Be a Tigger not an Eeyore, and other job-hunting advice

In my Participatory Journalism class this week, we’ll be talking about how to get a job. We’ll start tomorrow with some basics of cover letters, resumes and interviewing. (Guests are welcome — we’ll be in Lee Hills 101A from 12-1:15.) Overall, though, the theme of the discussion will be about how we tell stories about ourselves — how we craft the narrative about ourselves that we want people to experience.

Here are a bunch of links I’ve saved related to job-hunting .

Here’s a smaller, curated list of the best ones for new grads. I made it last summer when I was teaching at the Poynter College Fellowship program.

So, what’s your story? Is it consistent across platforms? Do you have the quick version ready to go in case you find yourself in an elevator with your dream employer and have seven floors to make an impression? Do you have a longer one that makes for a killer cover letter? Do you have details to back it up for the interview conversation?

Continue reading “Be a Tigger not an Eeyore, and other job-hunting advice” →

A note for student editors: There is life after major screwups

Some college newspaper editors here at Mizzou have landed in a heap of controversy after the publication of an April Fools issue.

They’re in good company. Young journalists learn early that their mistakes have big consequences, that they have to learn in the public eye and that jokes they find funny are lost on a larger audience.

I know about these situations personally because I was one of those students. As the editor of my college paper, The Oklahoma Daily, I was the object of an outraged audience’s wrath not once but twice. Both times, I published something I thought was going to be helpful for discussion about race relations on campus. And both times, the audience made it clear just how wrong I was.

And boy, was I wrong.

Continue reading “A note for student editors: There is life after major screwups” →

Where’s the mouse? My favorite Shirkyism

Prepping for a class discussion on the powers of collaboration, I’m re-reading Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus. I was struck again by a specific passage that I just might read aloud to my newsroom this week.

Shirky tells the story of the little girl who, while watching a DVD, went behind the TV to look for the mouse.

He then writes:

Here’s something four-year-olds know: a screen without a mouse is missing something. Here’s something else they know: media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for. Those things make me believe that the kind of participation we’re seeing today, in a relative handful of examples, is going to spread everywhere and to become the backbone of assumptions about how our culture should work. Four-year-olds, old enough to start absorbing the culture they live in but with little awareness of its antecedents, will not have to waste their time later trying to unlearn the lessons of a childhood spent watching Gilligan’s Island. They will just assume that media includes the possibilities of consuming, producing, and sharing side by side, and that those possibilities are open to everyone. How else would you do it?

The girl’s explanation has become my motto for what we might imagine from our newly connected world: we’re looking for the mouse.