The project actually came from a tweet by Jay Rosen, who wanted to know if a list of 20-something year old journalism bloggers existed. To my knowledge, none existed at the time.

I set out to create a definitive — but ever expanding! — list of young journalism bloggers and just provide it as a simple resource. But then I got to thinking that maybe I could do more than just a list.

So, I bought the domain name “journalism.me” and went to work building a list of not just young journalism bloggers, but a more general list of personal blogs by journalists who blog about journalism. Yes, I’m aware of how meta this is.

My criteria eliminated blogs written in an official capacity for a newspaper or news organization. The point here was to find personal blogs, not work blogs. I also didn’t include blogs that were basically resume/clips sites that copy/pasted one’s work. I’m more interested in what people have to say about their jobs and the field itself. I also would not be including group blogs, blogs from journalism institutions or news blogs.

So, what you end up with is a collection of individual voices discussing journalism all focused in one place. Hopefully, the site will drive traffic to their blogs and connect them with each other.

To do this, I took the RSS feeds from each blogger and fed them through Feed Informer. The problem with Feed Informer is that it only lets you compile 15 feeds into one digest, however, you are allowed six digests. So, I could have up to 90 feeds in six digests. Right now I’m using three digest feeds and taking those and putting them through Yahoo! Pipes.

Now, I know what you’re thinking: “Why didn’t you just start with Yahoo! Pipes?” The answer is complicated. That’s what I originally did, but ran into some problems with the RSS feed it spit out. It wasn’t valid and I wasn’t able to embed it into the site unless I used their badge widget. Unfortunately, the Yahoo! Pipes badges don’t display properly in Internet Explorer 7 (Firefox 3 and Safari were OK).

After feeding the three Feed Informer digest feeds into Yahoo! Pipes, I took that Pipes output feed and fed it back to Feed Informer so I could format/style the final feed and put it on Journalism.me as it currently looks now. Talk about a work around! Now, I’m sure there are ways to avoid this complicated mess, but for now it works and I’m sticking with it.

In addition to the main feed, I’ve also started a del.icio.us account to follow a number of these bloggers and see what bookmarks they are sharing. Del.icio.us automatically combines these bookmarks when you add users to your network and spits out handy feed, which I also used Feed Informer to embed in the site.

That’s about it! If you have a personal blog, please e-mail me at kiyoshimartinez@gmail.com and I’ll add it to the network. Also, if you add user journalismdotme to your del.icio.us network, I’ll add you in return and your bookmarks will be shared, too.

Enjoy and spread the word.

Huffington, who rocks not one but TWO Blackberrys, doesn’t just see her city-specific sites covering politics like her current effort does. Somewhat surprisingly, she intends to mimic the newspaper model, the Guardian reports:

Huffington said the Chicago site would aggregate news, sports, crime, arts and business news from different local sources as well as contributions from bloggers in what will be the first of a series of projects in “dozens of US cities”. The Chicago site will initially be curated by just one editor.

“We are aspiring to be a newspaper in that we want to covering all news, not just the political blogging the way we began,” said Huffington, speaking at Guardian News & Media’s internal Future of Journalism conference.

While I don’t believe the Chicago version of the Huffington Post will spell the end of the Chicago Tribune or the Chicago Sun-Times, I think the decision to target this city in particular shows a shrewd familiarity of the weaknesses of the two daily papers and their online properties. It seems almost paradoxical that at a time when two newspapers face financial turmoil, one of the largest news and political sites decides it’s a good time to move in.

Some people still remember when Chicago used to be a town with four daily newspapers, including the Chicago Today American and the Chicago Daily News. Also gone is the Chicago City News Bureau, which is legendary for the term “if your mother says she loves you, check it out.” And now the city has two papers on the brink of collapse.

The struggling Sun-Times

And now the Sun-Times just went through layoffs and other suburban papers are laying off employees and merging. Even the copy-editing desks are being merged together into one location for the suburban papers.

Frankly, it doesn’t look much better for the Sun-Times as Crain’s Chicago Business reports that more cuts are still ahead:

Raymond Seitz, chairman of the publishing company, blamed a combination of declining advertising revenue and a shift in information gathering habits for contributing to a “difficult year” for the company.

“The Sun-Times itself is the most widely read in Chicago . . . and yet we continue to struggle,” Mr. Seitz said. “We will work hard on these problems in the year ahead.”

Sun-Times CEO Cyrus Freidheim, Jr., said the company has enough “cash to weather the worst storms over the next two to three years,” but you can can’t help but wonder if things really will get better in the 12-18 months he’s expecting the economy to turn around. Newspapers aren’t declining just because of the economy — they’re just declining faster.

Of course, the Sun-Times is looking for a savior, too:

Cyrus Freidheim Jr. said at the annual meeting of Sun-Times Media Group Inc. that it is reviewing offers from potential buyers and would consider a transaction that takes the publicly traded company private. Such a deal could be structured so that some major shareholders retain an ownership stake.

