Job Hunt

Do you have the skills to pay the bills when you change fields? Transitioning Careers from News to PR, Part III

(Editor’s Note: This is part of a series that looks at journalism folks who have transitioned from jobs on the news side of the field to public relations and marketing over the course of their careers. I promised the folks anonymity before I got their answers, so they could be honest and also because I didn’t know how many folks I would get. Turns out, we have a lot of people who made the move for a lot of reasons, so I’ll do my best to keep the sources clear for you as we discuss their experiences. -VFF)

In case you missed it, here’s part I. And here’s part II.

If I had a dollar for every time a student asked me in an exasperated voice, “Why do I need this stuff? I’m going into (fill in the field they plan to enter)!” I’d never need to work again.

The analogy I use as an answer is this: I’m putting tools in your toolbox that you’ll likely need in that field and pretty much anywhere else you’ll go in journalism. You might not use them every day, and you might use them in a different way, but they’re tools you’ll be glad you have eventually.

To what degree I’m right has often been a mystery. Sure, former students sometimes send notes or emails or texts and tell me that they’re still using these skills, even as they move from Job X to Job Y to Career Change 1 to Career Change 2. That said, there are days I wonder if I’m flying blind.

I asked the folks nice enough to talk to me about their career transitions from news to PR if the tools we put in their toolboxes in college really helped or if they had to do a serious course correction once they changed jobs.

The answers vary, but for the most part, it sounds like we’re being pretty successful.

A former broadcaster and college media adviser who works in public affairs and public relations probably captured it best:

“I honestly don’t think the skills are all that different though – it’s all about writing. In PA/PR, it’s just that we tend to focus on the positive. But we also have to deal with the negative. The biggest difference is that when we go negative, it’s framed in the best possible light instead of just giving the facts. Like you, I went to school when we were all pretty siloed. And I was hard core news. But in the end, it’s all about the words. And that is a skill that easily translates.”

 

A marketing pro with 25 years of experience in the field said her news background gave her not only the ability to work with words, but the sense of how best to use them when she moved to PR:

“The skills I learned in college related to news writing certainly transferred into all that I’ve done. Learning how to tell a story with all the right parts was the very basis of everything I’ve done all these years. Those skills were honed and expanded upon as I took each new job in my 25+ year career.”

Knowing how to tell a story was about half of what people said they learned. The other half was learning how to tell that story to a specific audience. In other words, instead of following the model of “Here’s what I want to tell you,” these professionals learned the “How can I tell you what you want to know in the best way possible?” approach.

A California-based marketing manager for a tech company said she developed her audience-centric approach in her last stop in her news career:

“The skills 100% transfer. Everything I learned from my 6 years in journalism provided that bridge into marketing, and continues to provide a unique skill set that has served me well on this side of the fence.

“My last position in journalism was an engagement editor, where among other responsibilities, I lead the newsroom’s social media efforts. This experience landed me a position in social media at a marketing agency. After that first position, having a solid background in journalism gave me an edge for several copywriting/content-focused roles, including one where I lead content marketing for all of the agency’s clients.

“Journalism taught me how to engage an audience and tell a story, along with mass communication skills. Those skills (along with having newsrooms on my resume) have put me at an advantage in every single position I have worked in since leaving the newsroom.”

A VP who serves as a content strategist at a major financial firm said she learned a lot in school and as a news journalist that transferred to her new position. Even more, she said she continues to ask questions about how best to serve her readers every time she plies her trade:

“The skills totally transfer. Knowing how to talk to people, keep a conversation going, get people to talk, find the interesting nugget, etc. is helpful in any job or really any life situation. I always say that between my journalism career and then agency career, I’ve covered just about every industry, which is great for dinner parties! I may not be an expert in, say, fiber optic cables, but I worked on a brand that creates them, and if fiber optics happen to come up in conversation, I know enough to jump in and sound half intelligent.

“Learning how to communicate to your audience is probably the top skill I’ve used consistently throughout my career. You don’t really think about it in straight news as much, but you learn it instinctively – always asking yourself: Will the audience care about this? Do I need to explain this concept or will doing that insult their intelligence? Is this a topic they like to read about? Is this a format they prefer?

“Later as I got into B2B publishing and then agencies, those are the questions I still ask myself every day when planning content. It’s just different than straight news, because instead of your audience being “all humans who can read and live in this area,” it’s “grocery store managers” or “hospital system executives.” Knowing your audience and thinking about things from their point of view is key whether you’re creating an infographic, pitching to a journalist, or writing a tweet.”

Even though most folks said the skills transferred, more than a few said they still had to struggle a bit when it came to making the switch. Not everything they did in news worked in PR and not every PR need was taught to them during their college career.

A content manager for a firm that specializes in thought leadership said it took a while to settle into the new job and new expectations:

“The skills transfer, but the processes took me a while to figure out. I’ve only worked for one PR firm, but the systems in place are so much more structured than anything I ever experienced in newsrooms, even when I worked for Gannett. Most days, that’s a good thing – the people in charge know what they’re doing and really think ahead – but I do miss the freedom of just jumping in my car to find a random story.”

A PR professional at a prestigious private university also said that although the skills transfer, he’s not done learning yet:

“I find the writing I do in my current job very challenging, which is a great perk frankly. And I can read the minds of reporters and editors with a fair degree of accuracy. I wouldn’t be able to do my current job nearly as well without my journalism training and experience. That said, I learn everyday from my colleagues who do not have a journalism background. Their skills and viewpoints are different but complementary.”

Did college help get people ready for all media careers or was it “silo city?” Transitioning Careers From News to PR, Part II

(Editor’s Note: This is part of a series that looks at journalism folks who have transitioned from jobs on the news side of the field to public relations and marketing over the course of their careers. I promised the folks anonymity before I got their answers, so they could be honest and also because I didn’t know how many folks I would get. Turns out, we have a lot of people who made the move for a lot of reasons, so I’ll do my best to keep the sources clear for you as we discuss their experiences. -VFF)

In case you missed it, here’s part I.

When I went to school about 30 years ago (good God… My soul is starting to shrivel…), all of journalism was taught in a siloed approach: If you wanted to do newspapers, you took those classes and never saw anyone but newspaper people again, until you took the law or ethics capstone. If you did broadcast, the same thing was true, although we had a little more overlap with each other than with the kids in the strat com courses.

The PR and Ad kids seemed to be swept away right after the intro class and moved into some parallel universe where we never got to see them again. They showed up at graduation like they had been with us the whole time and we all were like, “Who the hell is that?”

My first couple teaching gigs, things were not only siloed in terms of news vs. integrated marketing communicators, but in some cases openly hostile. I remember hearing “F—ing PR kid” so often, I started wondering if the field had a branch in adult entertainment.

Professors of these varied disciplines often didn’t talk unless forced onto a committee. In student-reporter newsrooms, the students and the faculty members had an almost pathological disdain for anything involving PR. The old news theory of the “separation of church and state” when it came to ad folks and editorial folks reinforced the siloed approach we took in teaching them.

As digital publishing and social media started becoming more important than dead trees, airwaves and fax machines, it became vital for us as professors to bridge the gaps and find common ground for our students. Given the way in which academia moves at a snail’s pace and professors tend to think a great deal of their own sense of self, it’s probably a safe bet that silos remained the norm.

The folks who were nice enough to talk about life in news and PR told me that their experiences in this regard depended on a couple things: where they went to school, when they were there and how interested they were in getting a well-rounded education in the field.

