Since becoming the Detroit Free Press' recruiter in 1990, my work and the journalism industry have changed in unexpected ways. The transformation is rapid. One benefit is that I now learn from and help other Gannett recruiters. NewsRecruiter.com is a hub site that helps keep everything organized. It tells you what I am up to, it links to my latest work and it is a test site for new projects. My best ideas have always come from you, so please write. >more bio >resume >e-mail >twitter
As if newspapers don't have enough to worry about ...
On the Huffington Post, Henry Blodget wrote that young people, bored by what newspapers are doing, may one day get all worked up about it, and not in a good way.
Blodgett postulates that, "As 'green business' practices take hold, a new generation of consumers
will come to view the newspaper industry as a horrifically wasteful
polluter that eats forests, gobbles fuel and electricity, and farts
untold amounts of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere -- all to deliver
information that might have been interesting yesterday."
I've been thinking about that for the past couple weeks and think his prediction has merit. While the level of disdain is unpredictable, the conclusion seems to be unavoidable, even as much as publishers would like to eliminate the costs of paper and fuel.
Any paper product, or physical product, can be in for the same criticism, but the short shelf life of the newspaper, its low cost and easy availability seem to make it a likely target.
Shortly after Blodget's prediction appeared, I was in Washington, DoC., getting around the city on the Metro. I boarded at the Cleveland Park stop, man pushed a copy of the free Washington Express tabloid into my hands and I carried it with me for about four stops to the Metro Center stop.
There, I got off the train and fell in with a few of commuters who trooped past a trash receptacle. Several shoved still-new copies of the Express into it. I snapped a picture. Their copies had been "in circulation" for 15 minutes. That kind of throwaway news consumption could one day lead to subway stop activism.
Newspapers can get busy as soon as tomorrow to engage this issue on the field of public opinion.
* I frequently see "Please recycle" printed on items that I am not sure can be recycled. Maybe it's just a slogan to them. Newspapers can be recycled, should be recycled and are an important segment of the recycling game. When newspaper consumption is reduced, recyclers are hurt. Their business can be jeopardized by a lack of materials or a mix that is increasingly harder to break down. Newspapers can start telling that story.
* For years no, newspaper have also helped out recyclers by buying a lot of their product. Newspapers would be doing themselves a favor by stating, on the front page, how much of the paper's content is recycled. Again, let's tell how important the newspapers are to keeoing recycling operations humming.
* I have a harder time with arguments about fuel usage. And publishers would just as soon get out from under those costs/ Are their stories to tell about how newspaper drivers plan their routes to conserve fuel or whether the newspaper is an efficient way to deliver? If there is, let's read it.
* Finally, and quite aside from how newspapers are printed and delivered, newspapers can use their editorial pages to champion green causes and their news pages to describe environmental issues and efforts.
ABC News has posted a piece about maternal profiling -- the practice by some employers of asking whether female job candidates have children. Several have said that as soon as that information was out in the open, their employment prospects plummeted.
Twenty-two states and Puerto Rico forbid questions about parenthood, but other states allow it, sometimes with the proviso that it be asked of male and female candidates alike. While it is legal in some states to ask about marital or family status, it is not legal to discriminate on the basis of those factors.
The ABC News article interviewed women who felt they lost job opportunities when their status came to light, but it said that proving that can be difficult.
Coverage by ABC News is no doubt welcome by Kiki Peppard, who has been lobbying for stronger anti-profiling laws and who has been critical of the mainstream media for not taking up the issue.
I have heard people say not even half jokingly, that flat is the new up in newspaper circulation figures.
No decline means you're doing pretty good. And circulation growth, well, dream on.
When the American Society of Newspaper Editors reported its newsroom census figures a little more than a week ago, they showed that newspaper editorial staffs had declined by 2,400 positions in 2007, but that online positions in newsrooms had stayed the same, around 1,700. The census is intended to track how well the nation's newsrooms reflect the diversity of the population, and there was not much to cheer about there, either, as the country keeps getting more diverse but newsrooms don't.
The survey does not disclose how many people saved their jobs by moving onto their newspapers' online staffs. Certainly the census should encourage people to apply for new-media openings.
I spoke at an SPJ regional recently at the University of South Carolina, and the students gave me a little poster about liars, plagiarists and other cheats who have dishonored journalism. At the bottom it admonishes me, "Don't be the next."
Well, that's nice.
You know many of the names on the poster, so I won't repeat them.
The thing I found interesting was the frequency with which people made the list:
It's one of those puzzles: Are we getting more corrupt, or are we just getting better at finding it? Or, maybe the list, journalism-style, keyed on what was newest.