Freidheim noted that the company has some financial advantages compared with other media operations. Sun-Times has no debt except for an unresolved tax liability and has about $120 million in cash.

But getting a buyer probably won’t be easy. After all, buying a newspaper isn’t exactly something everyone’s lining up for these days.

Why ‘hyperlocal’ GateHouse would be a disaster for the Sun-Times

Buying a newspaper company means taking on more debt for an existing company. A potential buyer could be someone like GateHouse Media (GHS), known for buying up bunches of hyperlocal newspaper properties, clustered together geographically. The company’s already picked up a lot of smaller weeklies and shoppers in Illinois, along with mid-size metros in Springfield, Peoria and Rockford. On the surface, they appear to be a logical choice and the Sun-Times clusters of suburban papers are certainly attractive to their business strategy.

However, they’ve got their own debt problems. In fact, their debt problems could be the end of them as 24/7 Wall Street speculates:

At the end of the last quarter, Gatehouse had a little over $10 million in cash. Its long-term debt stands at over $1.2 billion. Goodwill is at just below $700 million.

During the last quarter, GHS lost $29 million on revenue of $170 million. Debt service was $24.4 million. Gatehouse has a huge dividend which it will almost certainly have to eliminate, taking away the sole reason for holding the shares.

Watch for GHS to be broken up before the end of the year or to enter Chapter 11.

And GateHouse has taken a huge hit. The company’s stock keeps hitting 52-week lows, they’re in “junk bond” status and the Motley Fool’s placed them on their list of 5 Deathbed Stocks. While they might have unloaded Copley’s Illinois papers and Gannet’s only Illinois paper, GateHouse probably can’t afford to take on much more debt.

GateHouse wouldn’t be a good solution for the Sun-Times News Group papers. Sure, a buyer is a buyer, but what’s the point of being bought by a company that’s already in fiscal trouble? No point in joining a ship that’s already heavy enough to sink.

Debt: an Achilles heel for newspapers

Earlier this year, Alan Mutter wrote about the fall of the Journal Register Co. (JRCO) and it’s a textbook example of what may become of other newspaper companies:

In addition to leaving JRC with some of the leanest-running newspapers in the land, [CEO Robert Jelenic] also left the company with the hefty $628.4 million in debt that now threatens to force it into bankruptcy. Most of the debt results from one bold, but less than successful, acquisition he undertook in 2004 in an effort to keep the company’s sales, profits and stock price growing.

Not only did the transaction prove over time to be a serious miscalculation, but a steep drop in JRC’s sales in the last two years has made it increasingly unlikely that the company can generate enough profits in the future to service its ponderous debt.

Mutter also produced a two-part series of questions and answers about debt and newspapers you can view here and here. While it’s not the most exciting topic in the world, it’s definitely a large part of the problem journalism is facing as an industry.

Mutter is quoted in Editor & Publisher’s special report on debt and the newspaper crisis:

But newspapers didn’t realize they were living in a historical aberration, says Alan D. Mutter, the San Francisco-based newspaper and new media consultant. News- paper profit margins were at historical highs, and credit was readily available.

“There was this impetus during the credit bubble to load up on debt, and amass more assets to somehow get better,” he explains. “It’s happening in other industries, too. Delta is a bad airline, and Northwestern is a bad airline, so lets put them together and somehow we’ll get a good airline.” The high debt wasn’t seen as a problem, Mutter adds, because it “was premised on an extraordinarily high level of profitability that is not sustainable.”

And that’s the crisis in a nutshell. All of this debt with no promising revenues in sight to pay it off. And with no new money comes the pressure to cut.

The troubled Tribune

The Sun-Times might hope they would fare better under private ownership. After all, that was the thinking behind Sam Zell’s purchase of the Tribune. While the Tribune was bailed out by Sam Zell, known for saying “fuck you” to his new employees and providing plenty of colorful quotations, the company is still facing a bevy of problems.

To Zell’s credit, he’s been the opposite of boring. Press releases from the Tribune have offended some, coming off as downright sexist. He’s brought in executives that issue memos with crazy ideas to innovate newspapers with the grace of a mind on too much caffeine (Steve Outing muses if we’re watching a train wreck in the process at Tribune headquarters). And there’s a redesign coming to the Tribune’s metro papers, including the Chicago paper — which already had a front-page tweak and a less-than-impressive overhaul of its Web site.

But the question is how much of this will actually help bring down the Tribune’s mammoth $13 billion debt? Probably none of it.

Back in April, there was already speculation the Tribune will default on its debt in 2009:

Tribune has nearly $4 billion in debt and interest payments due by the end of 2009, according to Gimme Credit analyst Dave Novosel, making it all but certain that the company will be forced to sell more marquee properties and make deeper cost cuts to avoid violating debt covenants.

