Maybe you’ve heard the news by now about how traditional journalism — especially the print side — is having a tough time.

This is not the time to despair. This is the time to create new ventures and take journalism to a new — better — level.

(This post is a follow-up to Journalism students need to know business)

Students looking for jobs in traditional journalism roles and in mainstream media jobs will be sorely disappointed with the job market. There simply are not a lot of jobs available in those areas, nor is there any growth. But there are journalism jobs to be had, and there is a lot of growth in online journalism.

The thing about online journalism is that many of the jobs aren’t with traditional MSM companies. And many non-MSM jobs are found through non-mainstream sources. Having a printed résumé and searching JournalismJobs.com doesn’t cut it anymore.

Students need to understand marketing and how to market themselves. I suggested in my previous post in this series that every journalism student should be required to take an economics or business class. It also makes sense for every journalism student to either take a marketing class or, better yet, a class on entrepreneurism.

Gone are the old, outdated concepts that journalists only produce content. New media companies like Engadget and Tech Crunch have been popping up. It’s not just the content that sells those sites, but rather it’s the ability of their founders to understand business and marketing — along with content — that has helped make those sites a success.

Even if a student wants to take the traditional media route, learning how to market one’s self is a helpful skill to have. It will help students get more job offers and better job offers. It will also help students break into new media.

How to market yourself:

1. Digital résumé - I’ve touched on this many times before, but every student needs a digital résumé with a personal Web site and/or blog. Online journalism content — especially multimedia — doesn’t show up properly on a printed résumé, which is a major reason why every journalism student needs to make a digital résumé. Plus, digital résumés can be accessed from anywhere in the world and are search engine friendly (SEO is the way of the Web).
2. Personal Web site / blog - You can’t have a digital résumé without a personal Web site or blog. Ideally, a personal Web site would be a gateway into a journalist’s work and talents. Preferably, a student would have both a blog and a personal Web site that showcases a variety of journalism and Web talents. But a blog at Blogger or WordPress.com isn’t a bad option for students who don’t want to get a personal domain name. And blogging is a great marketing tool. Many, many people have been offered jobs because of their blogs. If your blog becomes popular it will encourage people to view your digital résumé, and it will get your name out in the journalism community.
3. Online presence - When someone Googles your name, the search results should be littered with it. This mean having strong SEO on your personal Web site and blog. This means being active in social networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Delicious, Digg, etc. And it also means using your real name with your social networking accounts to increase your online presence and searchability. No one in their right mind would hire someone to be an online journalist who didn’t already have a strong online presence.
4. Be professional - Having an e-mail address with your real name in it is a must, but many students still use personal e-mail accounts that don’t exude professionalism in the least. The best option would be to have an e-mail address at your personal domain name. That takes it to the next level. Act like you’ve been there before.

All of these suggestions are aimed at making students look like professionals, like someone who gets it. You want to make people want to hire you and work with you.

That’s what personal marketing is all about.

This is my March post for the Carnival of Journalism. It is currently hosted by Will Sullivan over at Journerdism.

Students should not be allowed to graduate from journalism school without some business sense and knowledge of the journalism industry.

Every student should know how to write, edit, research, report and have strong online skills. But those are just skills, as Kiyoshi Martinez puts it. Journalism students also need to understand the industry they are about to enter, while also understanding basic economics and business:

Knowing the business and industry means realizing the broader challenges journalism as a whole is facing. Look beyond what job you’ll be doing and take a look at the snapshot portrait that’s being developed right now about the profession. Do you know about the mass layoffs, buyouts, paycuts and hiring freezes? How about the declining or stagnating advertising revenues? What do you know about what stock analysts are saying about the price per share on the major newspaper chains? Do you know the stock history of the parent company of the paper you’re applying to? More importantly, do you know how all of this will affect your job (should you get it) and the benefits, raises (or lack thereof) that you receive?

First j-schools should be honest about the state of the industry and educate students about the history of it. Professors need to educate students about possible futures they may face. Then j-schools should at least make students take a basic economics or business class (this should probably be a requirement for all college students).

