P-I's Monica Guzman agrees to keynote WJEA state conference

We at WJEA hope you're getting geared up to attend the annual WJEA State Journalism Conference -- now less than two months away on Saturday, March 15, at Auburn High School -- because we sure are. Today, we secured the conference's keynote speaker: Monica Guzman, online reporter extraordinaire from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Guzman is most well known for her prolific contributions to the P-I's Big Blog, "a rolling digest of the best in news, culture and entertainment." She's a self-described "product of her wired generation" -- that's her Facebook profile picture to the right -- and is fired up about getting to speak to the next generation of journalists. From her bio:

Monica Guzman is the P-I's first online reporter and the main contributor to its new online project, the Big Blog.

Monica joined the P-I in January as a Hearst Newspapers Fellow, covering the culture of technology in a weekly column and a blog, Net Native.

A product of her wired generation, Monica obsesses over her Facebook profile and can't remember what life was like before e-mail. She calls it a good afternoon when she can tinker with her piano and her Ibanez and a good evening when she can get out and enjoy the nightlife. A huge film fan, Monica will often cry at movies people have no business crying in and has been known to get moody if she doesn't see at least one movie in a theater every week. She can't cook, but she's trying.

Monica has worked previously at the Houston Chronicle, the Midland Daily News in Michigan and Foster's Daily Democrat in New Hampshire, covering police and breaking news, higher education and arts and entertainment.

You can watch her on KOMO/4 News at 4:20 p.m. and listen in to KOMO 1000 radio at 4:45 p.m. on Wednesdays, when she rounds up the news that's got Seattle talking.

Monica holds a bachelor's degree in sociology from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine.

Registration forms will be available on wjea.net soon, so be looking for those. In the meantime, we'll be working hard to line up all the session speakers for the conference. We'll pass those along as we get confirmations.