Our Mission

A blossom of youth: Our Story

It’s March 11th, 2023. Picture the bleakness of Rochester’s Main Street before blossoms assert their sweet dominance – before the air loses the stale chill of ice left in the freezer too long. It’s a sad week for the ghostly shell of Rochester’s stampede-wrecked Main Street Armory. Mournful grafiti brings a cultural flair to the commemoration of the precious lives lost, and several colorful candles offer a timeless, candid vigil. I was there to write a breaking news article for my school publication. I had almost secured an interview with a young woman who had been dropped off from the single parking spot in front of the insidious red brick ramparts. I think she was mourning, but I felt a certain responsibility to provide an outlet for her sacred, forlorn voice to be heard over the usual, pragmatic tide of courtroom drama and police findings– as any journalist would. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but my gut had a very good reason for steering me away from talking to her. Instead, it guided me to let her mind her own business, free from the exploitation of journalism that writes for vapid reasons. Indeed, as golden hour struck the empty glass windows of East Main’s rust belt warehouses with gripping brilliance, it hit me that to interview her would be to hand her a defunct megaphone, an outlet for a message that would hit students’ seven AM dazed glare with deadened insubstantiality. It’s just as bad as hustle culture reporting that writes the same sentence thrice for the buck and monopolizes every part of our attention span. To found a publication, my friend and I reasoned, would scare the living daylights out of us. But we thought, what is a dream that doesn’t scare us? I was done sleeping through journalism. It was time for us to lead students around the Greater Rochester community to open their eyes and offer their startled realizations about the world that older generations always told themselves Gen Z was not able to have. Journalism is not the same anymore – print rates are tanking and online news networks are so money-driven – but we’re young – look at us, we have something to say, we have something to show you, and it’s something you’ve never seen before. Join us in sharing our youth-writer-focused platform that embraces the first person, reports incisively, and shares lost perspectives with newfound meaning. Welcome to The Bloom – a birthplace of young innocence and simplicity written for the unassuming Rochestarian. 

-Corban Vogler, Editorial Board