Next week I’ll be speaking to a group of first-year journalism students at the University of Florida who are just learning to love their dog-eared AP stylebooks. They (and my former professor) are expecting me to help give them an idea of what they need to know about multimedia journalism to help “make it” as new hires. The class is a mixed bag of soon-to-be writers, photographers, designers, copy editors and –perhaps after hearing me talk– party planners.
So if you, my esteemed readers and friends, could help me out, I’d love some input on the following question:
What are the top three things a freshman journalism student should do or know to be a competitive job candidate three years from now?
I’ll be sharing your answers with the class, so don’t let me down! You can enlighten UF’s freshmen in the comments (cahman, share!) or e-mail me directly if you’re shy.
1. Start blogging. Write about whatever you want, but become as knowledgeable as you can about one or two topics you’re passionate about, and read and write about them constantly. Learn to design your own blog, and use a feed reader to do your online reading.
2. Treat everything you produce as a piece of professional public work, whether it’s text or photos or a video you post on YouTube. Your Web presence is an important part of your portfolio. You will be Googled.
3. Choose one online skill and become great at it. Edit video, podcast, create Flash infographics, design blogs, be a Soundslides ace — have a specialty.
Forget about platform. More and more every day, you won’t just write for print, or just write for a blog, or just do video for TV. You’ll be doing ALL of those things. You won’t work for a newspaper or a radio station. You’ll work for a media company, and the more things you can do, the more valuable you’ll be. So taking just print or just broadcast classes is shortsighted and dumb.
Don’t just learn computer programs; learn about how the computer actually works, how the Internet actually works. I’m not talking TCP\IP engineering, just the basic concepts of operating systems and Internet protocols. Don’t be a prisoner of your software.
If you don’t know how to think logically and critically, if you don’t know how to ask the right questions (and, sometimes, keep asking them), all the technical expertise in the world won’t matter.
I think the editor of the News-Record gives some good advice: http://blog.news-record.com/staff/jrblog/archives/2006/09/jan_schaefer_of.html
also, howard owens:
http://www.howardowens.com/index.cfm?action=full_text&ARTICLE_ID=2277
I think it comes down to three attitudes:
1. Excitement about change
2. Desire to learn new things
3. Embrace the “other” – i.e., the community
If you have these three attitudes, the skills and knowledge will naturally flow.
1. Become a great reporter — know how to work a phone, work a room, flirt with a secretary, cozy up to a crook, convince an untrustworthy politician to trust you, get regular people to feel comfortable with you, learn to feel comfortable around powerful people, always carry a mechanical pencil and double-check the spelling of people’s names.
2. Become great with the computer — know the ins and outs of every content-management system you can find, understand at least the basics of html, be able to work in Flash and Photoshop as easily as you can work in Word, build something online using open-source software such as WordPress or Joomla, learn to work a spreadsheet like an investment banker and an audio file like a sound technician, always carry a digital camera and double-check the spelling of people’s names.
3. Become a great person — be fair in your reporting and kind to strangers, keep your complaints to a minimum, work harder than the people around you, learn to understand yourself before trying to get others to understand you, don’t dress like a bum, call your Mom, always carry spare change for the winos and double-check the spelling of people’s names.
Hey, Paul, that’s WAAAYYY more than three. 🙂
I’m glad everyone is pitching in with advice for my brethren at UF. Thanks to everyone who has commented so far and those who posted on their own blogs about this (Bryan Murley, Mindy McAdams, lotsa love to you guys).
Not only will I be providing this advice to the students, but I’ll also be using this as a personal example of how readers can become a part of developing a story and improving it with their insights — simply if you take the time to ask them nicely!
Again, thanks everyone; I’ll let you all know how it goes!
I’m glad everyone is pitching in with advice for my brethren at UF. Thanks to everyone who has commented so far and those who posted on their own blogs about this (Bryan Murley, Mindy McAdams, Rich Cameron, lotsa love to you folks).
Not only will I be providing this advice to the students, but I’ll also be using this as a personal example of how readers can become a part of developing a story and improving it with their insights — simply if you take the time to ask them nicely!
Again, thanks everyone; I’ll let you all know how it goes after Monday!
From someone that was hired one year ago at a 90,000 daily as a phone clerk and has moved up quite a bit in one year, students must know in three years that a degree doesn’t mean they can walk into a newsroom and become a columnist and/or the No. 1 reporter. You must start somewhere, and that somewhere is traditionally a very low place (low as in on the totem pole and in the pay scale)
Also, read a newspaper. Every day. I can’t tell you, as a former EIC of one of the top JC papers in SoCal for a year, people come in not reading one inch of a newspaper (sure, plenty of blogs and web sites) but rarely did I find someone who actually read a newspaper. To me, it shows when reading their copy.
As a newbie in the field of multimedia journalism (just started my first “real” job last January), here is what I have found the most useful – sorry there are four not three:
1. Understand what the different types of media are – text, audio, video, photos, infographics – and how they work. You don’t have to be the best at each of them, but understand them and their purpose.
2. Learn how to tell a story. Forget the platform and focus on the story and how to best tell it. (Each media can be used to best convey something…why are you choosing video to tell a certain story over photographs with audio? Maybe because there is a lot of action you would otherwise miss out on, etc…)
3. Get experience NOW! INTERN! WORK! Don’t restrict yourself to anything in particular. Think about the big picture and use internships/jobs to get skills – I interned for a wide array of companies and honed my skills not only in journalism but also in design, programming, and development).
4. Make use of the technology available to you! Biggest question in interviews: Do you have a blog and what is it about? Everyone has a passion – write about yours on a blog to get experience and practice! And if you are a visual person, don’t feel left out – make your blog using photo stories or videos.
I would love to see a fresh post from you, Danny, that summarizes the best of these tips. It would be VERY linkable …
I agree Danny. I’ve been waiting for the update on what you told your students. Since we’re offering advice (I know I’m late:), I’d offer up one additional piece: learning to use Excel and manipulate data. I’ve been told by reporters/editors that learning to feel comfortable with numbers will be a huge plus. So much information is online now that the more you know about what to do with it, the better you’ll be.