For example, a VP in content strategy who attended a major journalism program said the school operated in silos, but made a few efforts to round out her experience:

“There was an attempt to ensure we got a well-rounded education in all areas of comms. So I took courses on photography for non-majors, design, branding, strategic communications, advertising, etc. although I don’t remember anything really deep into PR while in school.

“It did feel a bit siloed, and some of the courses I was required to take felt like I was checking the box because I wasn’t interested in them. Looking back, I wish I had been more invested in strategic communications, marketing (I have no memory of marketing classes being offered, but it was a while ago!), branding, etc. since that’s more of the stuff I do now.

“Also, although we were required to take statistics, the course wasn’t really applicable to marketing/comms work. Nowadays, I use consumer data all the time, so learning more about how to read that info and apply it to building marketing personas would have been super valuable.”

A practitioner who works in the field of thought leadership for professional organizations said his experience was not only more siloed, but also more hostile when it came to the news/PR divide:

“Other than being in courses with PR majors, it was silo city. The journalism professors were respectful toward PR in the classroom, but the newsroom was another matter.

“The editors/professors there had a clear disdain for the PR folks they dealt with. I think they had a right to feel that way – many of the PR folks in the city and at the university weren’t worth much.”

For a marketing manager who attended a smaller school around the same time as the VP, the siloing was a bit stronger and shaped her ideologies about the disciplines a bit more:

“It was fairly siloed. There were a few Ad/PR people in my freshman/sophomore year journalism classes, but by the time I got to the junior/senior level it was pretty much all news/editorial folks in my journalism classes. To be fair, I also did not really take any classes with an advertising or PR focus at that time.

“I don’t recall professors trashing the other side. But PR was definitely discussed through the lens of how a reporter might deal with them (ex: you can’t rely on a PR person for 100% accurate information. Get several perspectives for your story.) I remember having the perception that advertising/PR/marketing was “the dark side” and they were all sell-outs, but I think that came more from my peers.

“As far as how it aligns with my life experiences today, I guess I did sell out and join the dark side. Journalists have a much more negative view of marketers, while marketers have a pretty positive view of journalists (at least those who eventually join the dark side).”

A marketing professional in the manufacturing field who attended the same medium-sized university about 20 years earlier found stronger demarcations in how she was taught. Those silos made the transition more difficult:

“The subject was taught in a very siloed approach. You could major in Journalism, but with a News emphasis or PR/Advertising emphasis. Marketing was thrown into the PR/Advertising genre, but wasn’t its own entity.

In fact, I took a few PR/Advertising classes and the closest I saw to marketing was when we created an advertisement. We were to create an ad that could be pitched for print, radio and television. This was my first taste of marketing, though it wasn’t called that.

“As teams of 3-4 students, we created story boards (with actual drawings and cutting and pasting with scissors and glue) for a product and had to pitch it to made-up executives who were students in the same class. That experience alone was enough for me to say that I’d rather not be in advertising. It didn’t seem right for me since I was intent on writing. I followed my passion.

“The rest of my Journalism degree was focused on news writing for newspapers. It was very straightforward in its message: Write a story, include all sides, but give it an angle, create a strong lead, build the story through others and put the fluff at the end in case there are space issues on the page. I had a knack for that.

“While I’m very thankful for my training in college, it doesn’t mirror what I do today, except for the fact that newswriting and marketing are both storytelling, just in different forms.”

A few other folks mentioned that even when journalism departments tried to get them to see the field in broader terms, it had little impact. A former news reporter who now does marketing for a well-known private university said he had a focus on news and nothing else really mattered:

“I was 100% focused on news/ed and newspapers. I was guilted into taking one online-focused class and dropped my only magazine class after like two weeks. I remember nothing about PR from J-School but I would have completely ignored any discussion of it.”

The one thing that gave me hope that maybe things are changing came from the most recent grad (within the past six years) who went through a program that is actively trying to change the silos. She works as a content marketing manager for a business-to-business organization, and noted that her experiences in school spanned the field:

“It was definitely not siloed. I was a journalism major with a writing and editing emphasis. Within the journalism department, we had some core classes that included students with other areas of emphasis in the program (such as PR or visual/photojournalism) as well as journalism minors. This was great because it built my skills in a variety of different areas and introduced me to people with similar interests who would go on to be great connections throughout the “media” industry at large.

“It was definitely the start of my professional network. It was also encouraged to pursue a minor and participate in extracurriculars, such as student media, to help you broaden your skills even further. I knew quite a few people with art/graphic design minors who were interested in a more visual-focused kind of career, people with English minors for a different perspective on writing and editing, radio-tv-film for a broadcast focus, and so on.

“Within those classes and extracurriculars, professors and advisers pretty clearly shared how the skills you were learning about applied across the board. In almost every class we talked about the importance of good writing, editing, and storytelling. Those skills apply whether you’re a PR pro writing press releases, a reporter covering breaking news, or a marketing guru writing website copy and blog posts.”

Transitioning Careers from News To Public Relations, Part I

(Editor’s Note: This is part of a series that looks at journalism folks who have transitioned from jobs on the news side of the field to public relations and marketing over the course of their careers. I promised the folks anonymity before I got their answers, so they could be honest and also because I didn’t know how many folks I would get. Turns out, we have a lot of people who made the move for a lot of reasons, so I’ll do my best to keep the sources clear for you as we discuss their experiences. -VFF)

—

I got a text from a former student recently that helped launch this series:

Hey Vince,

I am currently applying for a communications and marketing manager position at the school district I currently cover. Would you be willing to write a letter of recommendation for me?

This guy was probably the best reporter I’ve taught in the past 10 years, simply by the dint of being a persistent little cuss. He would dig into stuff that nobody else had the patience to go get. He wouldn’t stop poking people who had records, refused to comment or otherwise dodged him until he could get the story that needed to be told. He also tended to be the person who other people told stories that often began with, “You didn’t hear this from me, but…”

The idea that he was considering a move from news into the public relations and marketing portion of the field told me two things that I pretty much already knew: The skills we teach in our journalism-based writing courses need to transfer among the disciplines of the field and that reporters were actively looking to get out of the crumbling mess that is news.

Public relations is a booming field, as there are approximately six practitioners for every one news reporter, according to a recent study. That number is up from a 2-to-1 ratio just 20 years ago. As newspapers continue to “shed” jobs (a term that should be replaced with “axe murder jobs for the sake of corporate greed,” but I digress…) and public relations continues to grow, I have no doubt that more news journalists will be taking their talents to PR.

Thus, I wanted to know what people who had made that transition saw and thought as they decided to make it and how they think we are doing to prepare them for life beyond college in a rapidly changing field.

What follows is a series of thoughts, comments and suggestions from an array of people who were nice enough to share their experiences. They come from various universities, work in different states and serve a mix of roles in the field.

Let’s start by looking at what they’re doing and how/why they made the move.

The continued downward spiral of few good newsroom opportunities, organizations cutting jobs and the general degrading of news jobs was a common theme for a number of people who made a quick switch to the other side of the field.  A California-based marketing manager for a tech company said she made the switch from news to social media promotional work after years of job fatigue:

“To be blunt, I left journalism because I got exhausted with the low pay and yearly layoffs that often felt like the Hunger Games.

“In the year before I left, the company I was working for did an extensive reorganization where everyone in the newsroom had to reapply for ‘new’ jobs, complete with resumes and interviews with editors from other papers in the chain. Of course, there were fewer positions on the other side of the re-org. The process took 6 months and was so psychologically exhausting that it felt like a type of PTSD. And I was one one of the “lucky” ones to get a job that was basically the same as the one I had. I can think of at least one person at that paper who got a job they didn’t apply for (and probably didn’t really want).

