Will Sullivan over at Journerdism has a great post with resources on how to get a better job.

He has 94 resources to help people with networking, resumes, interviewing and negotiating and places to find jobs. Even if you have a job, some of the resources can help you negotiate a better raise or a new position at your company. Newspapers are businesses, and if you don’t want to get stepped on, you better know how to play business.

His post is also a phenomenal resource for upcoming journalism grads. Here is my quick advice: make sure you have a dynamite digital resume (a printed one is OK to have around too), apply to jobs that you’ll enjoy (don’t just apply to random jobs, because it might show up in your interviews and you may not enjoy the job even if you get it), research the hell out of any company that asks you to come in for an interview, dress professionally (I’ve always gotten an offer when I wear my pinstripe suit) and learn how to interview well.

It doesn’t matter how good your resume and portfolio are if you bomb the interview. You have to sell yourself when you interview by demonstrating how your skills will be beneficial to the company you are interviewing with. It’s also very, very important to know how to negotiate when it comes to money, whether it is for a job offer or for a raise.

Your first salary out of college can greatly impact how much you make for the rest of your life. If you start off with a below market salary, it will impact every raise you get. If person A starts at $30,000 and person B at $35,000, their salaries could quickly diverge even further.

A 10 percent raise puts them at $33,000 and $38,500. Another 10 percent raise puts them at $36,300 and $42,350. What started as a $5,000 difference in salary became a $6,050 difference in just two raises. Every raise that person B gets will amplify his salary even more over person A’s.

Holiday pay? Person B will benefit more from that. 401(k) and retirement? Person B will benefit more.

Virtually every job offer has room for negotiation. It’s rare that a company will offer a candidate its best offer right off the bat. That doesn’t stop most people from accepting that offer. Remember, when negotiating money and benefits, it’s never about what you need, it’s always about what you’re worth.

This is a new weekly feature debuting today at the JI. Every week I’ll take a look at a student newspaper Web site, feature on that site, story or other content that I like.

The inaugural College High Five of the Week goes to The Independent Florida Alligator for its Best Photos of the Week in News feature. Here is why I like this feature: it’s an easy way to get more life out of content, while also serving users better. Does it get any better then that?

Basically, Alligator staffers select the best staff photos of the week, put them in a slide show and boom they have new content. First, people love photos. Whenever you can get mileage out of photos, do it.

Second, this feature is a showcase for a newspaper’s best work. By showcasing its best photos, newspapers can use them as a launching pad to get people to consume more content. Like that photo? Maybe you’ll like the story that goes with it.

Finally, this is an easy, Web-only feature that people enjoy. People enjoy looking at photos, especially good photos. I guarantee you that even your regular users will probably miss a few of your best photos each week.

It happens. Users will appreciate that you are highlighting your best work for them.

Now, there are a few ways to improve this feature. First, it would be much cooler if instead of putting the photos into Soundslides, the Alligator put each photo into a database. I’m pretty sure the Alligator does it the way they do because of CMS limitations.

This would allow the Alligator to track the page views for each photo. Also, each photo could have a rating from 1-5 stars. This would allow users to see what their peers thought was cool.

Let’s take this concept a step further. What if every photo on the Alligator’s site was rateable and tracked page views? Then the Web site could automatically create a most popular photo gallery every week by either page views or by rating. Those galleries could then be compared to what the Alligator staff thought were the best photos.

I think this would be a huge way of getting more life out of existing content. I don’t believe any newspaper does the concept I have discussed here, mostly due to CMS limitations. It would take a very Web-first CMS to make this happen (most newspaper CMSes are very print-content centric). But just because you don’t have a great CMS (and who does?) doesn’t mean you can’t make cool features.

That’s what the Alligator has done here. Instead of worrying about what they can’t do, they have figured out what they can.

If you would like to nominate a collegiate newspaper Web site, story or feature send an e-mail to connect (at) patthorntonfiles (dot) com.

Many journalists are loathe to care about what readers/users want to read and consume, but if you don’t have readers you don’t have a newspaper.

Far too many journalists have a journalistic arrogance, as Sam Zell put it. This arrogance journalists them to believe that only they know what is and what isn’t news. These journalists don’t care what readers and users want, because journalists know best.

But Zell is right. A lot of journalists are arrogant for thinking they know best. Most newspapers are owned by corporations, which means they are firmly a for-profit business.

You don’t make money (or hire new people or give employees raises) if employees don’t care what consumers want. Newspapers probably shouldn’t be owned by large publicly-held companies, but that’s the reality on the ground. Let’s be honest for a moment — the vast majority of journalism isn’t big Fourth Estate Journalism.

The vast majority of journalism doesn’t expose government corruption, mob activity or corporate greed. No the majority of journalism is community journalism. It’s journalism that journalists want to cover because they enjoy it or because they believe it is news.

That small journalism needs to support big Journalism. The New York Times spends $3 million a year on it’s Baghdad Bureau. You can’t cover Iraq without something subsidizing that coverage.

Zell recently told employees of the Daily Press that journalists need to focus on what readers want.

The news operation “has to be part of the solution, not part of the problem,” he said. “If we don’t have the revenue and we don’t have the readers, it really doesn’t matter what you write.”

It’s true. If a newspaper’s employees don’t care about what its readers want to read, there won’t be much to write about when that paper lays everyone off and stops printing.

Thus a newspaper must make sure that its little journalism is popular with readers. That might mean covering more high school football games (hint: people love photos of high school sporting events and high school sports in general). It might mean that the high school prom is news.

It might mean a lot of things. Ask your readers for better guidance. Covering local news that readets actually care about has been the recipe for success for the Lawrence Journal-World, winner of the NAA’s Digital Edge Award for best overall newspaper site in the under 75,000 circulation category.

No one is debating what Journalism is, but it’s pure hubris to believe that only journalists know what journalism is. Newspapers need readers, and that means covering events that people actually care about.