No golden age of political journalism? I agree. But given what this columnist says about the greater education of and resources available to today’s political journalists, I would expect to see more policy than politics, and less pack reporting, a little more outside-the-bubble context. … I say that as a consumer; I’ve never worked on the Hill.
Survey: Public prefers news from professional journalists | Poynter.
Survey: Public prefers news from professional journalists | Poynter..
So there, my citizen-journalist-loving former industry.
Laid Off? 10 Tips For Suddenly Unemployed Journalists – Recovering Journalist
This is a good article — I’ve said most of these things at one time or another myself, and am patting myself on the back for my smarts — but the really interesting thing about this are the comments, especially the last one, from a journalist who was near retirement age when she was laid off. She became a security guard to supplement her severance/unemployment/pension and says it woke her up to what she should be doing, and all in all the lesson she learned is “you are not what you do.” That was a good one.
Laid Off? 10 Tips For Suddenly Unemployed Journalists – Recovering Journalist.
A Vision for the Future of Newspapers—20 Years Ago – Recovering Journalist
Wondermark » Archive » #862; In which Jeremy has Standards
Postmedia sheds costs with shift to Hamilton – The Globe and Mail
The future of newspapers is apparently “no news.”
Postmedia sheds costs with shift to Hamilton – The Globe and Mail.
The job seeker is a lonely hunter
Jobs are tricksy bastards — hard-to-get at the best of times and seemingly even more adept at melding into the wallpaper the more desperate you are to find them.
I mean, think of the contradictory truisms that accompany talk of a job search: it’s easier to find a job if you already have one — but the job search should be your full-time job. I guess the takeaway from that is if you’re going to be laid off, use the time while you’re still employed to find a new job, while doing just enough work to ensure you still get a good reference.
And it all becomes even more true whe you start looking for a job outside your geographic area. Brazen Careerist Penelope Trunk’s advice for the long-distance job search is: don’t do it. Or at least, only do it if you’ve got something really special to offer and a support network on the ground.
That said, a layoff is a good time to relocate, if that’s what you’ve been wanting to do, especially if you have a severance package to cover some of your inevitable startup costs. But if you’re like me, you won’t want to move and then start looking for work; you won’t commit to the move until an employer has committed to you. I’m not saying that’s the best way to go — if I’d had less of a security fetish I’d probably be somewhere in Montreal right now, living the boho, louche life of a francophone intellectual. Woulda coulda shoulda…
The long-distance job search is a tough slog but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. In the end, it’s not all that different, in its essentials, from the at-home search. You identify your preferred geographical location (in a perfect world), research the current job market, identify potential employers there, do your homework on the companies, find a contact and introduce yourself to them, via letter or email. And then follow up with a call.
Ideally, you’d have contacts in the place where you want to go, so tap your networks, because you never know — someone might know someone there. And again, ideally, you’d move somewhere that you already had contacts, that makes life in general, and not just the job search, a lot easier.
In a perfect world, a prospective employer will be blown away by your CV and cover letter, will want you on the spot and will pay for you to come out in order to give you the hard sell on the job. That’s unlikely to happen, just so’s you know. More likely, you’ll have to decide when to make the trip to your chosen city and pay for it yourself. One way to go about it is to send out your cold-call letters, follow up with a phone call and say you’re planning to be in town on such-and-such a date, could you come by for a chat? It shows a willingness on your part to make the move. And face-to-face is the best way to sell yourself.
Going on your own dime has its benefits too — you get an opportunity to explore the city your way, to see if it’s a place that you could live in or if maybe it’s best admired from a distance, or as a tourist. Some great tourist towns are less attractive to the locals.
As always, research, research, research, know what you want and then go get it.
Political Irony › Mass Satire
Should I stay or should I go now?
Do you like to move it, move it? I’m not a fan. My parents were near-radicals in their place and time in that they moved an hour’s drive away from their parents, but they stayed in the house where I grew up for 30 years, moving only after retirement. I haven’t managed that record, but it’s taken a major event — job change, layoff, job change, buying a house — to get me out of my comfort zone any time since.
I’m from what we Canadians call a “have-not” province, and because of that I’m more familiar than some (immigrants and emigrants not included) with the idea of leaving your home and family and everything you know in order to chase a dream — or at the very least a decent paychque — elsewhere. At one point in the recent past, my four brothers and I were spread from one end of the country to the other, and into the U.S. I used to feel bad for my parents — you’d think with five children they should have been able to guarantee at least one would be home for Christmas, but that wasn’t always the case.
So I have a little experience with moving away, and I’ll say honestly it has its pros and cons. The overwhelming pro is job opportunity. As a journalist, I had essentially four options for GOOD jobs in my home province. One of them laid me off, and I couldn’t get a look-in at the other three (because it has never been a good time to be a journalist since I entered the profession.) After the GOOD jobs, there were other places that hired journalists, to be sure, but none of them paid enough to live on and so weren’t an option for me. Once I was laid off, it was pretty much a given that I would have to move. So I did. But I’ll tell you right now that if I could find a job paying what my jobs in this province have paid, I’d move back in a minute to be with friends and family there. And I refuse to move farther away. I’m no longer as homesick as I once was, but I miss the ocean and my favourite people on earth.
So increased job opportunities, money … personal growth is also a big one. If you never see anything but what you know, if the world-view you grew up with is constantly reinforced because your world never really changes, it doesn’t make you a bad person but it stunts you a little bit. Leaving your comfort zone exposes you to new people and experiences that may not change your life in any great way, but they all have a subtle impact.
The cons can be equally persuasive. I remember listening to one co-worker years ago question why all the recently unemployed fish-industry workers in Newfoundland didn’t just move to the then- and again-booming oilfields in Alberta instead of collecting pogey at home. It seemed perfectly obvious to him — he’d left his home province to go to school and was looking at his professional moves afterward as career-builders, no big deal. Reasons for not leaving, on the other hand, seemed perfectly obvious to me: in Newfoundland they may have owned their own homes, or had places to stay with friends and family; they had social safety nets; they had any number of things that could not be easily duplicated in a new place, certainly not without incurring a lot of start-up costs for which they might not have the funds. So there are two cons: leaving behind your people, your place and the environment you know how to operate in, and the money it takes to get started. Another con, depending on the field you’re in, is not having contacts to find work. That’s less important if you’ve got a ticket in skilled trade, the ticket is your entree. You have to work harder to find work if you don’t have that kind of professional lubricant. If you have a job nailed down before you move, that’s a different kind of calculation.
I don’t know, I have had two careers and I chose both for their portability — I never intended to stay where I was. But moving because you HAVE to, and not because you WANT to, can be its own kind of hell.
I don’t have any answers. Sometimes you just have to do it — pick up sticks and move, make that leap of faith and/or desperation, hope for the best. Millions of people do it every day. Sometimes sticking to what you know is the best thing for you, sometimes it’s the worst. If you’re in a depressed job market, the choice can sometimes be between remaining unemployed, or underemployed, at home or finding professional success away. It’s essentially a deeply personal question of what you can bear.
Welcome to my layoff 