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Jose Antonio Vargas
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Jose Antonio Vargas is the founder of Define American, a new campaign that seeks to elevate the conversation around immigration.

He is also an award-winning multimedia journalist. Most recently, he was a senior contributing editor at HuffPost, where he launched the Tech and College sections. Prior to that, he covered tech and video game culture, HIV/AIDS, and the 2008 presidential campaign for the the Washington Post, and was part of the team that won a Pulitzer Prize for covering the 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech. His 2006 series on HIV/AIDS in Washington, D.C. inspired a feature-length documentary, The Other City. It world-premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival and aired on Showtime.

News media's evolution, and the breakdown of barriers between print and broadcast journalism, has guided his nearly 13-year reporting career. He's written for daily newspapers (Philadelphia Daily News and San Francisco Chronicle) and national magazines (the New Yorker and Rolling Stone) and has appeared on several television and radio broadcasts.

He taught a class on "Storytelling 2.0" at Georgetown University and serves on the advisory board for the Knight-Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism, housed at American University. A very proud alumnus of Mountain View High School ('00) andSan Francisco State University ('04), he loves jazz, can't get enough of Ben & Jerry's and worships at the altars of Altman, Almodovar, Didion, Baldwin and Orwell.

Blog Entries by Jose Antonio Vargas

How Do You Define American? Share Your Story

479 Comments | Posted November 18, 2011 | 08:05:43 (EST)

Mine was merely one story, in which I chronicled my life as an undocumented immigrant for the New York Times Magazine. I'm just one person. From the very beginning, as I told The Guardian, "if I'm going to come out with this, I'm going to do...

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Jose Antonio Vargas: A DREAM Act Deferred?

Posted September 1, 2011 | 16:06:44 (EST)

This piece comes to us courtesy of Education Nation’s The Learning Curve blog. Jose Antonio Vargas, Define American founder and former journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle, the Huffington Post and the Washington Post, writes.

[Ed. Note: On Wednesday, the California Senate passed AB131, one half of the...

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The America in Me

Posted July 4, 2011 | 17:16:49 (EST)

"You've been trying to write yourself into America," my dear friend Teresa Moore said after she read an early draft of the essay I ended up submitting to the New York Times Magazine.

I first met Teresa in 1999, when I was a high school...

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Following the Tweets

Posted January 9, 2011 | 12:42:35 (EST)

Being a news junkie takes on a whole new meaning -- and a lot more time -- in the age of Twitter.

I first read about the Tucson shootings from Twitter, as tweet after tweet streamed on my iPhone. At one point, after retweeting some messages, speculation was so high...

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Bearing Witness, A Tweet At A Time

Posted December 13, 2010 | 06:34:51 (EST)

Online, using social media, we can become each others' witnesses.

Take Eric Sheptock, a former crack addict and now homeless advocate who is the subject of a remarkable story in today's Washington Post, written by Nathan Rott. It's one of the most insightful and...

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Mark Zuckerberg -- Our First Millennial CEO

Posted December 9, 2010 | 10:46:59 (EST)

Like all influential and complex entrepreneurs, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg is many things to many people. But he is, first and foremost, our young century's first Millennial CEO.

That's a fact that's been glaringly omitted -- not to mention profoundly misunderstood -- in everything that's been written and...

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Chris Hughes' Jumo: A Social Network for the Social Sector

Posted November 30, 2010 | 09:30:16 (EST)

If everything goes according to Chris Hughes' plan, Nov. 30, 2010 will be remembered as a critical and celebrated moment for the multi-billion dollar nonprofit and charitable industry.

Earlier this morning, Hughes launched his latest project, Jumo.com, which the Facebook co-founder describes as a "social network for the...

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The Social Disconnect -- How Hollywood Misread Facebook

Posted October 1, 2010 | 15:00:13 (EST)

Everything that's wrong about The Social Network is summed up by its title.

The movie, opening nationwide today, is not interested in the concept of social networking or the actual usage of Facebook. Aaron Sorkin, the film's writer, told me in my profile of Mark Zuckerberg for the...

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WATCH: "The Other City" is "The Real D.C."

Posted August 6, 2010 | 01:09:06 (EST)

There will be very little that's real about "The Real Housewives of D.C."

That, of course, is stating the obvious, especially after Thursday night's premiere. Folks who live in Orange County, New York, Atlanta and New Jersey -- the heretofore settings of the franchise's shows -- will quickly point...

