Tomorrow's News, Tomorrow's Journalists

Blogging: The skill that begets all others

If you’re a young journalist sitting around wondering what you can do right now to make yourself more attractive to potential employers, here it is: blog. Blogging is very much the basis for all web communication and by blogging regularly, you will incidentally pick up several other skills that will look good on a résumé.

You’ll become a better writer

Ideally you’re already writing every day, but I was a young journalist once, too, and I know that’s not always the case. Maybe you’ve got a few freelance assignments kicking about or you’re turning in once-weekly bits for your school paper. Whatever the case, you need to do your best to write every day because it will simply make you better.

Comic book writer Brian Michael Bendis once explained it to me like this (I’m paraphrasing): “Writing is like going to the gym—you can do it once every two weeks, but if you do, you can’t really expect to get any stronger. The way you build up your stamina and build strength is to go back every day and occasionally up the amount of weight you’re trying to lift.”

Don’t worry what you’re blogging about (though blogging about the industry you want to head into has its benefits), just blog and be prolific.

You’ll learn the ethics of the web

The SPJ Code of Ethics and AP Stylebook can be handy tools, but they can also lead you astray. This is something not often understood by experienced journalists, many of whom teach young journalists.

Your blog audience will edit you, probably whether you like it or not—let that happen. I learned so much faster by posting by messing things up and having people correct me. This goes for everything: linking, quoting, sourcing and more. A lot of the things journalists have been taught to do in print are flat-out wrong on the web. (Example: “Reports say the Seattle Mariners have fired Manager Don Wakamatsu.” Well what reports? Where? Give us a link.)

You’ll know some code

HTML and CSS sound like scary things because they’re complicated and specific and journalists come up thinking they need to know a little about a lot. But code isn’t as intimidating as it seems. It’s a lot like learning to play guitar, which pretty much every college student has taught himself to do at some point. You don’t need to be Slash from Guns ‘N Roses, but it helps to be able to know a few chords in case you need to impress a girl sometime.

Once you start blogging, you’ll hit a few roadblocks. How do I put this video on my page? How do I re-size it? What if I want to draw a table to illustrate a point? Solving those will involve learning a small bit of HTML and maybe CSS. Being able to put “basic HTML” on a résumé is the modern equivalent of “conversational in Spanish”—trust me, it’s clutch.

You’ll build up your own brand

Here’s the thing old-school and new media journalists butt heads on probably more than anything else: “personal branding.” Admittedly, it sounds pretty PR-y, but here’s all it means: when I do a search on the internet for your name, I find you. If you’re a young/student journalist languishing in obscurity, that’s huge.

The fact is, the first thing anyone considering you for a job is going to do is Google you. When they do, you don’t want them to find either (a) some other person or (b) pictures of you doing keg stands in your friend’s backyard. You should take your brand as seriously as you take your résumé because that’s exactly what it is. If I’m an employer and I have two equally qualified candidates, but one has an established web presence, I’m going with the guy with the web presence. He’s polished, he’s professional and he’s obviously passionate about what he does because he’s put some time into it. The other guy…who knows?

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