Has anyone ever successfully used an elevator pitch? I don’t know if I believe preparing a 15-second statement about myself in preparation for when a professional idol, mentor or potential employer-of-my-dream-job asks for it, perhaps in an elevator, is really anything more than HR lingo. But I took three minutes to make one anyway. Why [...]

Some folks in public relations relish the opportunity for their clients to respond to journalists in e-mail. The message can be crafted, measured and direct. Really, it ought to be a great opportunity, but most times, in my experience, I see the difference between a wizard in media manipulation and some hack. The lessons are [...]

If you are a budding journalist, or trying to break back into the game, if you’re a writer, a poet, an editor or aspiring movie star, if you want to be on TV or on radio, why aren’t you blogging? If only just a bit. Newspapers are trying to establish themselves by these online rules, [...]

Mark this off the list of simple things I wanted to get done for this site. I made the above banner, though I don’t have plans for using it as a header. Rather, it’ll serve its purpose as a focus when I need one, in places like on my blogging experience page. Something that no [...]

There are, I’m willing to bet, a lot of Jason Martins. One particular Jason Martin is an online marketing manager in Cincinnati, Ohio. He left a worthwhile comment on yesterday’s post about branidng your byline. It prompts a conversation I’ve had here and read elsewhere, but it’s always worth returning to. With a common name [...]

Last week I announced my intentions to give one of the hardest professional roads a try. I’m trying to be a freelance journalist – in Philadelphia, a city in a persistent media hiring freeze. So if it’s always important to brand yourself, now is a particularly important juncture for this underemployed writer. For more than [...]

Google Reader I am back. Last month I returned from five weeks backpacking Europe and moved into a new home in Frankford, a neighborhood in lower Northeast Philadelphia. Somehow, even though I was travel blogging and video podcasting at WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com, my month-plus European tour was an Internet vacation (IV) for me. It was a chance [...]

As of last week, Chris Wink is on MySpace. The first comment I got came from one of my oldest friends: “Wow, you are Sellout Central recently!” Surely noting my July foray into Facebook and other social networking experiences of late. I was a long hold out, interested in their function but critical of their [...]

On July 3, I finally succumbed and joined the movement that is Facebook. Six weeks later, I have 400 “friends” – yeah I am that popular. But, from when I first started thinking of giving into the social networking movement back in March, I took the decision way too seriously – wanting it to benefit [...]

Today, nearly four years after it launched, I have joined Facebook. The site itself launched in September 2004, and during that summer, while I readied to begin what would be a transcendent tenure at Temple University in Philadelphia, founder Mark Zuckerberg was watching his baby explode. From its Harvard roots, through other Boston and Ivy [...]