The poster reminded me that the Web makes it easier than ever for people to plagiarize -- and easier than ever for it to be detected.
I heard last week from an editor who is having trouble with all the turmoil in the newspaper business.
Her issue?
It is neither distant not abstract. It bothers her to lay people off.
Good times or bad, one of the toughest things a boss ever has to do is to let someone go. I don't know whether it is harder or easier to do that in a layoff situation, where there is no performance issue and perhaps no choice, than not.
As the father of two 20-somethings, I sometimes get honked that, when I randomly call one of them on their cell phones, they stick with whatever they were doing -- gaming or surfing -- through the whole phone call. There are unusual pauses and keyboards clicking, so I KNOW I am not getting their undivided attention.
But at a visit to the University of South Carolina's IFRA Newsplex last week, I heard of a 2004 study I had missed. It examined media usage by adults and found that we grossly underestimate our media usage because we so frequently use two or more media at once.
The study found that as much as a quarter of our time with media is actually spent using at least two.
So, when our sons talk to us on the phone while gaming or surfing, they are just -- doing what people do.
On Wednesday, J-schools day, I'll tell you what I learned at the IFRA Newsplex.
There has been some interesting talk about permalancers.
What is that?
A permalancer is one who comes aboard to do work for a company and then winds up being kept on -- permanently -- with none of the benefits such as health care, paid vacations or holidays.
It has sparked some understandable outrage. Targets of that outrage have been MTV and Viacom.
Recently, I was talking with a friend who is a reporter at Chicago's major daily, and she speculated whether permalancing is the way of the future -- but with the worker in the driver's seat.
Could someone who builds a stable of clients use that freedom to cherry pick the best assignments and turn down boring assignments that might be a required part of a real job? If the future is to take us to such a place, couldn't highly successful workers command enough money to pay for their own insurance and retirement -- and then take off exactly the says they want, without being shackled to an office senior list or the whims of a manager? And couldn't such a person simply schedule a sabbatical whenever they wanted one -- without asking anyone's permission?
All of that could happen, but ...
It depends entirely on how much money you make. That, in turn, depends on your value in the marketplace -- a cross between how good you are and how scarce labor is. Could you name a high enough price? Would someone else do well enough for less?
It seems that if employers are going to develop a permalance model, workers will adapt to it, flitting from assignment to assignment or project to project. For the best, this could be liberating. For employers, it will mean a serious loss of workplace continuity and institutional memory.
I was in Chicago next week and, after having lunch with a friend, we ran into a top editor with the Chicago Tribune, where they are lurching through a buyout/layoff process.
The editor said that he has turned his list of names over to top executives of the paper and s now waiting to see what happens.
My friend asked him if he thought there would be "another round" of buyouts.
He said, "I don't think it's going to stop."
Certainly, we need to see something happen -- a reversal of the trends in adverting and circulation or a major boost in online revenue -- to see things in traditional newspapers turn around.
One of the most influential books I have read in the past few years has been Chris Anderson's "The Long Tail:Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More." Worth your time, it explains how digital economies have made it possible to identify and serve markets that simply could not have existed before when geographic proximity was such a n imperative.
One characteristic of the writing of that book was that a lot of it happened in plain sight -- on his blog.
Well, Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine is at it again. Now, he is writing "FREE", due out in 2009.
But you don't have to wait. He is working it up on his blog and you can get a big bite of it in March's Wired. He did the same thing with "The Long Tail."
You can pick up the magazine for $4.99 -- or get the "FREE" prequel free here. You can also find a video of Anderson there.
Sometimes it seems like everyone has an opinion about how you should handle a job interview.
This month, a Web site posted helpful tips for landing your next job.
At the end of the item, it linked to "other articles." One was about being a master of ceremonies at a wedding. The other was about laying ceramic tiles.
Newspaper Death Watch is used by its author, online marketer Paul Gillin, to promote his book, "The New Influencers." Another tool he uses to promote his book is positive reviews -- from newspapers. In fact, newspaper reviews are the most prominent feature on the book's home page.
I have to say, though, that his site works well. I ordered the book with just three clicks. Three. No typing, as I already have a PayPal account.
Recruiters talk about the importance of dressing well for an interview. A necktie is basic equipment for guys.
If it is so basic, why did it take three recruiters -- Bill Elsen, Reggie Stuart and me -- to put one tie on one candidate, Jordan Dresser, at the Spirit of Diversity job fair?
We seem to have only the vaguest familiarity with them.
I attended the memorial services for Tom Morgan in New York City on Saturday.
It was a touching and dignified service.
