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Matters of Varying Insignificance

Useful Resources for Some, Useless Rants for Others

So Much for the Tampa Tribune’s One-Section ExperimentOctober 10

One week. That’s how long the Tampa Tribune’s one-section weekday paper experiment lasted. The new look debuted this Monday, and the newspaper announced on Thursday that it is going back to a more traditional multi-section format starting next Monday.

I haven’t picked up the new format, I don’t live in Tampa, and I don’t know the area or its people, so I’m not going to wax on about something I know nothing about by trying to critique the one-section format. Instead, I just wanted to make one observation.

First, a comment from Tampa Tribune executive editor Janet Coats in announcing the return to multiple sections, via The Feed:

It was a noble experiment, but we’re going to back up a step,” said Tribune executive editor Janet Coats. “People want sports in a separate section…they want to be able to hand sections around. Turns out, we had really disrupted the way people communicate with each other in the morning.

Now, a previous comment from Coats i

National Press Club Forum at UNC: The Future of NewsOctober 8

I attended a National Press Club forum at the UNC School of Journalism and Mass Communication last night. The topic was “The Future of News”. The forum was mediated by Donna Leinwand, a USA Today correspondent, the press club’s vice president and a UNC alumna. The four-member panel consisted of:

• Orage Quarles, publisher of the News & Observer (Raleigh, N.C.)
• Penny Muse Abernathy, the school’s Knight Chair in Digital Media Economics
• Deborah Potter, director of NewsLab, a nonprofit journalism resource in Washington, D.C.
• Jim Hefner, professor at the school and former VP and GM at Raleigh-based WRAL

A couple observations from the forum:

• It was sparsely attended. The forum was held in Carroll Hall’s auditorium, and the room wasn’ close to half full.
• The ages of the audience also struck me. I’m 29, and while in the workplace it may be relatively easy for me to still be in the younger half of the crowd, that’s usually impossible on a college campus swarming with 18- to 21-year-olds. Yet that was the case

How to (Voluntarily) Become an Ex-Journalist, Part 4October 8

One problem that many journalist face in trying to leave newspapers mid-career is how to convince a prospective employer through your application material that you have the skills, if not the experience, to do the job. In this post, I’ll share some of the things that have worked for me. In fact, I’ve had to accomplish this task a couple of times — first when I went from designing newspaper sports pages to a job where I did scientific illustrations and designed science educational materials, then again when i went from being a designer at an ad agency to a PR position where I was hired for my writing skills. So it’s definitely doable.

Generalist, not specialist

I began my career with several years as a part-time sports correspondent while in college, and I still did some writing after I first got a full-time job as a sports designer/copy editor. These days, when I talk about my writing experience in my application letter and resume, I call myself a “writer who spent the first X years of his career as a journalist”, not “sportswriter”. See the difference? In the former, I present myself as a writer who CHOSE to apply his writing skills to journalism (note that I don’t even mention sports in that phrase), whereas in the latter I come off as someone whose skills are

How to (Voluntarily) Become an Ex-Journalist, Part 3October 8

I wrote yesterday about how to approach your job search as you try to get out of newspapers. Today, I’ll talk about some of the fields that you can get into with the skills you used in journalism and, in some cases, a little bit of extra learning. This isn’t meant to be an all-inclusive list, just a few things off the top of my head. I’ll talk about the skills you need for each job, why it could be a good fit for a former journalist, and why it might not be a good fit.

COMMUNICATIONS / PUBLIC RELATIONS

OK, for many journalists, going into PR might feel like selling your soul. After all, aren’t PR people the spin artists who try to obstruct our finding the truth? Well, yes, in some cases. But realize that there are also PR or communications jobs that don’t require you to lie. In fact, when I took my current job as a member of the media relations department at the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, I asked my boss for some tips on dealing with the media. The first thing he said was, “Don’t lie,” which I admit did take me by surprise a bit. I would estimate that 99.9 percent of what we do is help reporters find the drug expert they need for their stories or to pitch stories t

How to (Voluntarily) Become an Ex-Journalist, Part 2October 8

After spending the first part of this series badgering and bludgeoning you into deciding that it’s time to leave journalism, I’m going to use this post to talk about how to approach a job search in trying to land a non-journalism job using the same skills you used in your journalism careers.

Compile a List of Job Sites and Check It Frequently

Just as a beat reporter would check with his/her sources on a regular basis to see if there’s any news, a job seeker needs to make the rounds. You’ve got your usual suspects like Monster and Careerbuilder, and I’ve found Craigslist to be a very abundant source for writing and design jobs, especially at smaller local companies. Also, be sure to check the classifieds in your paper (oh irony of ironies) and other local publications.

Aside from those general job sites, look for:

• Industry-specific sites, such as creativehotlist.com for design jobs.
• Sites of various trade associations.
• If you are looking to remain in your current area, look around and see who the biggest employers are, then go find the job boards on their sites.
• Nonprofits’