About those jobs

Working my way through some of the items I’ve been holding in Bloglines, I’ve come across these three related posts.

New media skills = better job prospects, at Visual Editors, includes this:

If for no other reason, learn new media skills for increased employment opportunities. There is a sweet spot in the journalism job market right now for good journalists with multimedia skills. Demand, at least for now, outstrips the supply of good digital storytellers.

UPDATE: As Bryan Murley points out in the comments, the Visual Editors post is a citation from a post at Innovation in College Media. The full original post is here.

That’s related to a pair of fairly recent posts from Paul Conley. In Three job tips for students, he lists what he’s looking for when hiring: youth itself, evidence the applicants are self-taught (above and beyond what they’re getting through the curriculum) and an entrepreneurial spirit. The last may seem a little controversial, but I think you could successfully argue that “enterpreneurial” is no worse a term for drive and desire than that old warhorse “self-starter.”

In the second post from Paul, Folks with resumes need not apply, he points to a recent Wired move to tell applicants to forward a blog post, not a resumé. What he’s writing about in both isn’t industry standard. The old ways — the resumés and carefully compiled clips file — are still the norm.

All three posts point to something, though. Want-to-be journalists need new media skills and a new media approach to their education and job applications.

(One of the reasons these three caught my eye is that my summer is going to be spent substantially reworking four of the courses I teach to take the emphasis off “paper” and put it on news and multimedia delivery. I’m hoping the students we produce will be able to take advantage of that “sweet spot” mentioned above.)