But I was distracted by one attendee, who left his Blue Tooth receiver clipped to his ear for the entire service. I am sure he did not plan to answer his phone if it rang during the service.
So why did he leave the ear piece on, its blue light pulsing, for the entire service? That was just as distracting as the ringing would have been.
A journalism colleague asked me to connect to to him through LinkedIn, a business-related social networking service, and then wrote this: "Tell me how I can quickly jump up my connections to more than 200 like
you. I know I have that many, and more, but I'm still learning how to
get from 100 to 200. It took me a week to get to more than 100, so I'm
concerned about how I'll get to 200 and 300 soon.
What did you do? How? How often?"
What we have here is a philosophical difference..
When I joined LinkedIn, I was trying to create a new network, not to replicate the one I already have. So, I was looking to connect with people I met outside of mainstream journalism who had many contacts. My targets were people with more than a hundred connections who worked in new media. So, I built slowly, paying more attention to my third-degree connections (friends of friends' friends) than to my first-degree connections. As it turned out, people saw me on LinkedIn, recognized me and asked to connect. I was reluctant to, but that seemed kind of rude, so now I accept invites from people I know.
As I told my friend, networking -- whether online or face-to-face -- seems to me to be a lot more like gardening than paving. I am not trying to build a network that covers everything, but a sekective one in which the people will enhance the network and be good for other people on it.
I love using LinkedIn to introduce people who will be good for each other, just as it is fun in the garden to put complementary plants near each other.
At the end of the year, I received three e-mails from different people who just wanted to let me know what they're up to.
I had misplaced one of them. And one said that staying in better touch was one of her new year's resolutions.
What a good idea.
The start of a new year seems like a very appropriate time to get back in touch and to let people know how your career is going. It also is the time of year when a lot of companies have fresh budgets to work with and can do some hiring.
News late last week that the Miami Herald is following another McClatchy paper in shipping work to India prompted two copy editors at my newspaper to send me copies of the story. One noted, "And so it begins."
This started a long time ago. And more will come. In a global work market, with high-speed fiber optic transmission and work that can so easily be broken down into units that can quickly be reassembled, some of our work is going to go overseas. Like it or not, that's what we've got.
I wrote a piece for Poynter in November, 2006, outlining some strategies that can help U.S. journalists move away from duties that are easily exportable and into ones that will need to be done right where they are. I immodestly think it is still worth a look. Here it is.
The Joint Operating Agreement that has kept the Cincinnati Post going for the past 30 years expires today.
The paper began publication almost 117 years ago, on Jan. 3, 1881.
The end of the Post and the JOA leaves the arrangements in just nine cities: Salt Lake City, Tucson, Albuquerque, Detroit, Seattle, Charleston, Debver, Ft. Wayne and York, Pa.
The end of a JOA does not require the end of a newspaper. JOAs have been dissolved in San Francisco and Honolulu and papers kept publishing. The Post's owner, Scripps, has decided not to continue on its own.
I don't know how long this has been going on, but I just noticed a catch line at the bottom of a Reuters story: "Editing by John Doe."
I'm not sure, but I think I like it.
But a more honest catch line might look like this:
"Assigned by Terry, first read by Kyle, copy edited by Kelly, slotted and bounced back by B.J., second primary edit by Pat because Kyle's shift was over and then copy edited again by Blair because Kelly had to go move her car."
In a hallway conversation, a collegue from Detroit's Other Daily said that he likes working at newspapers and hopes to "ride this dinosaur" a while longer.
Now, he is not the type to avoid new technologies. In fact, you can find him live and in person -- on their Web site.
But his phrase reminded me that there are some editors who are no doubt waiting things out, thinking they can make it to the gold watch without changing too much. I have talked with some of them.
That is such an irresponsible way to neglect one's duty as a steward of an institution, an industry or the First Amendment.
Work to find new ways -- or get off the donosaur now.
Saturday was the deadline for internship applications at the Free Press.
So, of course, at 5:30 p.m. the day before, I received an e-mail application of 5 megabytes. To give you context, that is about the same as 1,000 short e-mails. Of course, this plugged up my e-mail basket, which is usually pretty close to capacity, anyway. I was unable to respond to the applicant -- or anyone else -- until I killed that whopper and then purged my "deleted files" basket.
And it didn't need to be so big. It included a cover letter, resume and a few clips. But the clips were sent as .jpg files. They were pictures of clips. One was 1,700 megabytes all by itself. In real life, it was just one page. But when moved as an image file, it had so much detail to display the intricacies of type, it became huge.