“Marketing was the easiest field to transition to. I was the social media and engagement editor for my paper, so I was able to land a social media manager job without much hassle.”

For many people, the move wasn’t a hard break, but rather a series of small moves that had them using their skills in different ways.

A marketing manager for a manufacturing company in Wisconsin has worked as a marketing professional for the past 15 years at various institutions. Prior to that, she spent the 10 years after her college graduation as a news journalist:

“My move to the PR/Marketing side of things occurred somewhat naturally through my various places of employment. I went from writing hard news stories at newspapers to writing news stories in magazines and newsletters for non-profit organizations and then for corporate jobs.

“As the industry morphed into the digital thing it is today, the shift was made somewhat naturally as society and our culture became more interested in short stories than long stories. Ultimately, the storytelling part of my training has remained constant through my career, no matter what kind of story I was telling or for what kind of media.”

A VP at a major financial institution, who serves as a content strategist, also noted the gradual movement over time from news to marketing:

“It was sort of a gradual transition driven partially by necessity. I started out as a newspaper reporter (2003), and then over a 5-year period, I went from news to B2B magazine publishing (2005), then custom publishing (2007), which morphed into content marketing (2008ish).

“Over time, I became more of an agency person than a journalist. I got out of news initially because I was a magazine major and really wanted to break into magazine publishing. When I moved to the custom publisher in 2007, the company primarily created magazines for brands, so that was my entry into agency-land. That also happened to be when social media became ‘a thing,’ so the whole industry changed, and the company I was with adapted as needed along with it.

“By the time I left in 2014, it was a full-on marketing agency and I was a content strategist more so than an editor or writer.”

 

In some cases, the small moves were less linear, as was the case for a PR professional who works for a firm that represents professional organizations, like law firms and management consultants, in the realm of thought leadership:

“I got out of newspapering right before the economy crashed in 2008 — and when I wanted to get back in, there were fewer good opportunities (I faced some geographic constraints, too). I actually did sales/tech stuff for a few years and then some freelance writing and editing. I decided writing and editing was more for me, so I signed on with the PR firm to do that kind of work.”

Many people mentioned the issue of needing a job but being limited to a certain geographic area, such as this former broadcast journalist who also taught college courses and advised student media:

“So I was a broadcast news producer before grad school. Then taught for years and ended up making a move to DC due to my husband’s work, and PR jobs here are everywhere. I am a director at a large consulting firm serving government clients.”

The same thing rang true for a former copy editor and writer for major media outlets, who shifted to PR after more than a decade in news:

“I made the move to PR because my commute was untenable and neither my job nor my family was going to move. I looked at good employers within a reasonable distance of my house and started applying.

“Much to my own surprise, I haven’t missed journalism for a moment since I left nearly nine years ago. I don’t even miss election night pizza.”

Next time: The pros discuss the things their education did (or didn’t do) for them in terms of preparing them for life beyond the newsroom.

Throwback Thursday: Revisiting some insights from a journalism hiring manager on how to succeed in applying for jobs and internships

Based on the success of the other day’s post on people freaking out, I’m guessing more than a few students are concerned about graduation coming up and getting a job.

With that in mind, I dug out a piece I did back in 2019, where I interviewed a friend who has hired journalism folks for a living. Tim Stephens was the first person to help me see better what life looks like for people on the other side of the looking glass in terms of hiring our students.

His thoughts here might be helpful to your students as well

—

 

“Your resume is not about you:” Insights from a journalism hiring manager on how to succeed in applying for internships and jobs

Tim Stephens has spent more than a quarter of a century at various media companies, including the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the Orlando Sentinel and CBSSports.com, where he helped recruit, hire and develop talent.

“I placed a high premium on being connected in the industry and knowing what other outlets were developing track records in terms of producing quality journalists who could fit into our fast-paced, evolving newsroom culture,” he said. “Your organization will only be as good as the people working for it, and I didn’t want to miss on hires. I wanted a pipeline of talent.”

Stephens said that no matter who he hired or how long they worked for his organization, he was always looking to put the best people in the best positions when he hired someone.

“I was never afraid of losing talent…” he said. “I wanted ambitious, high-achieving performers to have opportunities to move up in their careers. Every time I lost an employee to a larger organization or an expanded role, I took it as an opportunity to find the next high achiever.”

A few years back, Stephens and I were at a convention where we talked about a massive disconnect between college-age applicants and places that hired them for internships and jobs. His insights shaped how I work with students as they build their application packages, resumes and cover letters

Last week,  I asked him some questions via email so that he could share some additional thoughts about how hiring works, what he looks for as a hiring manager and other things that might help you get where you want to go in this field.

 

What is/was life like as a person responsible for hiring interns and employees? What goes on behind the scenes that students or newly minted graduates don’t know about between the time they send in an application and the time a person gets hired?

I planned for openings months before I had them. Part of that was because I was accustomed to large organizations making occasional raids on our staff, and part of that was because of the shrinking nature of the newsroom made it extremely important to make strong hires when you had an opportunity to do so.

I had my eye on candidates who were often 2 or 3 moves away from a position on our staff. I talked to hiring managers at other companies all the time, picking their brains for potential candidates. I referred people who impressed me to hiring managers who had openings when I didn’t, with a special eye for matching those talents to newsrooms where their best attributes would be developed.

Bottom line is that it’s a small industry and you are rarely more than two or three people removed from knowing someone who knows someone.

 

One of the things you mentioned to me a long time ago was that students don’t really understand the point of their resume from a hiring-manager’s perspective. What are the problematic things students or new job seekers do in terms of creating documents or applying and how can they fix that to improve their odds of impressing an employer?

Your resume is not about you. It’s about ME, the hiring manager. If I move your resume through the stack, I am attaching my reputation to yours. I am being judged in large part by my hires. Don’t ever forget that. When I am looking at a resume, cover letter and portfolio, I am not looking at what you’ve done. Frankly, I don’t care.

What I care about is how what you have done translates into what you will DO if I hire you. Big difference. I have always tried to encourage job hopefuls to try to view the search from the perspective of the person doing the hiring.

First, you have to find out who that is. Be a reporter and do some digging. What is this person’s track record? What attributes do they value? Who previously held the job I am going for? Do your homework and help me project you into the job rather than simply to view you as an applicant.

 

If you had any key advice for students or one thing you would want to tell them about this whole process, what would it be?

Network. Always be professional — always. You never know who someone knows … or who they will become in this industry. And last, when you get an interview, try to flip that conversation toward how you’ll do the job you’re applying for, and you will take a big step toward landing it. You want me leaving that conversation feeling like you’re already part of the team.

 

Is there anything you think I missed or anything else you’d like to add?

Where you start in your career isn’t as important as who you are starting with. Do your homework on the hiring managers and the person or people who will supervise you.

Who has a track record of investing in and developing talent? Who has a track record of sending people on to bigger and better things? Who gives young journalists prime opportunities to shine when they earn them? Will you get feedback? Will you have a strong cast around you who will support your development? The most prestigious media company isn’t necessarily the best opportunity to advance.

Nursing, Social Media Experience and “Knowing I belonged:” How Emily Reise landed a digital marketing job during a pandemic

EmilyMugWith graduation drawing close, college students across the country are panicking even more than usual as they try to get a job in the middle of a pandemic. Even professionals with years of field experience are concerned about moving jobs or finding a career path as the coronavirus has made it difficult to find opportunities or stability.

Emily Reise a public relations and social media professional managed to navigate this new landscape amazingly well, landing her current position as a digital marketing coordinator for Nurses PRN in Appleton, Wisconsin about a month ago.