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What's the Future of the Journalist in Our Digital Era? (VIDEOS)

Posted June 25, 2010 | 14:50:44 (EST)

Exactly how has technology changed the journalist's role?

The question has nagged me since the latest Future of News and Civic Media conference in Cambridge, hosted by MIT and the Knight Foundation. The three-day confab drew a curious hodgepodge of technologists, academics, foundation and non-profit folks, with a...

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The Future of News: The "Me" in "Media"

Posted June 16, 2010 | 16:56:07 (EST)

*UPDATED*

CAMBRIDGE, MASS. -- The future of news. The future of civic education. The future of citizens as engaged, educated participants. Lofty topics all of them, essential to maintaining democracy.

And technology -- technology being as mainstream and accessible as it's ever been -- plays a central role in how...

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PdF 2010 LIVE BLOG: The State of Tech-Powered Politics

Posted June 3, 2010 | 08:48:31 (EST)

FRI, JUNE 4, 4:11 P.M.

Forget the Internet. For the post-email, AIM-oriented, text messaging-driven generation of the American electorate, the future of politics -- how voters interact with politicians, elected officials and their government -- is right in their pockets. Scott Goodstein, the Obama campaign's texting...

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The Social Web, Insurgent Candidates and Rallying the Base

Posted May 18, 2010 | 15:45:38 (EST)

Does the social Web -- the blogging, tweeting, Facebooking Internet -- work better for insurgent candidates?

The answer, of course, is not that simple. Yes, the here-comes-everybody, let's-crash-the-gates nature of social networking lends itself more easily to insurgent candidates. The relatively unknown Barack Obama effectively leveraged the social web in...

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HuffPost Spotlight Series: Let's Innovate!

Posted May 18, 2010 | 08:50:31 (EST)

Innovation.

In our globalized, social network-connected, ideas-driven economy, the key to success is through innovation. It's how we improve and upend existing infrastructures, may it be in field of education or energy strategy or politics and policy. It's how people in the areas of media, sports and culture make their...

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The Online Fight to Define Elena Kagan (VIDEO)

Posted May 10, 2010 | 16:36:32 (EST)

And so it begins -- the online war to define Elena Kagan, whom President Obama nominated early Monday to be the 112th justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

She is not the first SCOTUS nominee to be vetted by the online public in our blogging,...

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"The Other City" -- AIDS in America, Nearly 30 Years Later

Posted April 20, 2010 | 10:17:06 (EST)

Is there another disease in America as politicized and as polarizing as HIV/AIDS?

It's about sex and drugs, it's about race and class and homophobia -- the very things that we, as a society, grapple with every day. No wonder then that the story of AIDS in America, nearly 30...

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WATCH: Not Everyone Has The iPad Spirit

Posted April 6, 2010 | 08:44:20 (EST)

Judging from the hype that preceded its arrival -- the cover of Time magazine! and Newsweek! endless chatter from media folks looking for a Messiah to technophiles anxious to get their hands on the latest gadget -- you'd think everyone was clamoring for an iPad.

Well, not quite....

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Memo to Media -- iPad Won't Save News Industry

Posted April 3, 2010 | 17:05:09 (EST)

What, you think the iPad hitting stores on Easter Weekend is a mere coincidence?

Nope. The media gods have conspired. Sure, the venerable Wired magazine would be all over it. And of course Laptop mag would hype the inevitable if not wholly simplistic "iPAD v. NETBOOK"...

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UPDATE: HuffPost College And WhiteHouse.Gov: Open For Questions

Posted March 30, 2010 | 07:03:07 (EST)

If the signing of the historic health care bill rang a very loud bell across the country, then the passing of the Student Aid and Financial Relief Act (SAFRA) landed with a relative whisper. Overshadowed, it certainly was. But the bill, folded in at the last minute with the health...

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Richard Stengel On Mandela: Neither 'Terrorist' Nor Mother Teresa

Posted March 30, 2010 | 06:52:16 (EST)

Is there a more fruitful relationship between writer and subject than Richard Stengel and Nelson Mandela?

The two men collaborated on the best-selling, critically-acclaimed Long Walk to Freedom, Mandela's 630-page autobiography, which took Stengel two and a half years to write in the early 1990s. Stengel recorded the...

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