I also received a last-day e-mail from someone who attached documents in .jpg, .txt, .doc and .tiff formats. Of course, I have to open each one in a different rogram to see them all. One showed up with funny little boxes that I am sure the applicant never intended.
And there was a 2-megabyte application that required me to start QuickTime and a decompressor I don't have.
I'd love to tell you that we have become a paperless society and we can all jet off e-mails with 15-part attachments in different formats that office computer systems will not block.
Two internship applicants came to talk with me on Friday. Both are in school and have some experience.
One said that a press release arrived at her office, complete with a large, attention-arresting food basket. The newsroom enjoyed the food.
The other works for a mid-size daily and occasionally encounters free cookies at school board meetings. She has been told not to eat the cookies. Her competitor is watching to see if she will pick up the free food. More importantly, the school board is watching. She doesn't touch the cookies.
Getting food? Easy.
Getting a good reputation? Hard.
(Cookie photo by Bob Smith, licensed under Creative Commons)
On the Public Journalism Network, Leonard Whitt proposes that journalists vary between two extremes -- between reporter and pure writer.
I don't know whether I agree with all that -- certainly the extreme ends of that continuum lie outside of journalism entirely -- I am thinking of novelists and the people who investigate reports for the General Accounting Office -- but it is an interesting way to look at things.
Too often, journalism candidates are asked, "Do you consider yourself to be a writer or a reporter?"
I advise them to say they are both -- that it is a false choice.
Maybe a better way to ask that question is to draw a line on a sheet of paper, to put "writer" at one end and "reporter" at the other and to ask people to chose their spot. It might be informative.
This weekend, I heard from David Stoeffler. He is leaving hs job on the inside -- he once was a VP with Lee -- to work on his own.
His plans include a life back home in Wisconsin and some consulting.
I wish him well.
But I can't help worrying -- not for him, but for the news industry. There are a lot of good people like David who have moved into places where they will be less able to serve as resources for all of us. We are seeing more consultants and, I observe selfishly, fewer recruiters. Collectively, people like David as well as ex-recruiters Cynthia Todd (St. Louis), George Rede (he had moved to editorial pages at the Oregonian), Margie Frazier (Cleveland), Bonnie Bolden (Akron), Sue Smith (Dallas), Mira Lowe (Newsday) ...
We are rapidly losing am invisible infrastructure of people who showed journalists how to navigate the job market. It might never be replaced.
I had a thought while reading Richard Florida's “Rise of the Creative Class.”
In
looking at IT workers' highest needs both before and after the tech
crash, he noticed, “the same three general attributes -- a challenging job, a flexible workplace and stability -- topped the list in both years.”
In
the news business, where stability is questionable and flexibility
succumbs to increased workload sor tighter command and control, one of the best ways to retain people may be to let them do work that is challengnig and fulfilling -- and to spend time on those aspects of the stoey.
Someday I would like to write a book by that title.
It seems that 90 percent of the attention to communication is focused on 50 percent of the transaction: the speaking.
Go to the management section of any bookstore and you will see shelves of books about how to make your point, but hardly any about how to listen. We are a Blowhard Nation trying to make the other guy hear us without putting in the listening effort that we seek from others.
So, while waiting to catch a flight in September, I bought the Harvard Business Review paperback on Effective Communication. Here’s what sold it: The first article is called “Listening to People.” Great, I thought.
That listening article in my new book was originally published in 1957 - it is exactly 50 years old. Do you hear me?
I have just heard that when the Bay City Times shut its Tawas bureau, it was replaced with some space in a
West Branch outlet mall next to a chocolate shop.
That made me recall that the Free Press' Macomb County newsroom is very close to a chocolate shop in Mt. Clemens, Mich.
If the habit-forming qualities of chocolate could rub off on newspapers ... problem solved!
There were two men shining shoes near New Jersey Avenue and E Street in Washington, D.C., on Sunday.
One guy, with a little shoeshine box and kneepads, gamely called out to passersby, telling them they needed a shoeshine. He worked the cab stand and the busy liquor store on the corner. As he finished up with one customer, he tried to line up another.
He said he's been shining shoes for 27 years and that he's been in the Washington Post three tmes. He said he has regulars, that he works even in the rain and that he's shined shoes outside the Old Ebbitt Grill, a D.C. landmark.
"Hey, at least I'm trying," he says to persuade people to stop.
He uses deception, too. "Hey, you dropped something," he'll call out. When his quarry stops to look back, he'll hit them with the punchline: "You dropped your shine." The day before, one man cursed him for this. The shoeshine man deflected anger with amiability.
