This is quite frightening.

I am sitting in my fourth floor office, safely in front of my computer – playlist raging at a professional volume – and yet my heart is racing, my hands are shaking, there is a slight shiver in my shoulder. It’s stage fright.

I have a lot riding on Reznet and it all starts with this re-launch of the site. It is not my only job here at the University of Montana, but it is important. There are a lot of eyes on the site, and I can’t help but sweat from the heat blaring out of that digital spotlight.

It’s taken a lot of work to get Reznet going again. It’s been over a year since reporters have created original work. Many of the site’s original writers and editors have understandably moved on. What I hoped was going to be an easy task of getting the band back together for some serious rockin’, like Kiss in 1996, turned out to be a gargantuan effort to form a new band and hope nobody would notice, like Kiss in 2002.

However, the original intent of Reznet had to remain intact: To help recruit and train Native American college and high school students in the journalism field. It’s the same mission I have in my new position as the Director of Native American Journalism Projects, and the sole reason I left my job and family in August.

I thought the Navajo Times, where I had worked for six years covering tribal government, was going to be my last job in the journalism field. I had said if I were ever to leave that paper, it would be for something in an entirely different field.

That job was very important to me. I had a purpose writing for The Navajo Times, a purpose that was missing when I worked for other exponentially larger newspapers on both coasts. I had an audience that I cared about, faces that I could picture while trying to explain how a revenue shortfall could affect their jobs.

The entire time, though, I would have much preferred writing about music for a glossy magazine or an even glossier web site. I have a scary mental database of movie factoids filed by genre, star, director and…uh, kill shots that I would have rather put to use for any number of entertainment publications.

However, there are hundreds of people clamoring for those jobs; to live in a shiny city writing about famous people for a large audience. Yet, such was not the case for the Navajo Times; to work in dusty Window Rock, Ariz., writing about tribal government for a readership that only just outnumbers the capacity at a Montana Griz football game.

This is where I hope to find success with Reznet. To find students from Indian reservations who want to work for their audience. Who want to find satisfaction from working in one of the most un-glamorous corners in an un-glamorous field. Who want to pick up the storytelling torch after the big name media outlets have left following the latest minority tragedy and show how much more is going on back at home.

It all starts with this re-launch.