You have a resume, clips, maybe even a standard cover letter you dust off for applications or to forward to new contacts. But do you have any idea what it is that actually makes you special – if you think you’re special at all?
Get on board and get yourself a checklist of the qualities or experiences you have that make you special, that you can share in an interview or even in a casual conversation with a potential network. You need a mental resume.
Man, who doesn’t have a blog.
Any newspaper that can even be tossed in the conversation has someone adding to it. There is no end to the number of jerks like me doing much of the same, with less experience and knowledge but increasingly more interest than the more professional.
The question, of course, is if any of it is working. One of the simpler answers, I’d say, is, well, look at the comments. If they’re improving, you’re improving.
I’m reworking this site. There is no reason for you to have noticed that I’ve changed all the categories and started using tags for my posts. All of my archives are now online with the concept.
I was trying to organize a post last week and realized I had more than 40 categories and was barely using tags. That’s ridiculous. Their purposes are to better organize posts and allow you to group like material. None of that was happening.
Yes, for those of you new or unfamiliar to WordPress, it gives you every reason for your product to be super organized and increase the searchability of your posts. The better organized, the easier it is to disseminate and let others find your material. That’s good news for a young journalist looking to promote himself.
The only problem is that I have more than 400 posts in less than a year of this blog’s existence. That’s a lot of work.
Continue reading WordPress tags and categories: how a journalist can organize a personal site
After returning from backpacking Europe earlier this month, I shared some of the professional experience I got while blogging at WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com.
My good buddy, travel partner and fellow aspiring new media journalist Sean Blanda beat me to a post on lessons learned, but I have some thoughts myself: on podcasting, travel blogging and exploring generally.
Continue reading Lessons from WDSTL: podcasting, travel blogging, exploring
When I mentioned that yesterday to a neighbor, he asked for one of my business cards to pass off to a friend.
I don’t have one. I didn’t want to spend the money. I never knew what to write on one. Being young and transient, I feel like my information and location would change to quickly. …I think I’d feel uncomfortable slipping one to someone.
Continue reading Should an unemployed journalist have a business card?
You’re a member of a dozen or more social networking sites. Same goes for someone you’ve never met but know online, professionally or otherwise. When does that online relationship get weird?
I’ve never met Greg Linch.
He’s the editor at large for online and multimedia at The Miami Hurricane, the student newspaper pf the University of Miami. On my side of things, I’m fresh out of the setting of another large, celebrated college newspaper with a recent flurry of multimedia interest: The Temple News, of Temple University in big, beautiful Philadelphia.
So, in the small circles of young, Web interested journalists, Linch and I have professionally crossed paths. Things went and got serious when we started following each other on Twitter.
Continue reading Your best friend (online): how many social networking relationships make love?
How well do you e-mail?
A few weeks ago I came across a simple, intuitive but worthwhile post on Seth Godin’s blog – an e-mail checklist.
I send lots of e-mails. In searching for a new job, in looking for interviews, in sending pitches for freelance stories.
So, I am immediately incorporating a few of Godin’s points into my style and thought they might help you, too – regardless of profession. I have some thoughts myself.
I was given an open invitation for an entry level job writing copy for CNN.com in Atlanta. The pay was bad, and the reporting probably rudimentary, but it was a good name, a position with a clear line of succession and a straight path to New York or Los Angeles – the media markets in which professors and professionals tell young journalists we want to be. There the money is good and the reporting is top-level.
Instead, I am trying to get a job in Philadelphia – a city that has hated itself for at least the last half-century. Let me tell you why.
Perhaps more than any other profession, journalists live in moments, that hour’s story, that day’s deadline.
Zack Stalberg was made a legend for his Frank Rizzo moment. As a 2001 Philadelphia Weekly profile suggested:
Within two years the night rewrite kid is a City Hall reporter covering Frank Rizzo at a time when Rizzo was, as Stalberg recalls, “unstoppable … He was going to be governor and his image was untarnished and then–boom!” Boom, of course, was Stalberg himself, who persuaded the mayor to take a lie detector test to resolve a political dispute. Rizzo, as the whole city knows, failed the test in grand fashion, and Stalberg, as the whole city also knows, became someone who would make a name for himself. [Source]
There are those terms: a reporter, a journalist, a correspondent, a newspaperman, and others. What are the differences, and which are you? Find out.
Continue reading A reporter, a journalist and a correspondent walk into a bar