“Tribune is a big microcosm of issues across the industry, and Sam Zell made an unfortunate bet, if you will, jumping into a business he knew nothing about,” said veteran newspaper analyst Miles Groves.

And now, in June, news breaks that the Tribune’s taken to counting bylines and inches produced by reporters in the printed product and aiming for a smaller newshole while trimming page count. The headlines were dominated with the news:

In discussing the company’s efforts to alter its cost structure in the face of rapidly eroding industry conditions, Michaels said in a conference call that Tribune is “actively pursuing a plan to right-size” the newspaper operation. - Tribune

The editor of the Chicago Tribune issued a memo Thursday to prepare her reporters and editors for drastic changes in content and painful reductions in staff. - Sun-Times

Tribune Company newspapers like The Los Angeles Times and The Chicago Tribune will quickly cut costs — by printing fewer papers and employing fewer journalists — top company executives said on Thursday. - The New York Times

With top man Sam Zell weighing in, cutbacks in staffing and number of pages in the papers were also put loudly on the table.

Michaels said of the changes, “This is going to happen quickly.” Zell added: “I promise you, he’s underestimating the level of aggressiveness with which we are attacking this whole challenge.” - Editor & Publisher

There’s only one thought that came to my mind when I read this: “More with less.” And I think that American Journalism Review’s Rem Rieder put it much better: “Sam Zell wants to destroy the village in order to save it.”

But if all you’re bringing to the table is mindless ax-wielding, why bother? There’s no way drastically weakening your product in a bitterly competitive media landscape is a recipe for success.

In-depth, hard-hitting enterprise efforts are one of the key offerings that differentiate good newspapers and their Web sites from their numerous competitors. They are an important component of the brand.

Indeed, it seems that so far Zell hasn’t been the savior of the Tribune. More than a year ago, Jason Calacanis predicted Zell would lose billions because of a comment Zell made about Google to the Washington Post:

“If all of the newspapers in America did not allow Google to steal their content, how profitable would Google be?” Zell said during the question period after his speech. “Not very.”

As Calacanis points out, Zell has no idea how Google works and how it actually benefits the Tribune’s papers to have Google’s bots index their sites.

And while Zell might stand to lose billions in his latest venture, Chicago stands to lose a lot more.

‘Will newspapers survive?’

Even Chicago’s own journalists aren’t exactly optimists. On June 12, the Chicago Headline Club and the Northern Illinois Newspaper Association met and Chicago Reader’s Mike Miner described them going through the stages of dying.

You can see video of the discussions here and here. To be quite honest, the tone seems somber — at least for newspapers. The most excited the panelists seem to get about the printed product is the trashy, free commuter rag, RedEye, as being a consumer success. Not exactly the most encouraging thing for hard-news, shoeleather journalists to hear in a city filled with endless stories about politics, corruption, crime and public affairs. It’s like knocking over Royko’s tombstone to hear that RedEye is the city’s fastest growing publication.

But the problem’s not just the quality of the content in newspapers. It’s also a business problem.

TechCrunch reports that the top 100 advertisers shifted more than $1 billion away from TV and newspapers to online, which can only accelerate the decline of the daily in Chicago.

While that shift wouldn’t be so bad for newspapers if the revenues went directly from print properties to online properties of newspapers, that’s simply not the case. Online advertising opportunities are more abundant with more sites clamoring for advertising dollars. And with total advertising dollars remaining somewhat level, that means the more advertising money shifted online means more of it is distributed across a larger number of properties. In other words, newspapers get less because the Internet is more competitive for advertising sales.

And this is an industry-wide fear, as reported by The New York Times, when advertising revenue slips in greater numbers than ever before. As the audience shifts online, the money follows the audience. With an online marketplace, however, the choices are greater and the revenues are harder to get for companies in this intensely competitive environment. Frankly, newspapers aren’t suited to do battle with the Internet giants that understood from the beginning how to make money online. And newspaper companies mostly don’t have the financial resources to invest in themselves to be even remotely competitive.

To answer the question, if newspapers will survive, the answer seems to be a vague answer of “no.” But in Chicago, I’m willing to bet that there’s a distinct possibility that neither the Sun-Times or the Tribune will survive the next decade.

This isn’t to say these dailies don’t produce good content, or that the journalists working there are somehow subpar. In fact, I don’t believe that’s the case at all. There’s obviously talent there. But talent alone can’t turn around the financial situations of these institutions, nor can it change the advertising climate the Internet’s created.

If the Tribune can’t make its debt payments, they’re screwed. If the Sun-Times can’t find a willing buyer, they’re screwed. And in general, they’re all screwed because they’re both tied too deeply to advertising revenues. The numbers don’t add up in their favor.

The shifting media landscape

The Huffington Post local site will probably work. With one employee solely dedicated to merely aggregation, it’s hard to not be profitable with that low of an overhead. Obviously, there will be the inevitable cries from both the Tribune and Sun-Times that the Huffington Post site is merely piggybacking off of the hard work of journalists at their papers. And that’s a legitimate criticism, but it ignores the larger question: Why hasn’t either paper started up their own news aggregation site?