Reise majored in public relations and minored in environmental studies at UW-Oshkosh, all while undertaking four internships in her field. Upon graduation, she headed to St. Paul, Minnesota to work as a social media coordinator for Midwest Sign. After a year and a half, she was looking for a chance to come back home to the Fox River Valley, and found Nurses PRN.

According to its website, Nurses PRN is a staffing agency that connects clients and nurses “driven by the simple idea that better nursing care leads to better patient care.” The company notes that it has 500 active employees and fills approximately 6,000 shifts monthly for its clients.

Reise was nice enough to answer a few questions about what she learned as a student that she still uses and what she does in her new job:

 

You landed at Nurses PRN right in the middle of a pandemic and you are responsible for digital marketing content. I guess two questions that come off of that statement are a) What does your job normally entail? and b) What is life like dealing with this job now in the middle of this insanity?

“A normal day would consist of me taking leads from Facebook ads and ‘gifting’ them to recruiters in the company depending on the area they are staffing and the type of nurse they need. I am the main social media guru, so I make the content calendar, come up with content, strategize social media campaigns and monitor comments and messages. I also have my hands in email marketing, events, managing job boards, and helping edit and write website copy.

“Landing a job in the middle of a pandemic, especially in the nursing field, is chaotic to say the least! Everything is abnormal and changing which demands a ton of agility when approaching ads and job boards. Certain jobs are streaming in because of layoffs and furloughs that normally we never had an excess of. This floods the ads and gives us tons of leads we may need or not need depending on facility need. This forces me to jump in and start making decisions whether to shut off ads, make new ones, or edit the creative or copy. There is no ‘normal’ right now and no directions on how to adjust social media ads for nurses when there is a global pandemic.”

 

How did you land a job during this time of absolute uncertainty, given all the cuts to everything and how it seems like the economy is going to hell in a speedboat? What was it that drew you to this company and what was it that got them to find you as the perfect fit?

“I was looking for a new opportunity back home in the Fox Valley since I was living in the Twin Cities. I chose a day in March and interviewed with five different companies. Nurses PRN was the first company I interviewed with. By the end of the interview I remember telling them, ‘I am at a 10, I want this job- hire me today!” (They didn’t hire me that day.)

“I knew I belonged there because of how laid back and enthusiastic the marketing team was about their jobs. I clicked instantly with them. I found out later they were looking for an upbeat person who wasn’t afraid to express new ideas. Luckily, I can talk to a brick wall… I felt I connected well and after working for many companies, I now know that company culture and the people I work with is the most important factor for me.

“I got the job the next week and had to finish my current job. Two weeks after I put in my two weeks, though, the COVID-19 pandemic was heightened and I was worried they would move my start date back. Instead, they shipped a laptop, work phone, and training manuals right to my house so I could start remotely. Even though it’s not perfect, I’m so thankful to have a job during these uncertain times and working for a company who takes risks and cares enough to let me start on time.”

 

In your career to date, what are some of the most important things you learned in college in terms of being prepared to do this work? In other words, what “tools” were the most important things that college put into your “toolbox” for your career?

“Learning to write for blogs, website copy, and press releases has proved to be invaluable in my career. At my previous job, I wrote around 49 blogs in the year of 2019 alone. Now I mostly edit other people’s written work but taking Writing for the Media taught me to always comb through everything with an eye for detail.

(I still remember the day I got my assignment back from you and I went and cried in your office because I got an F since I spelled the lady’s last name in the story with an “a” instead of an “e.” You called that a major error and said I will always remember to double check details like that and never changed the grade. WELL, YOU WERE RIGHT! I STILL TELL PEOPLE ABOUT IT!)”

 

Right about now, a ton of students are looking for jobs and there is always that fear of “Oh, dear Lord, what happens when I can’t get a job?” As someone who graduated not that long ago (and who I know had some of those jitters at certain times), what kinds of advice can you give the kids who are graduating and worried about what will be out there for them, especially given our current situation?

“One of the biggest chunks of advice I can give grads, especially during the pandemic, is to be open minded. I thought I was going to be working for a sustainability company doing public relations. Now I’m working for a nurse staffing company as a marketer.

“I realized that the largest factors in finding a job you love isn’t just about the industry you are in, but the work you are doing, the people you work with, and the overall company culture. Don’t be too picky, if you think you would like the job duties, apply for it!”

 

Cheap  (and kind of self-serving) question: If Emily “now” could go back in time and talk to the Emily who was just starting her degree (with a “Writing for the Media” class), what would you tell her?

“I would say, ‘You’re right, you won’t be a journalist, but you will use these skills every single day in your career.’ Writing is something all employers crave in marketing and PR employees.

“I had to do multiple tests during interview processes to prove to the employers I knew how to write a press release or blog. I write for the media daily whether that be for social media, website copy, press releases, or blogs.

“Also, Filak was right. You will always remember spelling that damn person’s last name wrong.”

The Junk Drawer: An update on the Daily Northwestern apology, the tao of Vin Diesel and an honest look at journalism salaries

As we noted in an earlier post, the Junk Drawer is usually full of stuff that didn’t fit anywhere else but you still need, so here are a few bits and bites of things that are helpful or at least somewhat amusing:

REASON 283,435,139 I’M NOT A DEAN: In covering the Daily Northwestern apology story earlier this week, we took some liberties in explaining the best and worst ways in which people reacted to the paper’s editorial choices. A good number of folks I knew who were Medill alumni emailed the dean of the school, Charles Whittaker, asking exactly what the heck was going on at Northwestern.

Whittaker was in a tough spot: He didn’t control the paper (as is the case with almost all colleges and universities, despite what many administrators like to think) and yet the students running the place were most likely kids in his program. The paper’s actions reflected poorly on the school, even though the school itself had nothing to do with the paper. People wanted him to say SOMETHING, although anyone who has ever worked in crisis communication knows that rarely do statements in times like this satisfy everyone. (And, in many cases, these statements end up doing the PR equivalent of trying to extinguish a fire with gasoline…)

Whittaker put out a statement that, in my view, covered the bases and nailed the key points. It also did so in a way that didn’t throw anyone under the bus and yet moved the school beyond the hand-wringing point most alumni seemed to be stuck on. In reading it, I found that his points tended to mirror some of the concerns we raised here, but he did it with an eloquence that I couldn’t pull off at the time. This paragraph covered the three unpleasant truths I outlined in the post in a much tighter and with better language:

And to the swarm of alums and journalists who are outraged about The Daily editorial and have been equally rancorous in their condemnation of our students on social media, I say, give the young people a break. I know you feel that you were made of sterner stuff and would have the fortitude and courage of your conviction to fend off the campus critics. But you are not living with them through this firestorm, facing the brutal onslaught of venom and hostility that has been directed their way on weaponized social media. Don’t make judgments about them or their mettle until you’ve walked in their shoes. What they need at this moment is our support and the encouragement to stay the course.

Again, this is why I couldn’t be a dean. Well, that and I’d have to wear a tie…

 

YOU LEARN A LOT ON THE WAY TO 500: In listening to all the people talk about the Daily Northwestern’s position and how they were “much tougher back in the day,” I found myself going back to this Vin Diesel clip from “Knockaround Guys:”

Rarely do the words “Vin Diesel,” “stronger journalism” and “great philosophy” converge in a single sentence, but they all seem to work here. If those previous generations of journalists were tougher, it was because they got started earlier on their 500 fights. It’s the battles, the mistakes and the ability to live through everything that happens that gives you that toughness. That’s how you develop thicker skin, as so many people kept telling the staffers at the DN to do. It’s how you learn to tough out certain things and acquiesce in other situations.

