If you want to succeed in media or any other venue where your name is your brand – comedy, acting and more – then you better be ready. Retain that humility in person-to-person interaction, but forget about it when you near the professional realm.
As a young, aspiring journalist, I want to know what it is I need to have, what I need to know and what I need to learn. I’ve spoken to some friends, colleagues and with a few professional internships in my past, I think I am ready to fill the vaccum. What needs to be in every young journalist’s tool box?
MSNBC commentator and Philadelphia Daily News editorial board member Flavia Colgan has a page. I can only speculate, but, judging from what she shares on her page, I suspect she sees it as an easy way to help brand her identity – her name, her position and her work.
The newspaper of record for northwest New Jersey is the Herald. As such, it was the first newspaper I knew, the first read and the first I learned to criticize. But things may be changing.
The New Jersey Herald, now active six days a week, has published continuously since 1829. It is like many small, rural newspapers. With small communities, investigation is sometimes rare. Might Publisher Bruce Tomlinson and Editor Chris Frear avoid criticizing potential advertising streams when their coverage area is less than 150,000 people and their circulation is less than 15,000? Of course, but they’ve made a series of changes in recent years – like dropping their old God awful masthead seen above – and I’ve seen more of late.
I came home with lots of experience, dozens of great references, and a pile of clips. Browse my clips by publication here.
I pitched my own stories, was sent to dull and fascinating hearings, and got great clips, including front cover, A1 bylines for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Patriot-News and the Morning Call – not too bad. Below are my best six clips of the summer:
So I get really excited when readers respond to what I write. That can go further when someone uses my reporting for broader purposes. A common rag on newspapers and most media is that their reporting isn’t in-depth enough. Of course, the response is that one can’t track trends without daily coverage.
It feels great to be reminded that that isn’t a lie.
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 effects and bored with their benefits.
Brian James Kirk, a journalist I know, has a MySpace page that ranks higher in Google searches than his Web site or other professional work. Such a frustration can cause “brain hemorrhaging.” That’s for sure, which is why many people hide or at least veil their identities, particularly on MySpace – the creepiest of all social networking for anyone over 16.
I believe there is some line of thought that only those who like you enough will take the time to prank you. If this is true, it is entirely possible that the Harrisburg bureau of the Philadelphia Inquirer, one of the largest and oldest metro dailies in the country, loves me.
Late last month, I was working on a large story for the Inquirerwhen influential Harrisburg correspondent and noted… prankster (the kindest way to put this, I think) Mario Cattabiani told me to drop everything and get on an assignment. He and his fellow Inqy Harrisburg staffers were launching a state government blog at the behest of their editors – which I already knew – and it was going live that day – news to me.
The editors didn’t want to seem to be biting off on the series of already established Harrisburg government blogs so they wanted to profile one of the more respected bloggers and suggested John L. Micek of the Allentown Morning Call, who hosted the popular Capitol Ideas.
More than just the newspaper bubble, today’s industry fears are the result of another cultural divide, just like one journalism faced in the late 1960s and early 1970s, famed by the Watergate scandal.
We can see this in an old tradition that died here in the Capitol newsroom more than 20 years ago. This from a brief history on the PLCA, the oldest society of its kind:
…There was a prestige reason and a practical reason to be concerned with who had been in the newsroom the longest. The prestige reason was that the senior reporter was the one who terminated news conferences, not unlike the custom, still followed today, at [some] White House press conferences. When he judged that questions had been satisfactorily posed and answered, the senior reporter would say, “Thank you, governor,” and the news conference was over. That tradition later ended [in Harrisburg]. The practical reason was picking first in the “the divvy.”
The divvy was the ultimate divide between older and younger reporters.
