Looking for a journalism job? How to get yourself noticed

Want a job?

Thousands of them have been nuked in this business in the last decade, but don’t forget, we live in revolutionary times, and your next opportunity may be doing something that’s going to be invented the day after tomorrow.

If you want to be ready, you ought to clip and save this primer from Poynter’s Mallary Jean Tenore, “10 ways young journalists can make themselves more marketable.”

Clip and save is a thing people used to say before all those old jobs went away.

Tenore provides advice, links, words of encouragement. It’s all from a talk she gave at her alma mater, Providence College—which is also the alma mater of Poynter’s Roy Peter Clark, which, Tenore writes, is part of why she’s at Poynter. She put her first piece of advice to work: “Start making contacts. Track down journalists who graduated from your university and reach out to them.”

As is often the case with this sort of thing, much of what Tenore writes is common sense: Get experience. Develop new skills. Figure out who you want to work for. Make your application stand out.

But it’s good to have it in one place, and you can’t remind yourself of this stuff too often.

What are you doing right now? Why not drop an email to someone you admire? As Tenore writes, “Let them know that you like their work and would be grateful for any job-related tips they can give you. Chances are, they’ll want to help.”