You learn a lot of things on the way to 500, but none more important than this: You will survive and you will get better at fighting.

COME FOR THE ABUSE, STAY FOR THE LOW PAY!: Why journalists do what they do is often beyond explanation. In some cases, we find a calling, like a priest or a rabbi would. In other cases, we see how our skills match up with what news organizations need and we go for it. In many more cases, we realize we stink at math, so we figure this is the best field for us.

However, even if you’re bad at math, you can tell pretty quickly that the salaries of journalists aren’t among the highest in the world. Anecdotes often filled the ears of students who were working their way through college that, hey, you’d be better off working a fry machine at Hardee’s than doing this. Still, getting people to talk about money is really rough, so no true salary database existed in this area.

Some folks in the field wanted to change that with an open access Google spreadsheet and some publicity.

Journalists doing anonymous journalism about journalism, in the shape of Google docs, is a new development in form. And examples like the SMM list definitely bring up ethical implications that should be considered. But in the long run, we would probably all be better off if the salary list sparked a healthy conversation about who is paying whom how much, and for what.

If you want to dig around, feel free to depress yourself here. Also, if you’re living in Kearney, Nebraska or Butte, Montana and you see the six-figure salaries, remember those are mostly in New York where it can cost almost a quarter-million dollars for a parking space.

Still, you can’t beat the hours…

Until next week,

Vince

(a.k.a. The Doctor of Paper)

 

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” How to find your path from journalism classes to career success

With the start of school out here today, we’re bringing back the daily blogging. If you have any topics you’d like covered on this site, just hit us up on the “Contact Us” form and we can make that happen.

We’ll get into all sort of journalistic nuance later in the term, ranging from horrific leads to student media situations. However, as with most semesters, we start today with that slow-roll, first-day stuff that most students just want to get over. (Everyone except for that really enthusiastic kid who chose to sit in the front row and has already deemed himself/herself to be the “assistant to the teaching assistant,” much to the annoyance of everyone else in the class.)

The get-to-know-you part of class roll call often comes with the question, “So what do you see yourself doing when you graduate?” When I ask that, I tend to get one of two answers:

  1. “I have had a life plan since exiting the birth canal and please let me share it with you in excruciating detail!”
  2. “I don’t even know what I’m having for lunch today, let alone what I want to do with the rest of my life. Clearly, I am a failure, so please move on to someone else.”

I’d probably estimate about an 80/20 split in those answers, with a few “I’m pretty sure I know where I’m going” answers sprinkled in. The 80% fit into the latter category and they often feel like kids who lost their moms at Walmart: They’re wandering around in a panic as everyone else seems to know exactly where to go and they want to burst into tears.

The truth is, most of us don’t know where we’re going or how we’re going to get there. Even after we do get there, we know full well that it wasn’t a detailed plan or a series of savvy moves on our part that got us there. In some cases, it was finding a passion where we least expected it. In other cases, it was finding out that we had a set of skills we didn’t know we had that tied nicely to a career. In even other cases, it was a fortuitous bounce, a chance encounter or just dumb luck that got us where we’re going.

To help you out as you start school this year, I asked the hivemind for some advice for you on how to get where you’re going, even if you don’t know where you’re going yet. Here are a few basic areas of thought:

LOOK FOR RESOURCES AROUND YOU:

The best way to figure out what is out there for you is to ask people who have a better sense of what is actually out there. Most colleges and universities have resources for you to help explore career paths, talk out ideas or generally feel your way around toward something that might yield gainful employment. Here’s a thought from a woman who worked with college students at a small liberal-arts school on the East Coast for a number of years:

Visit your career center. They have tons of tools to help guide you in a direction you might like!

A recent educational retiree also noted the importance of these kinds of places on campus:

Most college career centers have resources, including career assessments that students can use. Also, like what another person said about trying out jobs via internships. Volunteering, doing job shadowing, and evaluating yourself, your personality, interests, skills, etc. can give you directions. There has been a lot of research about careers and the John Holland career inventory, plus the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator, which gives a lot of valuable insight into careers that might fit. There are even websites that show specific careers to fit one’s personality types. I used to do a lot of this with high school students, where the stakes are not quite as high as college, but similar resources.

Even though this sounds like simple advice, it’s great advice for a simple reason: It works. The reason it works? Well, to borrow a phrase from the Farmers Insurance folks, the people there know a thing or two about the career market because they’ve seen a thing or two in it.

(To be fair, a lot of us would rather deal with the clowns than think about our impending career moves…)

INTERN AND EXPLORE:

A lot of folks think about the need for internships and our folks in the hivemind were no exception. Here are some thoughts from someone who always knew where she wanted to work and eventually got that job:

Get internships/experience in things you think you may be interested in. If you wait until you know 100%, you could be walking the stage at graduation with only retail or food service jobs on your resume. Exploring fields you’re interested in will help figure out if it’s a fit, help get some internships under your belt, and if you find it’s not the place you want to be, you’ll still likely learn/hone transferable skills that can be helpful in whatever you do decide on

The idea of poking around at other things, perhaps not exactly what you had wanted, also played a role for a sports broadcaster, who always wanted to be a sports broadcaster and is now an actual sports broadcaster:

Get a taste of different things so you find out what you don’t like. Sports people! Get out of the sports realm for just a moment. Sports jobs are tough to come by and local sports departments in TV, radio, and newspapers continue to get smaller. Don’t have tunnel vision, there are plenty of areas with a lot of opportunities and more money. “Get out there and make yourself known.” That’s a quote from ABC World News Tonight anchor David Muir.

This guy tried a few things even as he pursued his key goal of entering sports just to make sure a) that he really liked sports and b) that he didn’t miss something he might have liked more. In the end, he might change jobs or fields, but at least he knew what he was getting into and that he was right about it.

Or as a broadcast professor noted: “Your 20s are for experimenting and for doing jobs you won’t necessarily want to do forever.”

 

DON’T WORRY. BE HAPPY.

(To be fair, again, Bobby McFerrin hates this song now. It doesn’t represent his musical tastes or skills. Still, a lot of us who grew up when it was on the radio still think of him as that “whistling guy.”)

Telling someone not to worry is like telling someone to not think of a pink elephant: It creates a counterproductive outcome. However, people who have made it to where you want to go can give you some good advice about how they zigged and zagged their way to a positive outcome. Here’s a thought from an amazing young PR pro who almost went another way:

Well, before my sophomore year I nearly dropped out and changed my major to something that I can’t even remember. But sophomore year is when I got involved in PRSSA and many organizations and was the game changer for me. I think it’s not so much about the major you choose it’s about the journey you take to get the degree. You can always change fields down the road but get involved in college. You have the rest of your life to ask yourself what you want to be when you grow up.

A college professor had similar thoughts on this issue, as he found happiness running student media and teaching students how to make something of themselves:

Use college to get new and unique experiences to find something you enjoy working in. The most important goal is happiness.

That can seem a little too “pie in the sky” for a lot of us, given that what makes my kid happy these days is sleeping until noon and watching NetFlix. I’m not entirely sure there’s a career in that, or at least a path that would lead her to eventually not spend her life living in my basement. However, some jobs lead to more misery and some to less. It’s all about what you enjoy, as a researcher who started in journalism and moved around noted:

Think about your role in your friend group and organizations. Do you come up the whole idea, do you plan the whole thing, do you get others excited? Then think about which subjects you’re strongest at (math, science, language). I love writing and thinking. I became a researcher. My brother is a planner and science person. He studied biology. He was a football coach, now medical sales.