What Ariana Huffington is proposing isn’t anything particularly special or complicated. She’s just put money behind an idea that’s potentially lucrative because no one’s bothered to do it before. And here’s the reason why her site will do it better than the Sun-Times or Tribune ever will: Hyperlinks.

Rarely does the Tribune or Sun-Times link outside of their Web site to local bloggers or other Chicago-media sites (i.e.: EveryBlock, Chicagoist, Gapers Block, Chi Town Daily News). Nor do they embed YouTube videos, make use of Flickr, be active on Twitter or actually understand the concept of creating a community on their Web sites through commenters. And we haven’t even talked social networking yet.

Instead, they build walled gardens, which defeats the philosophy of the Internet. Making things worse is that most of their new media content, such as videos, cannot be embedded to a reader’s blog or shared easily. And the Tribune removes its articles from the public view after little more than a week, meaning that search engines can’t index it and send them more page views and more revenue.

I’ve got a gut feeling there’s a whole lot of room to exploit Chicago’s weak online media scene. There’s plenty of room for niche blogs where a handful of writers can make a living covering just a narrow set of interests. This is how Gawker Media has been able to be successful (along with a good sales staff). Once others wise up to what Ariana’s doing, I think you’ll see more single-topic properties pop up in Chicago. It just takes an investor, a workhorse writer and some simple marketing to get it to work.

Some ideas I see becoming popular quickly would be professional sports, improv theater, music and food. If a writer could be financed for a year to completely own one of those topics and had a decent sales/marketing staff behind him/her, then I think you’d start to see this shift away from the daily papers.

The question is who will pony up the money and take the plunge?

The main problems with comments stem from two areas: identity and filtering.

Comment identity

I remember in my first journalism class I was fortunate enough to have Roger Ebert visit our class and he said something that stuck with me. A student asked if he has a pseudonym on RottenTomatoes.com, which Ebert replied that while he read the site quite often, he did not anonymously post on the site.

Ebert’s personal policy was that he signed his name to anything he wrote. I remember thinking, “If it’s good enough for Ebert, then it’s good enough for me.”

Since then, I’ve always registered for new web services with my full name and I make it a policy to never leave an anonymous comment. I figure if I’m not willing to put my name next to what I write, then it’s probably not worth writing and won’t contribute to the conversation. While this has prevented me in several cases from writing a really snarky and biting comment in the past, I think sticking with this personal policy has many advantages.

For one, it makes you accountable for what you write. It means that you’ll actually take the time to reply with something thoughtful and well-written, rather than just the online equivalent of a drive-by shooting. And when you write better comments, people tend to respect your thoughts and opinions over those who hide behind their Internet mask. It adds a sense of authority to what you have to say. Also, conversations tend to be me polite and productive when you know the people you are talking with.

Additionally, using your real name when you comment helps build your own personal branding online. Extending this to any service you use on the web, people recognize your name and are more likely to connect with you at other places. This furthers the personal social network you create for yourself. It’s a good thing.

Information Architects now demands that you use your real name when commenting, and they had a very robust and thoughtful debate on the topic. Frankly, I agree with their philosophy, but I don’t believe it’s the perfect solution for all situations.

Obviously, at AngryJournalist.com I don’t require or even request that contributors identify themselves. In fact, I discourage the use of real names. Part of the reason: I didn’t want to deal with any potential libel suits stemming from the comments. The other reason, however, was that I really didn’t want to place any barriers between getting people to open up.

I think many of the comments AngryJournalist.com received would never have seen the light of day if I required something as simple as an e-mail address, let alone sign-up and registration. To get people’s raw emotions and uncensored stories, I had to give them a sense of privacy and extend trust to the extent of anonymity.

For my situation, this worked out. But as I said, comment identity is only half of one problem.

Comment filtering

The other half is how you moderate the conversation. The more elements you remove from true identity online, the greater the number of responses you’ll elicit. The problem associated with this is that with the increased volume comes even more noise.

To create a worthwhile site online and develop the kind of community atmosphere that’s sustainable, I believe you need to truly define your role as the administrator and balance identity and filtering. To be blunt, most sites do a poor job of filtering and this is despite having way too many identity restrictions.

Let’s be perfectly honest. Most newspaper sites that allow comments to go unmoderated have threads that aren’t worth anyone’s time. Any pageviews generated by people following the supposed “conversation” isn’t worth the loss in quality of experience that the site’s providing.

Yes, you’ll lose pageviews if you filter the conversations of your community, but you’ll build a better reputation. Your users will reward you with more return visits and brand loyalty.

Remember: Most news is available just about anywhere. Content is duplicative. What will differentiate your site above others won’t be what people are talking about, but the quality of the experience of the interactions they’re having with others while viewing that content. People will live in communities they find friendly, and they’ll leave those that refuse to filter the signal from the noise.

