Category: On Media

My industry

Marketing yourself online: your byline is your brand

Last week I announced my intentions to give one of the hardest professional roads a try. I’m trying to be a freelance journalist – in Philadelphia, a city in a persistent media hiring freeze.

So if it’s always important to brand yourself, now is a particularly important juncture for this underemployed writer. For more than a year now though, leading up to and continuing beyond my college graduation, I have employed and developed a growing online community of methods to take control over my Web presence.

I am obsessively trying to find ways to market myself online like more and more multimedia journalists of all ages and experiences. So, what are you doing to promote your name?

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Web presences, social networking that can be put on hold

google-reader

Google Reader I am back.

Last month I returned from five weeks backpacking Europe and moved into a new home in Frankford, a neighborhood in lower Northeast Philadelphia.

Somehow, even though I was travel blogging and video podcasting at WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com, my month-plus European tour was an Internet vacation (IV) for me.

It was a chance to look at what social networking devices are easiest to put on hold.

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Look at the comments, stupid

Man, who doesn’t have a blog.

Any newspaper that can even be tossed in the conversation has someone adding to it. There is no end to the number of jerks like me doing much of the same, with less experience and knowledge but increasingly more interest than the more professional.

The question, of course, is if any of it is working. One of the simpler answers, I’d say, is, well, look at the comments. If they’re improving, you’re improving.

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Congratulations, President Obama

It will be an event I will tell my children about. Given this country’s race history, it is undeniably important to elect our first Black president.

It helped that John McCain wasn’t running as John McCain. Growing up as a McCain fan and trained to support defensible nonpartisanship, I can report that I do believe Obama-Biden was the better choice for American progress than McCain-Palin. It became easy for me — even if it is uncomfortable to discuss political decisions as a journalist — to vote for Obama.

Similarly, unfairly, unjustly untruly or not, it seemed the media – particularly in Europe, from my experience – wanted Barack Obama in the office. That is perceived as a liberal bias in journalism but McCain made it easier with a Vice Presidential pick. Journalists should be wary of being perceived as being “for” a candidate.

Still, Obama confronts outlandish expectations for a new president. He has already been anointed as part of a great achievement of American freedom. As a supporter of the U.S. presidency, I hope he can do it. But he has to exceed the level of excitement around him that prompted one supporter to tell a CNN TV camera: “you hear about people seeing Ghandi and Martin Luther King…”

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Journalists are victors of the moment

Perhaps more than any other profession, journalists live in moments, that hour’s story, that day’s deadline.

Zack Stalberg was made a legend for his Frank Rizzo moment. As a 2001 Philadelphia Weekly profile suggested:

Within two years the night rewrite kid is a City Hall reporter covering Frank Rizzo at a time when Rizzo was, as Stalberg recalls, “unstoppable … He was going to be governor and his image was untarnished and then–boom!” Boom, of course, was Stalberg himself, who persuaded the mayor to take a lie detector test to resolve a political dispute. Rizzo, as the whole city knows, failed the test in grand fashion, and Stalberg, as the whole city also knows, became someone who would make a name for himself. [Source]

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How to get your press release noticed

So you have a press release and want someone to actually pay attention to it.

After noting a fine internship with the Philadelphia Business Journal, I thought I might offer some advice I got there. Through that internship, I dealt with thousands of press releases, so let me help you out.

The publicity world is in the midst of plenty of conversations about bypassing media, trying direct-to-consumers press releases, but many criticize the practice.

 It’s not the purpose of public relations, they say. The point is to persuade media to tell their story.

If you’re in that camp, here are some thoughts about getting through to newspapers, journals, magazines and others through press releases.

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Journalism Tool box: What every young journalist needs

As a young, aspiring journalist, I want to know what it is I need to have, what I need to know and what I need to learn. I’ve spoken to some friends, colleagues and with a few professional internships in my past, I think I am ready to fill the vaccum. What needs to be in every young journalist’s tool box?

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Are things changing at the New Jersey Herald?

The newspaper of record for northwest New Jersey is the Herald. As such, it was the first newspaper I knew, the first read and the first I learned to criticize. But things may be changing.

The New Jersey Herald, now active six days a week, has published continuously since 1829. It is like many small, rural newspapers. With small communities, investigation is sometimes rare. Might Publisher Bruce Tomlinson and Editor Chris Frear avoid criticizing potential advertising streams when their coverage area is less than 150,000 people and their circulation is less than 15,000? Of course, but they’ve made a series of changes in recent years – like dropping their old God awful masthead seen above – and I’ve seen more of late.

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