Two years ago, I started my first gig as a reporter for a newspaper — covering local government in a college town. That semester, a student at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University went on a killing rampage, shooting 32 students, wounding many others and eventually killing himself.

The morning after, our newsroom — about 35 college students — gathered in an auditorium to brainstorm ideas about how to cover this. After all, Virginia Tech and Missouri are both public land-grant universities with about 30,000 students. This was a story our audience cared about, and we wanted to tell it creatively. We spent more than an hour in that auditorium, throwing out ideas and hoping for the best.

We couldn’t think of anything. Our coverage over the following few weeks was typical: wire reports of what happened and the obligatory statement from someone — anyone — with a little authority who could tell us why Missouri was different.

I was starting to question whether there was a creative way to tell this story when I read a post my mother wrote for a blog. Mom linked three major news stories affecting college-aged women, stories that newsrooms around the world had failed to connect: Don Imus’ famous “nappy-headed hos” comment, the dropping of the Duke rape case charges and the shooting at Virginia Tech.

Read how my mom's blog post affected me by clicking "more."

“Our daughters don’t always receive the respect and encouragement we were faithful to give them while they were home,” Mom wrote. “I am comforted by watching news coverage — seeing the pictures and hearing the words of the many fine college kids who are helping each other, advocating for each other, praying for each other.”

My newsroom editors thought this news story was something for college students to cover; it was our peers who were targeted, affected, killed. But it took a mother to see this story as a piece of a larger puzzle: a story about the different ways our college students — especially women — are attacked on a daily basis.

My mom didn’t see the link because she has journalism training (she doesn’t) or because she was assigned to write about it (she wasn’t) or because she’s special (she is to me, though.) She noticed because that’s who she is. She’s a mom with her two little girls in college, and one day she wrote down what she knew.

Blogging is about writing what you’re thinking.

Who are you? A mother of college students? A special education teacher? A nurse for the elderly? What do you know because of who you are? Write that down. Tell us. Tell me! I want to know. I’m just a college student, wondering where I’ll go and who I’ll be after graduation in two weeks. That’s what I know, and that’s all I can write.

If my mom hadn’t been willing to blog, who knows if anyone would have made the connection that three of the biggest news stories of the day all delt with attacking female college students. Her post had a huge impact on me, as a writer, as a journalist and as a woman. And it’s all because she wrote what she knew.

What do you know?