I understand that to do community moderation properly that you’ll need to spend a lot of time and resources to do it properly. This means having people dedicated to guiding conversation and regulating it. It’s going to take a lot of work and most sites probably won’t do it, but the smart ones will. Nothing worth doing is worth doing halfway. Either make a commitment to building a community or don’t bother. why make something that sucks? It’s a waste of everyone’s time.

At AngryJournalist.com, I quickly discovered that if I was going to let people be anonymous, I’d have to moderate everything. At first I worried that delaying the posting of comments would take away from the site’s appeal and hurt traffic. But the reward was getting rid of spammers, trolls and making it a better quality site. It’s cost me time, but I found a solution that worked.

News organizations and their sites will also need to juggle their resources to tackle filtering. This is a new form of editing the Letters to the Editor pages, except it’s in real time and the stakes are much higher. Instead of this being one of the few pages without advertising in the newspaper, it’s the part of the site that will underscore the traffic, which drives the revenues.

But right now I feel that most news organizations don’t really give their comments section a second thought. Instead, they’re still panicking over the idea that people can just say anything. Or they’re patting themselves on the back for finally adding a feature that’s years (aka, an Internet lifetime) old on the web. How many of them realize the monetizing power that comes from this simple feature? And why aren’t they doing a better job of protecting this investment?

Conversation is migrating elsewhere. Right now, the early adopters have begun to crown Twitter the winner (despite their problems), but no one has perfectly merged news and conversation. There’s still time to jump into this niche and begin the battle for people’s loyalty.

As we approach a consumer culture where time will become scarce and content will be plentiful, we’ll turn to places that can provide quality filtered experiences. Content isn’t where the money is, that’s all free. The money’s going to come from meaningful interaction.

Stop treating comments like a feature that’s just something you activate on your site’s blogs and start viewing them like the key to making your sites profitable.

(Naturally, I want your comments and thoughts on this topic. I’d encourage you to use your real name, but it’s cool if you don’t want to. Also, you can find me on Twitter or just e-mail me.

Additionally, for more resources, check out my del.icio.us bookmarks tagged with comments and community. Lots of good reading there.)

Technorati Tags: community, comments, journalism, media, web+2.0, anonymous, real+name, identity, filtering, signal+to+noise+ratio, moderation, Twitter, conversation

+ Changing the body text to Georgia. I like this font for reading moreso than sans-serif fonts.
+ Enlarging the font size across the board. Makes for easier reading on my longer posts and titles with greater impact while scanning.
+ Increasing the line height. Again, to help with long reading and avoid the mushing of text.
+ Underlining links in the body text. Now you know what’s been bolded and what’s a link.
+ Adding a red hover color to linked text. Also added an underline to hovered titles.
+ Added a background shading to blockquoted text. Also increased font size on blockquotes.

Again, nothing particularly major. And it might not even matter as I rarely do long-form blogging here. As always, I’m updating my Tumblr with a much greater frequency. I have a few ideas that I’d like to write out, but just have to find both the time and motivation to put the keys to the keyboard.

Technorati Tags: web+design, site+design, wordpress+template, font, css

+ Beck Diefenbach has started a blog featuring some of the photos he’s shot during his internship at the South Bend Tribune. I’m not a huge photoblog person, but I get more interested when it’s photos shot by people I know.

+ Things that could kill me in Vietnam is the blog of my friend Jenette as she prepares to go to Vietnam to teach English. Landmines or avian flu? What’s worse?

Previously:

+ More friends who blog
+ Friends who blog
+ Friends who blog (and are worth reading)

Other designs include:

+ print is dead
+ journalists get laid (off)
+ -30-

More to come! Get yours today!

Technorati Tags: angryjournalist.com, tshirt, shop, journalism, media

Now, you have to remember, this was around 13 years ago when the Internet and how it would evolve, how popular it would become, how societies attitudes would shift, etc., were still still up for debate. Stoll took a very interesting and unfortunate stance:

Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Oops! As we now know, this premise turned out to be wrong. He probably wasn’t the only one. Luckily, he didn’t have to pay dearly for his predictions beyond his pride.

Sadly, others did have to pay for this way of thinking. Yes, that’s right: newspapers. The ultimate nay-saying industry that’s found itself in pain from self-inflicted wounds. I could go on about this, but I’d much rather focus on Stoll for a moment.

While you might be inclined to laugh at Stoll and write him off, I’d say, “not so fast!” He’s actually a really entertaining and brilliant man.

