographers' Association and Society of Professional Journalist, and I believe un-compromisingly in the ethics shared between both.

I believe a good written story is never one-sided. As a journalist I will not write with an agenda. I will find both sides and am never satisfied unless I include some path to a resolution.

Not the fixed problem, but what is being done as I report on the issue as well what the future holds. The factual truth.

One of the most conservative people I have ever met, a coworker in South Dakota, told me they could never tell what side of an issue I stood when they read my work.

I was also told by a managing editor, "You would be perfect, if you didn't care so much."

I proudly own that knock.

All off my galleries and pages are public and can be found on Facebook and Instagram.

Please see my resume below to fill in any blanks or feel free to contact me.

The photo is of me riding in Black Hawk with my Army ROTC class to Ft. Knox for FTX. The photo was taken by my classmate Cadet Austin Barnes.