Zac Echola is muffin but trouble

Do it: Blogging tips for students

Published on 11/04/08
by Zac Echola

Last Monday I made a guest appearance at a reporting class in town. I speak to students fairly regularly lately, but usually on quick topics like Web writing, video or multimedia and the like. This time I got a good hour and 45 minute conversation with a couple j-school professors and a small reporting class that had some great questions.

This conversation started with a 15 minute presentation about the state of the media. I didn’t talk about specifics like video or multimedia or programming. I explicitly avoided those topics. I wanted to have a conversation about conversations. I wanted to talk about how conversation and mass media can be the same thing on the Web.

We covered some topics like blogging, how people can commit acts of journalism without being “citizen journalists” and some tough issues our industry faces. We talked about how the act of searching narrows your scope as a news consumer, creating a tunnel vision that ignores the bigger picture. We talked about how technologies like tagging can increase the scale of that narrow scope and how it can lead to pivot points to other conversations.

It went over very well, I think. I was on top of my game when asked tough questions.

But one question came up that I think I stumbled on: What can journalism students do to help themselves get jobs after they graduate?

I mumbled something about LinkedIn and I said start a blog, immediately, but I should have been much more specific: I didn’t mean that you should start a blog to learn how blogs and the Internet works. We grew up with this. Point and click. Easy. I trust (and expect) you’ve gotten at least that far. I meant: Start a blog to network with others in the industry.

There’s a big difference between a blog that you use to grow a larger audience and a blog that you use for networking.

  1. A networking blog should be a living document of your professional self. You should stay focused on topics that matter to people who may hire you. You should start reading blogs from people in your field.
  2. When someone makes you think, you should think out loud on your site. Have a conversation with others. Email people questions. Chat with them on twitter. Get to know people. Working a blog isn’t much different than working a room at a conference. Stay focused.
  3. Show off your work. When you do something good, show it off. Don’t be bashful.
  4. SEO the crap out of yourself. When you apply for a job, the first thing most people do is Google your name. If your MySpace shows up with some compromising pictures, that puts you at a disadvantage. I don’t think you should have to take down those photos (with a bit of digging, I’m sure you can find some videos of me doing the drunken robot somewhere), but make sure your best stuff is at the top of the results page.
  5. Seize every opportunity you can. When I talk to people about Creative Commons and copyright, I talk about a student who sent The Forum photos from Northwood, ND. A tornado ravaged the small town last summer and Forum Communications had multiple properties covering the news. One student drove up to the site and started taking photographs. He took some great pictures and then he put them in front of us. We used some on In-Forum. On Monday, just as I was about to break into this spiel, a student in the back of the room told it for me. I had the fortune of finally putting a face to the photos. So:
  6. Always remember that there’s a real human being on the other side of the machine.

The end. Or is it?

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