For instance, he sells Klein bottles at his online store that he makes himself. He’s written a few books that I’ll have to check out, too. Plus, he’s a really funny speaker that I’d like to see in person. Check him out his talk at TED 2006:

Technorati Tags: clifford+stoll, klein+bottle, physics, mathematics, science, internet, future, TED+2006

There’s been quite a bit of negativity and despair coming from college students at AngryJournalist.com and it’s bothered me quite a bit. While I wouldn’t actively encourage students to definitely seek a career in newspapers, or journalism in a broader sense, I wouldn’t say I discourage it either. I don’t particularly regret the time I spent doing journalism and it’s a field I have great respect for, but also can be very critical of because I do feel passionately about it. So, I thought creating a HOWTO guide for college journalists with things I’d learned and observed might be helpful, especially for those who aren’t as Web-savvy as others.

=====

Journalism school graduates: How to increase your chance of finding a job and decrease your chance of having to vent on AngryJournalist.com

You might have heard of the journalism punching bag I created, AngryJournalist.com, and if you’re a college student right now it’s probably a discouraging place to frequent given all the horror stories that’s on there.

It’s not completely hopeless, despite all the doom and gloom, however, you can’t assume that your college education will be all you need to snag a job. Remember, your journalism degree’s probably no different than the thousands of other j-degrees out that other graduates have. The only thing that’s going to set you apart from the pack and help you land a job is ultimately related to the amount of self-initiative and investment you place within yourself.

I remember looking for a job (and internships) and thinking that I was really unprepared. I had decent clips, extensive college-newspaper experience but still felt as if I wasn’t competitive enough — and this was back in 2005-2006, when Web skills weren’t as in demand as they are now.

So, how should you prepare? Here’s some tips that I think will help you on the job hunt.

+ Get real about your situation
Take some advice from Warren Buffett:

“You ought to be able to explain why you’re taking the job you’re taking, why you’re making the investment you’re making, or whatever it may be. And if it can’t stand applying pencil to paper, you’d better think it through some more. And if you can’t write an intelligent answer to those questions, don’t do it.”

You know that journalism jobs don’t pay much money, so be smart about entering the field. Know how much money you need to pay your bills (student loans, car payment, rent, utilities, insurance, etc.) and also basic cost of living. Adjust for taxes that will be taken out of your paycheck.

You might think you can take a job that pays less than $30,000 a year, but can you really? Do the math. Look through your spending habits in college and see how much money you burn through in a month. Be realistic about what you need to stay above water.

Once you know this number, don’t compromise downward — or better yet, ask for more should you get a job offer. You might think this is the only offer you’re going to get, but if you’re good enough you’ll be able to find a better offer. Don’t be a sucker.

It’d be nice if journalists could just focus on the job and say pay doesn’t matter, but that’s not the case. Logically approach the idea of entering the field. Make sure it makes financial sense for you to take an offer. Don’t bother applying to places that you know won’t meet your salary requirements. Have standards and stick to your guns. Remember you starting salary will determine your next raise or pay jump when you switch publications.

+ Know the business and the industry
You might think you know journalism. It’s writing articles for a newspaper. Or shooting photographs. Or designing pages. Or maybe even that new media stuff people keep mentioning. Wrong. Those are skills.

Knowing the business and industry means realizing the broader challenges journalism as a whole is facing. Look beyond what job you’ll be doing and take a look at the snapshot portrait that’s being developed right now about the profession. Do you know about the mass layoffs, buyouts, paycuts and hiring freezes? How about the declining or stagnating advertising revenues? What do you know about what stock analysts are saying about the price per share on the major newspaper chains? Do you know the stock history of the parent company of the paper you’re applying to? More importantly, do you know how all of this will affect your job (should you get it) and the benefits, raises (or lack thereof) that you receive?

If your answer to any of that was “no,” then you need to find those answers. Why would you enter an industry you know nothing about? There are greater external forces acting on your newspaper than just what happens within the paper’s distribution. Start by reading (daily) Romenesko, Editor & Publisher, NYT’s Media & Advertising section, OJR, AJR, Reuters MediaFile and Gawker. Then, read even more. Read the State of the News Media 2008 report, especially the advertising section and the economics portions.

Learn about the trends in journalism. Learn what the buzzwords words are and decide if you think they’re bullshit or not: hyperlocalism, crowdsourcing, etc. Look at what direction the business side of journalism is pushing the industry side of journalism into. Watch to see how these forces change the type of journalism you’ll be doing at a certain publication.

Remember: journalism is a business first in most cases — maybe not for you, but it is for those who cut your paycheck. Money will end up dictating the editorial process in every way, for better or worse. Be honest with yourself and decide if you can ride the wave that’s overtaking the field.

+ Don’t be stupid
With Google and Wikipedia you no longer have any excuse to be stupid. Ever. Have a question or curious about something? Type it into Google.

Don’t know HTML, how to install blogging software or shoot and edit video? Too bad, you’re out of excuses because you have the Internet. Take the initiative to learn these yourself. Add value to your skillset and make yourself more marketable to an employer.

Your college education isn’t the reason why you don’t know new media — you are. Saying, “I’m really bad with computers” won’t make people pity you and hand you a job. In a competitive job market, there are no more free rides.