On the shady side of ths street, there was a bigger, newer shoeshine box set out on the sidealk. I was almost past it when a man peeked out from a homemade shelter of blankets and towels under which he was reclining. "Shoeshine?" he asked half-heartedly. I didn't slow.
The media"s transformation will have tipping points.
We had two last week at the Free Press. The first was when several members of our staff won a broadband Emmy for "Band of Brothers".
An Emmy. The Detroit Free Press, a 176-year-old newspaper. Tip.
Three days later, the Unied Auto Workers ended their first national strike in more than 30 years at the worst possibly time. That was at 3:30 in the morning, when we had pretty much finished newspapers for the day. Our next edition -- the first one with the news of the tentative contract would not be in readers' hands until the story was 26 hours old. Ice cold.
This might have precipitated an extra at noon the day of the settlement.
Onstead, readers woke up -- earlier than any extra could have been printed -- to a dozen online items including stories and photos. Tip.
I attended a Meetup of Web2NewYork last week and Aaron Bollinger expressed a different perspective. He told us “Content is not always king. Sometimes, Context is king.”
Bollinger wrote “MySpace Social Guide“ and is now with KickApps Corp., which builds social networking tools
What Bollinger means – and it is good for journalists to evaluate this as we try to work transform the news industry, is that more does not always mean better.
Take FaceBook. Is it really good to be friends with 500 people – as I have seen some journalists do? Is it really helpful to be friended by famous people you don’t even know? Does that imply some kind of access or relationship that isn’t really there? Bollinger says that consumers might rather have a smaller amount of connections or content that is tailored to them.
It is not a new idea, of course, that journalists have a role in helping our audiences find the news they want, but his statement that context is sometimes king boils it down to a phrase that can help focus us.
I believe the media transformation we're goingthrough is more about audience than technology.
I spent today's journalism class polling my 24 students on their media habits. The 24th student had as much to say as the first -- and then we started going around the room again. We never ran out. Among their sources were traditional mainstream media, fresh news clips on YouTube, the BBC, a variety of sports Web sites, NPR and a respectable new sdigest page put up by Comcast.
We saw how audiences are fragmenting and how much opportunity there is to build or belong to new constituencies. No source was the big winner, but news consumers seemed to be.
There is a big challenge in their habits for big media, but there are big opportunities for them.
Later this week, UNITY: Journalists of Color should circulate, in its Friday e-mail blast, a vignette about a journalist who is making a difference at her hometown paper and making some waves nationally, too.
If you're not on the UNITY e-mail list, you'll be able to find this week's story and those from previous weeks in the UNITY archives.
As work piles up, it can be a burden to write them, but each time I do, it gives me a lift.
A Bay Area reporter writes to Ask the Recruiter with all kinds of concerns about media cutbacks and consolidation ... and more than a few concerns abour her own ability to make it as a print journalist.
Her question and the answer will be on Ask the Recruiter on Wednesday.
Usually, I will use Monday's Cuppa Joe to refer you to something coming in the week ahead.
This time, I want to refer you to something posted late last week.
Someone wrote to the Poynter Career Center's Ask the Recruiter and described the constant dread they live with. I replied that I knew that feeling and have recently decided to stop dreading, as much as is possible, and to play to the possibilities. So far, it is working. Check the Friday, Aug. 10, posting.
Breaking In is the insider's guide to landing — and acing — your newspaper internship. These are your strategies for applying, interviewing, succeeding and then using your newspaper internship to launch your career. This book is based on the www.JobsPage.com Web site, which Detroit Free Press Recruiting and Development Editor Joe Grimm created as a strategy guide to newspaper careers. Twenty news recruiters, editors and journalists have contributed to the book. >Buy itBringing the News Century-old postcards celebrate newsies in photographs and artwork, in groups or singly, black and white or color. The newsboys -- and girls, as well as a few adults -- are always portrayed in hard-knock ways. Feet and calves are sometimes bare. Patches cling to elbows and knees. They cover their heads with stocking caps or the floppy hats we still know as "newsboys." If there is inside you a scrappy, survive-by-your-wits newsie, you'll enjoy this collection of cards and carriers bringing news in old-fashioned ways. (Twenty-five images.) >Buy it
Bringing the News Century-old postcards celebrate newsies in photographs and artwork, in groups or singly, black and white or color. The newsboys -- and girls, as well as a few adults -- are always portrayed in hard-knock ways. Feet and calves are sometimes bare. Patches cling to elbows and knees. They cover their heads with stocking caps or the floppy hats we still know as "newsboys." If there is inside you a scrappy, survive-by-your-wits newsie, you'll enjoy this collection of cards and carriers bringing news in old-fashioned ways. (Twenty-five images.) 