The overall point here is that nobody really knows anything when it comes to what happens next. The kid in the front row with the plan? Ask that kid in ten years how it worked out and 80% of the time, it didn’t. (For the other 20 percent, feel free to actively dislike them and their inherited wealth.)

The advice here is based on personal experiences of people who walked the path you want to walk. They made it and you will too. At the very least, it’ll be better than living by these rules:

Have a great start to the semester. See you tomorrow.

“Your resume is not about you:” Insights from a journalism hiring manager on how to succeed in applying for internships and jobs

Tim Stephens has spent more than a quarter of a century at various media companies, including the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, the Orlando Sentinel and CBSSports.com, where he helped recruit, hire and develop talent.

“I placed a high premium on being connected in the industry and knowing what other outlets were developing track records in terms of producing quality journalists who could fit into our fast-paced, evolving newsroom culture,” he said. “Your organization will only be as good as the people working for it, and I didn’t want to miss on hires. I wanted a pipeline of talent.”

Stephens said that no matter who he hired or how long they worked for his organization, he was always looking to put the best people in the best positions when he hired someone.

“I was never afraid of losing talent…” he said. “I wanted ambitious, high-achieving performers to have opportunities to move up in their careers. Every time I lost an employee to a larger organization or an expanded role, I took it as an opportunity to find the next high achiever.”

A few years back, Stephens and I were at a convention where we talked about a massive disconnect between college-age applicants and places that hired them for internships and jobs. His insights shaped how I work with students as they build their application packages, resumes and cover letters

Last week,  I asked him some questions via email so that he could share some additional thoughts about how hiring works, what he looks for as a hiring manager and other things that might help you get where you want to go in this field.

 

What is/was life like as a person responsible for hiring interns and employees? What goes on behind the scenes that students or newly minted graduates don’t know about between the time they send in an application and the time a person gets hired?

I planned for openings months before I had them. Part of that was because I was accustomed to large organizations making occasional raids on our staff, and part of that was because of the shrinking nature of the newsroom made it extremely important to make strong hires when you had an opportunity to do so.

I had my eye on candidates who were often 2 or 3 moves away from a position on our staff. I talked to hiring managers at other companies all the time, picking their brains for potential candidates. I referred people who impressed me to hiring managers who had openings when I didn’t, with a special eye for matching those talents to newsrooms where their best attributes would be developed.

Bottom line is that it’s a small industry and you are rarely more than two or three people removed from knowing someone who knows someone.

 

One of the things you mentioned to me a long time ago was that students don’t really understand the point of their resume from a hiring-manager’s perspective. What are the problematic things students or new job seekers do in terms of creating documents or applying and how can they fix that to improve their odds of impressing an employer?

Your resume is not about you. It’s about ME, the hiring manager. If I move your resume through the stack, I am attaching my reputation to yours. I am being judged in large part by my hires. Don’t ever forget that. When I am looking at a resume, cover letter and portfolio, I am not looking at what you’ve done. Frankly, I don’t care.

What I care about is how what you have done translates into what you will DO if I hire you. Big difference. I have always tried to encourage job hopefuls to try to view the search from the perspective of the person doing the hiring.

First, you have to find out who that is. Be a reporter and do some digging. What is this person’s track record? What attributes do they value? Who previously held the job I am going for? Do your homework and help me project you into the job rather than simply to view you as an applicant.

 

If you had any key advice for students or one thing you would want to tell them about this whole process, what would it be?

Network. Always be professional — always. You never know who someone knows … or who they will become in this industry. And last, when you get an interview, try to flip that conversation toward how you’ll do the job you’re applying for, and you will take a big step toward landing it. You want me leaving that conversation feeling like you’re already part of the team.

 

Is there anything you think I missed or anything else you’d like to add?

Where you start in your career isn’t as important as who you are starting with. Do your homework on the hiring managers and the person or people who will supervise you.

Who has a track record of investing in and developing talent? Who has a track record of sending people on to bigger and better things? Who gives young journalists prime opportunities to shine when they earn them? Will you get feedback? Will you have a strong cast around you who will support your development? The most prestigious media company isn’t necessarily the best opportunity to advance.

Why NYT’s Theodore Kim ticked off a squillion journalism folks with his list of Amazing Journalism Schools and why you shouldn’t care about it at all

Theodore Kim, the director of fellowships and internships at the NYT, recently posted what he called a “super unscientific opinion on which U.S. schools churn out the most consistently productive candidates.” This list came in several tweets and tiers:

Best (no order): Columbia, Northwestern, UC Berkeley, Yale

Honorable Mentions Tier 1 (no order): Missouri, Harvard, Florida, USC, Duke, Stanford

Honorable Mentions, Tier 2 (no order): Howard, Texas, Maryland, UPenn, Cornell, UNC, Syracuse, Illinois, Arizona State, Colorado State, Florida A&M, NYU, Miami of Ohio, Western Kentucky, UC San Diego

I also forgot to mention the Newmark School (formerly CUNY), which is definitely in the mix…

Kim’s list set off the kind of social media rage usually only seen at a New England Patriots’ fan site when someone notes that Eli Manning beat Tom Brady twice in the Super Bowl and is thus a superior quarterback.

Most of the responses kind of fell into two basic areas: Outrage that the respondent’s school wasn’t included on the list/was listed too low or that the list itself read like a rich kid’s guide to picking out schools. Katy Culver, an assistant professor at UW-Madison and a Teachapalooza instructor, took a different angle, examining this as an ethics issue, noting in part:

Journalism needs to do far more to diversify the people who produce it if it’s going to have any fighting chance at representing us accurately and in the rich contexts in which we live. Bias in favor of students at elite schools only compounds the lack of diversity.

Others pushed back at this in an even more pointed way: If you’re the guy picking interns and you lay out a list like this, it really comes across like you have a bias toward Schools A, B and C and maybe against those X, Y and Z Colleges. To his credit, Kim didn’t claim he was hacked by the Russians or that someone spiked his Diet Coke or something when he wrote the original list:

KimOwned

While you decide whether it’s worth it or not to scour Kim’s list in search of your school, consider a few thoughts:

  • Lists Like This Are Just Stupid: Look, I get it. Lists can seem like a fun idea and they often get a lot of traction. This is why Jonah Peretti and the Buzzfeed crew have enough money to buy half of the planet at this point. It’s also why we can waste half of our day arguing about who was a greater “clutch” quarterback or which “Star Wars” movie was the best/worst. In the end, however, these things lack value and come from no serious vantage point. If you want the best look at how stupid this is, consider a classic clip from “The Newsroom:
  • Your Degree Doesn’t Make You: In going down the rabbit hole that was Kim’s tweets and the backlash that followed, I found support for the argument I’ve been making for years now: It doesn’t matter where you go to school. If you want something badly enough and you work hard enough, you’ll get something great out of your time as a journalists.One of the things that came up when I left Mizzou and went to Ball State was the students at my new university wanted to know if they were as good as those at my old university. “Do we measure up to the Mizzou kids?” one newsroom student asked me. The answer I gave him was the same that I give the kids at UWO, who ask if they’re as good as the kids at Ball State:

    The degree from one of these places is shiny. It looks good and it can open some doors. However, the dumbest kid I ever taught at (Aspiration School X) isn’t automatically better than the smartest kid I ever taught at (Downtrodden School Y). Those Lord Almighty Schools of Journalism Brilliance and Deity don’t hand you a brain when you graduate that has all the answers in it. In fact, I find that a lot of students who rely on the idea that graduating from one of those Holy Grail Universities to solve all their problems tend to do horribly once they graduate.