No one’s saying you have to be the expert, but ignorance isn’t tolerable. Spend your free time online learning something new and stop wasting time with Scrabulous on Facebook! And once you learn these new things, take it a step further and think, “How can I use this to be a better journalist and tell better stories for the consumer?”

+ Think of yourself as a brand
I’ve written about this idea before. You might think you’re too young in your career to build a brand. Wrong. You need to start developing it now. Literally, your employer is purchasing your skills over someone else. You have to sell that idea to them. This requires you to think in marketing and advertising mode. This means doing more than joining Facebook and LinkedIn (although, those are good starting points).

Get a professional-sounding e-mail account that uses your real name. Get a domain name with your real name and server space to setup a homebase for yourself. Make sure it’s SEOed properly (search engine optimization, if you didn’t know that, then you should’ve Googled it). Start blogging there. Feature your new media projects and post your clips and portfolio. Keep it professional and well designed, because the idea is you want your employer to Google your name, find your site and say “damn, I want to hire this youngblood.” Don’t know how to do this? Ask friends. Google it. Remember, no more excuses.

Get into the Web 2.0 stuff. Grab a Twitter, del.icio.us, Flickr, Digg, etc. account with your real name. Link in your profiles on those sites back to your homepage. Build up your identity using your real name. When you comment on blogs, newspaper sites, etc., again, use your real name and link back to your personal site. Establish your presence online while building SEO. Not sure what to do? Howard Owens has a list for you. You’ll need this to start building your personal social network.

Finally, don’t ruin your personal branding by putting stupid photos up on Flickr and Facebook. Think before you write a drive-by comment on a blog or newspaper Web site. When you contribute to the conversation online, make sure it’s adding value, not destroying it.

+ Stop blaming others
Maybe you wanted to start blogging for your college paper, but they’re too incompetent, lazy or slow to let that happen. Same goes for video. Or soundslides. So, you’re sitting around and doing nothing now.

Screw them. Do it yourself. Buy a domain name, camcorder, digital camera, digital recorder, etc. or whatever you need and make it happen today. If you still get birthday and holiday gifts from parents and relatives, ask them for the higher-priced items. Tell them it’s an investment in your own career development. Or maybe you’re willing to invest in yourself to do quality journalism. Either way, that’s the path you need to take.

We’re in an era where you don’t have to be officially affiliated with “legitimate media” to be a journalist. Start your own on campus blogging network of writers. Find contributors and give your college paper a run for their money online. Break news. Advertise with spray chalk your URL. Post it in classrooms. Use Facebook. Put some of that marketing and advertising you learned about to get students excited about what you’re creating. Become your own part-time publisher.

When you’re in a job interview, you can be one of two people. You can say, “Well, we didn’t have blogs at our college paper,” or you can say, “We didn’t have blogs at my paper, so I decided to leave and create my own publishing network on campus.” Which candidate would you hire? Don’t waste your time waiting for others to catch up, because that’s the kind of thing a traditional newspaper would do and we know how well that’s worked out for them.

+ Know where you want to work
Get a good idea about the publication’s strategy and vision — and not the bullshit one that they’ll spin you. What have they actually done? Where have they spent the cash? Do they have an online strategy beyond just “we’ll put videos and blogs up”? How are they looking to monetize the Internet? What’s their definition of innovation and what was the last good thing they did online (and is it crap)? Google the names of their top executives and management and see what these people are saying about where they’re taking the company. Read the Romenesko memos and see what’s being said internally. Does this sound like a place where you’ll be comfortable working and confident that you’ll be on a ship headed in the right direction?

What about the environment? Are the editors and management incompetent or are they inspiring? Try to get to know people on the inside of the company and ask them for the dirt. What do the front-line journalists in the trenches have to say about the management? How many of them have left recently or taken buyouts? What about the sales and advertising staff? They’re important, too, as they bring in the money. Do they find that it’s harder or easier to sell ads for the paper, and what about online? Even if the market isn’t competitive, is it shrinking?

And remember, this is your first job, not your last. Where can you go from here? Can you prove yourself at this publication and get the portfolio you’ll need to find another job or move up within the company quickly?

When you get to the end of your interview, you should have more questions than they had for you. I think it’s easy to get enamored with the fact that someone actually called you back for an interview that you’ll tend to let the interviewer off the hook. Hold their feet to the fire like you would a source and get the answers you need to make an informed decision. After all, it’s your career.

+ Don’t limit yourself
Finally, I want to leave you with this thought: It’s not the end of the world if you don’t get a newspaper job.

There’s online publications, non-profits, activist publications, etc. Yes, you can also be like me and join the so-called “dark side” and go into public relations. If you’re talented, marketable and passionate, then you can find yourself with opportunities beyond what you’d traditionally think of as a journalism job.

You might think that, right now, all you want to do is work at a newspaper and be a reporter. But you’ll probably quickly find that you might not enjoy that as much as you thought. And it’s also likely that you’ll find that your interests extends beyond deadtree editions. To me, it didn’t make sense to close any doors and restrict myself narrowly. You can be happy doing a variety of things.

If all you love is newspaper journalism, then you take the risk of it not loving you back.

Technorati Tags: journalism, college+student, media, newspaper, jobs, career, tips, howto, angryjournalist.com, news

Muxtape has a lightening-fast sign-up process and it’s functionality is dirt simple to use. Upload up to 12 mp3 files (no larger than 10 mb each) and then send your friends an easy to use URL — like kiyoshimartinez.muxtape.com. The interface is elegant. Click a song you want to hear. Use the arrow keys to toggle forward and back and the enter key to pause/play.

If you’re on Tumblr, I recommend following muxtapelist.tumblr.com, where people are linking to their Muxtapes. It’s a fantastic way to discover new music and share some of the rare tracks you own with others.

You can also follow the official Muxtape Blog and also the site’s creator, JSTN.cc on Tumblr, too.

Time to make my Muxtape!

Technorati Tags: music, mp3, filesharing, mixtape, muxtape, web2.0

Each week, I spend between $15-25 on comic books, which range from $3-4 per issue.

Each month I probably spend $10-25 on books that probably will just sit on my shelf for years unread.

Yet, each day I refuse to spend even 25 cents on a newspaper.

I support printed products, just not newspapers. Why is this? I think it’s very simple: newspapers have no value.

Newspapers are what I’d consider disposable products. The price is too expensive, even if it is relatively cheap. They range from 50 cents to $1.50 on average (Sunday prices obviously being higher).

I’m never going to read an entire paper. Based on those prices, I probably need about a nickel’s worth of news a day from the paper. And even then, it’s a gamble picking up the paper, because it might not have anything I wanted to read. In fact, I’m probably better off going online at work and Googling the news I need and care about.

Instead, what I will do as a consumer is take that money I’m not spending and purchase a magazine for the week to read (especially if I’m a commuter) that focuses in a niche interest I have. I get a bunch of quick bits and also some longer articles as well. I’m also more likely to get more vibrant design, glossy photo spreads and a more reader friendly format versus the terrible concept of the broadsheet. This only cost me $3-5, and I’ll have it around for quite some time until I’ve read it cover to cover. It’s a more economical buy.

Books are even better. I’ll have to pay a higher price, but when I’m done I can pretentiously store them on my book shelf. And talk about a quality printed material. This stuff is built to last, with the hardcover binding and thick pages.

And with comic books, you have the collectible factor to go with cool visuals and writing. Best of all, this medium continues for several months in a series. The idea of periodical storytelling is far from dead.

So, what can newspapers learn from all of this? Frankly, a whole lot.

+ Kill the newspaper format
Newspapers have to stop printing their product in a format that’s terrible. Forget the broadsheet. Forget the tabloid even. Give me a glossy magazine once a week with analysis and charge me a premium for it. People who want print will pay for it. Those who don’t are already reading it online. Milk your print subscribers for more money, but give them something that’s not so damned disposable.

+ Serialize your coverage
I might skim over the Iraq coverage each day, but imagine if you sold me a month’s worth of Iraq coverage with compelling photographs and fantastic storytelling. And what if you sold me The New York Times: Iraq War Coverage each month as a magazine. Use periodical storytelling. Do multiple part stories over the course of a year. Do photo essays. I may not have time to read about Iraq each day from the NYT, but I might be in the mood for it once in a while and want to read about it for a few hours on my bed, sofa, office, etc. Give me a format to digest the big topics.

+ Be more visual
While I’ll read the Wall Street Journal and the NYT, I loathe their frontpages. In fact, I hate most newspapers’ design. It’s boring. No wonder no one my age wants to read it. It’s bland, has no color and has so much text without an equal amount of visuals to balance it. Now, take a look at your favorite magazines — that’s how news design should be done. And, no, doing your newspaper’s design like the Tribune’s RedEye isn’t what I mean by design that’s appealing to younger readers. There’s a reason why the RedEye is free.

+ Let writers be writers, DAMMIT!
Why is it that every news story I read (and used to have to write) follows the inverted pyramid? Or even the WSJ lede? Boring. Novels aren’t all written the same. Neither are comic books. Writers do what’s best for the story. They tell it in a way that’s most compelling for a reader. Why do newspapers force every reporter to writer like we’d expect a reporter to write? The journalism police aren’t going to give you a ticket if you let them write in first person on a city council story. Experiment and let your writers actually practice a craft. Think I’m crazy? Take a look at the blogosphere. They’re not worried about having fun and using a little bit of their personal voice.

Those are just a few ideas off the top of my head how to add value to printed products. Like I said, print isn’t dead. You just have to provide me with incentives to pay for what you produce. Until that happens, expect me to spend more money on comics in a week than I do on newspapers in a year.

Technorati Tags: newspaper, journalism, media, print, books, comics, magazine, money, utility, value, writing, photography, design