    Maybe this is a better example of how this doesn’t matter at all. Check out this photo of two dudes from the same state who graduated from college at about the same time:

    JVHandMe.jpg

    The guy on the left is me. I grew up in the largest city in Wisconsin, attended the flagship university in the state and got a journalism degree from the oldest journalism program in the country. I also got a master’s from there and a Ph.D. from Mizzou, which will argue with anyone that it is the greatest J-school in the country. I worked on a night desk at the Wisconsin State Journal and eventually went into teaching.

    The guy on the right went to UW-Oshkosh, occasionally derisively called “UW-Zero,” and got a degree in poli sci and journalism. (UWO is in nobody’s top anything and its so far off Kim’s list that he probably couldn’t find it with a search light and a posse.) This guy worked as a sports writer at the Oshkosh Northwestern for a while and could have stayed in his hometown forever.

    Instead, he scored a job working at the Washington Post. That’s impressive but what’s even more impressive is that Jim VandeHei quit the Post and co-founded two of the most important political journalism organizations in the past 50 years: Politico and Axios.

    Axios, his current gig, has a readership in the millions while I’m writing a blog with literally tens of readers (and I’d like to thank you all for getting me up to that number). He drew in millions of dollars of investment capital for the Axios launch and it is so successful, Axios has a video news program on HBO as well. I bogart video clips from YouTube that feature programs that once ran on HBO.

    The point is, if you looked at both of us on paper in the mid-1990s, you’d never guess who would go on which path and the degree of success the guy from a “branch school” would have achieved. And I know he’s not the only success story like that out there. And you might be the next one.

 

  • There Are Always Folks Like This. Your Job Is To Prove Them Wrong: The thing that bugged me the most about Kim’s list wasn’t that he published it or that he ranked certain schools in certain ways. What bugged me was that this wasn’t the first time I’d see this kind of attitude and I know it won’t be the last. Here’s a story I shared with some friends after this broke:
    I had a student who was an editor for me at UWO. Smart kid, decent grades, hell of a good student media practitioner. I took her with me to a college journalism convention where a variety of people were doing internship recruiting. She had an interest in PROGRAM X, and I happened to know the recruiter, so I asked how she did in the meet and greet etc.    She’s fine, he explained, but she’s not going to get in. When I asked why, he said, “We don’t take people from branch schools.” He then elaborated that they only really take people from ELITE SCHOOL X (one of those listed on Kim’s top of the pops), ELITE SCHOOL Y (a good tier one on Kim’s list) and people from GEOGRAPHIC AREA X. His rationale was that the kids there were just “better” (although he couldn’t quantify that for me) or if the kid was a disaster, they could say, “How could we know? The kid went to X or Y!” (the geographic area was because they could get kids there and ship them out for bus fare, basically.)

    The silver lining was that I told my student to apply anyway, she did, she got in and she got a hell of a good scholarship, a hell of a good internship and a hell of good media life out of it. The reason? It was her sole goal to prove this person wrong and show she was just as good as anyone else.

    I know I tend to get a little too “rah rah” on this blog some times, but it’s only because I see so many students on a weekly basis who feel they can’t succeed. It’s like the world is filled with better, smarter, faster and richer kids than them and it’s only by a miracle on par with the loaves and fishes that they managed to get this far.  The truth is, gumption, grit and a general sense that you CAN do it often separates those folks who get where they want to go from those who don’t.

    The best form of revenge for being told that you aren’t of the proper ilk is to go out and find a way to have an amazing fulfilling life. It also feels pretty good to flat-out crush these folks at their own game and become awesome.

 

Cover Letters 101: How to tell your story and connect with an employer in journalism

I spent about half of the week working to get students into classes through our advising process and the other half working with students in a panic over trying to get an internship or a job.

Their biggest freakout? Cover-letter writing.

I’m hoping this post can help you (or your students) build a pretty standard cover letter that will touch on the basics, avoid any major problems and possibly even stand out among your peers as a quality candidate. (I grabbed most of this from the reporting book’s appendix, with a few alterations to make things clearer or better…)

Cover letters 101

In the days of texts and tweets, the idea of a cover letter can seem as quaint and unnecessary as communicating via the Pony Express. Some publications require a cover letter as a matter of course and to meet specific requirements set forth by a human resources department. Other places will ask for an email or a video or some other form of introductory element that goes beyond the resume to explain who you are and why you matter. Regardless of the format, you want to put your best foot forward when you formally introduce yourself in the hiring process. Here are a few bits of advice to help you alone:            

 

Start with a connection if you have it: If it’s an opening paragraph or an opening line in a video, you want to introduce yourself to your audience in a way that gives you an edge over any potential competition. One of the best ways to make this happen is if they already know you, which is why networking is so crucial throughout your college (and professional) career.

If you went to a journalism conference and met a recruiter for the Johnson Journal, she might say, “Hey, we have an internship this summer that you might want to consider.” That connection can be helpful in pulling you to the top of the stack, if she remembers you. That’s why you want to start with something like, “It was great to meet you this fall at the ABC Media conference, where we talked about potential internship opportunities. Given what you told me there, I was excited to see you had this internship available and I couldn’t wait to apply.”

In some cases, you won’t have that connection, but you will have that “friend of a friend” connection that you can exploit for your own benefit. Professors get emails or messages from former students all the time, asking if they know of any good students that might be interested in an internship or a job. If the professor handed this off to you, this is another great way to connect with a potential employer: “Professor Smith said you were looking for a hard worker to fill your internship position this summer and he recommended that I send you my resume.”

If you lack any specific “in” with a potential employer, consider telling the employer where you found their advertisement and why you felt you compelled to apply for the opening. For example, you could explain that you read the publication frequently or that you have professors who speak highly of the writing it puts out. You could also look for a way to tie your interests to their needs. In doing this you could mention how you covered specific things such as crime or sports and that is what drew you to the company’s open position for a crime reporter or a sports reporter. Look for a way to reach out and explain to the person reviewing resumes, “Hey, I’m interested in you for a good reason!”

 

Explain, don’t repeat, your resume: When students take essay tests, I often advise them to go through the essay question and highlight key phrases and active verbs so that they don’t miss any section. Things like “Compare and contrast the four ethical codes” and “Describe the structure of an inverted pyramid story” call for specific actions on the part of the student. Going through and noting those requirements can be helpful when the students want to provide the most complete answer possible. If you use that same formula when you write your cover letter, you can set yourself apart from the people who use form letters to regurgitate their experience.

Go through the job posting and highlight specific things the job requires or the employer wants. This could include things like “must be proficient at social media” or “needs the ability to work well under deadline pressure.” Once you highlight those elements, pick out the ones you want to discuss in your cover letter.

At this point, you don’t want to repeat your resume, but rather link your experiences to their needs and do a solid job of explaining how they connect through narrative examples. Let’s say the need is “must work well under deadline pressure.” You can link that to your work in student media with an example of how you did this:

“You noted in your position description that you need someone who works well under deadline pressure. As a news reporter at the Campus Crier, I often found myself working on tight deadlines including one case where I got a tip about the university’s president resigning. In less than two hours, I managed to get the story confirmed and written. Even better, I scooped the local paper.”

Not every need will attach itself to one of your great adventures in media, but you should look for those opportunities to show people what you did and how it can be of benefit to them.

 

The Money Paragraph: Why should they hire you? After you outline your skills and traits but before you thank the person for considering your application sits the most important couple of sentences in your letter: The Money Paragraph. At this point, you should have made a good impression and have the person on the other end of the letter thinking that you might be a good fit. It is right here that you want to seal the deal and give the employer something to remember.

Each of us has that “one thing” that we think we’re better at that most of the rest of the people in our field. We pride ourselves on our ability to work through problems, to constantly look for positives in every situation or to smooth over personnel concerns. Whatever that “one thing” is for you, hit it here with some emphasis. The goal is to say to an employer that if she is looking through your application and Candidate X’s application and everything completely equal to this point, here’s the big reason why you should get the job over that other person:

“Above all else, I constantly look for new ways to reach the audience. I was one of the first reporters on our staff to integrate digital tools like Periscope and Storify into my work. I knew this was how most people in our audience got the news and now everyone else at our publication uses these tools as well. I will always look for the next best way to connect with the readers and viewers and I think this approach could really boost readership for your organization.”

 

The last paragraph should simply wrap things up with something like,” With all of this being said, I think I’d be a great candidate for (WHATEVER), so please feel free to contact me at (PHONE NUMBER) or via email at (ADDRESS).” Make sure you type your name and sign the letter. If it’s digital, you can sign a printed copy and then scan it back in there.

(Instead of doing that, a long time ago, I grabbed a piece of paper and practiced my signature until I was happy with it. I then did a large version of it with a big Sharpie and scanned that into my computer. I saved it as a jpeg and just insert it now as a signature. Works well.)

Before you send this off, have at least one other person read it for any spelling, grammar or other goofy errors. Make sure you have the name of your contact spelled right and the name of the organization done properly (is it Advanced Titan or Advance-Titan  and is it hyphenated or not?). Then, fix any minor glitches and submit your application.

Your parents’ generation sucked at this, too: 4 helpful thoughts on finding your way through life

Scott Cunning, an associate professor of economics at Baylor University, recently laid out his life path and his feelings regarding jumping into grad school right after college as part of a Twitter thread.  He makes a number of points that are good, including the idea that grad school shouldn’t be about inertia or self-doubt, but rather when you know what you want (and that you want grad school). He talks about job choices and the benefits to getting one as well here, and I highly recommend giving the whole thing a read.

The nexus of his thesis is something students should keep in mind: You won’t know what you want to do until you end up running into it. That can make for some pretty high levels of anxiety for students and parents, as well as some really awkward family gatherings where random relatives feel it is their duty in life to say, “So you STILL don’t know what you’re doing yet?” instead of “Nice to see you. Pass the potatoes.”

In hopes of helping you defend your psyche from the chaotic panic and shutting down the naysayers who keep blaming your generation’s downfall on “FaceSpace and those iText things,” here are four things to keep in mind:

 

Everyone in college is lost and that’s just fine: At the beginning of each semester, I ask the students in each of my classes what they want to do with themselves once they get out of school. Some of them have a vague notion, half of an idea or a general sense, and that is about the BEST it gets. Only once in all my time teaching did I ever really have a kid tell me something straight-up honest and it was last semester:

Me: So what do you want to do with your IWM (Interactive Web Management) degree?
Him: Make a ton of money.
Me: How will that work?
Him: I don’t know. I’m gonna figure that out when I graduate.

For the rest of the people in my class, it’s like this: “I want to graduate, get a job, not move into my parents’ basement and not have to answer stupid questions like this one from every relative who runs a business selling wiener dogs out of a mobile home and somehow thinks they’re better than me.” Spoiler alert: That’s the American dream of this generation.

Cunning is right, though, in that you won’t know what you want to do until you do it, which is why they force you to take a boatload of general education requirements in college: They figure you don’t know what you want, so they give you a taste of a bunch of stuff.

Instead of taking those classes with only the edict of “Please, God, not another 8 a.m. on Fridays,” look at classes that might interest you and see where they take you. That’s how you bump into things you might like to do for the rest of your life and find some direction. In the mean time, it’s not a problem to not know.

 

Being good at something doesn’t mean you should do it: The longest-running argument in my life is between my mom and me about what I should have done right out of college. She still believes that I would have made a great speechwriter for politicians, based on my various skill sets. I liked to write and had the ability to turn a phrase fairly easily. I did well in public speaking courses and extracurricular activities, such as debate and forensics. I worked well under pressure and could logically process information quickly. It seemed like a perfect fit for me.

Here’s the counterargument I had for mom: I hate politics.

I spent a lot of time with political figures during college, ranging from student government folks on up through the city and county leaders and found I disliked the majority of them and their attitudes. I never understood the wrangling and the gamesmanship they used to carve up their little portion of the world just a little bit finer. I also hated the arrogance and ego associated with the jobs. Why on Earth would I want to write things for people like this so they could snow under a whole bunch of voters in hopes of furthering their own petty agendas?

The point is, Mom and I were both right in some way. She was right that I had the talent and skill set to do this as a job, and I was right that I’d rather gargle with raw sewage than subject myself to that career path. Thus, the maxim outlined above.

You might have a talent, a skill or some general proclivities that push you into a realm of study or onto a career path, but keep in mind that just because you can do something, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you should. If you don’t like something, don’t put yourself in a position where you dedicate your life to it.

In this regard, Dad had the better take on this topic: Find something you like doing and you’ll never work a day in your life.

 

You are not a fraud, even though you will feel like one: During my doctoral program, we had a class in which every faculty member in the school could come in and discuss his or her research or offer us advice. Of all the advice I got at that point, a couple stuck with me, including this one from Dr. Stephanie Craft:

A few years into your career, you are going to look around and panic because you think that you are a fraud. You will worry that you aren’t good enough or smart enough or whatever and you figure that it’s only a matter of time before everyone else figures this out, too. You then start counting the days until the entire illusion you’ve built will shatter and you won’t know what to do.

Don’t worry. It’s not true. You are not a fraud. You will be able to push past this.

A few years ago, I read about this concept called “imposter syndrome” that essentially captures this whole notion perfectly. It happens to a lot of people and it’s not something you can necessarily dodge in advance of its arrival. When it hit me, it didn’t matter how much work I had done, how well I had done at that work or what everyone else thought about how awesome I was. All that mattered was that I figured I’d eventually get caught short and revealed as something between a carnival huckster and a guy selling snake oil out of the back of a covered wagon.

The one thing that made the difference was remembering what Dr. Craft told me and realizing her prescience on this fraud fear arriving also made it likely that she was right that I could beat it.

 

Your parents’ generation sucked at this, too: If your parents tell you that they knew everything when they were your age or that they had a job or that they knew their destiny, I’ve got two words for you: “Reality Bites.” This movie came out 25 years ago, or roughly around the time many of your parents were finishing up their college careers and looking around for whatever that next stage of life would provide. This movie really captured the post-collegiate zeitgeist better than almost anything else at the time, and it provides you with the perfect time capsule to look at what your parents dealt with.

You have Lelaina, Winona Ryder’s character, who was working as a young assistant producer for a cheesy morning show where the host (John Mahoney) treated her like crap.  When she got fired for perhaps the best on-air prank possible, she tried to find a job in her field, only to realize that she couldn’t get hired anywhere. Her father thought her generation had no work ethic. She craps all over her friend Vickie for offering her a job at The Gap, and falls into the bell jar of trying to find meaning in life via a “psychic partner” phone line. It only gets weirder from there (although the final love connection she makes is really too Hollywood for its own good).

If you strip away that last part, you realize that this generation didn’t know anything either, and I say that as PART OF IT. Sure, she fell in love at the end, which is pretty much what the film industry was selling at that point, but she didn’t have a job, was dead broke, had to use her father’s gas card to pay bills and there was no sense she was figuring it out. (And yes, that’s why reality really does bite.) Still, that generation eventually dug in, figured something out and managed to build a life that produced you.

Whatever they tell you about their origin story, view it through the prism of “Reality Bites” and you’ll probably be closer to reality.