We all make jokes about journalists being bad at math and not understanding or caring about business. We all laugh, and everyone has a good time, but it’s not much of a joke anymore. It’s kind of just sad really.

Journalism needs enterprising journalists to think of new ventures to modernize journalism. Opportunities in journalism will increasingly be from entrepreneurial routes as the mainstream media continues to wither away from obsolescence.

When journalism was doing well, and journalism companies were living in the monopoly era, business sense was the last thing journalists needed. Somebody else could worry about that. But that’s not the case anymore.

Traditional media companies are failing, journalists don’t understand how to make compelling products and new media ventures are beginning to take over. That’s where solid entrepreneurial skills come in.

Let’s be perfectly clear here: People want to be informed. They like journalism. They, however, want journalism in different, more modern forms.

That’s why students need to understand how to start their own ventures and compete on the Web. Jeff Jarvis started an entrepreneurial journalism class at CUNY, and every journalism school should have a course like it.

The opportunities for journalists are growing, not shrinking. The traditional, MSM routes are rapidly shrinking, but the avenues for business savvy, enterprising young journalists are ever expanding.

Journalism schools need to give students the skills needed to succeeded in modern journalism. That means a little business sense is now needed.

No one should be shocked that The Huffington Post had better comscore and Nielsen Online numbers than the Drudge Report in February.

February 2008 monthly unique visitors:

Nielsen Online
Huffington Post: 3.7 million
Drudge Report: 3.4 million

comScore
Huffington Post: 2.3 million
Drudge Report: 1.6 million

It has nothing to do with liberal vs. conservative or the content on either site. It has everything to do with conversation. The success of the HuffPost is due to the community it has built around user interaction.

The Drudge Report is one of the first and most successful link blogs (and much better at linking to stories than just about any other site or blog). In fact Drudge’s popularity is a testament to how good Drudge is at sorting through news and finding interesting stories. The Drudge Report is almost entirely repurposed content, with an occasional scoop, while being completely devoid of any sort of community features.

The HuffPost is totally different. It does a lot of the same linking that Drudge does, but that’s not why it’s popular. Don’t try to out-Drudge Drudge because that’s a suicide mission.

So, the HuffPost decided to allow users to comment on stories and it built an impressive network of bloggers. This blog post at the HuffPost already has 500 comments on it.

Not only have community features allowed the HuffPost to garner a huge following, but those features have also allowed the site to be valued at $70 million. Compare that with a valuation of $10 million for Drudge.

The thing is, these two sites are not competitors. One is merely a site of links that has been widely accepted within MSM circles (especially among journalists who consider Drudge and Romenesko mandatory reading), while the other is partisan community site. That community aspect is why the sites are nothing alike, while the partisan aspect allows the HuffPost to hone in on a niche — albeit a very large one.

There are not many lessons to learn from the Drudge Report, because its success is probably not replicable, but the HuffPost is a great template for 21st-century media success. It’s built around a niche and community. That’s the formula for Web success.

“Before the public can learn to trust the powerful, the powerful must learn to trust the public.” - Jeff Jarvis

Too many journalists don’t trust the public — AKA their audience. Many believe that journalists are the arbiters of information and truth. This is why so many journalism companies have been slow to adopt blogs, allow comments on stories, accept user-created content like photos, etc.

That sort of hubris worked when journalism outlets like newspapers had monopolies, but it’s a terrible mindset to have in the era of choice. People have a voice now, and that voice allows them to choose a myriad of other sources for news and information. People overwhelmingly want to apart of the conversation, not just a third-party sitting on the sidelines.

People have left traditional journalism outlets in droves, often because new media outlets provide a conversation and openly ask for user feedback. In fact, many blogs and other new media companies were founded by non-journalists who felt left out of the conversation by traditional media companies.

Embracing users is a great way for journalism companies to connect with users. Users that feel a connection are more likely to come back to a site and spend more time on it. Many news organizations have embraced their users, and those are the companies best positioned to not only survive but also thrive in 21st-century journalism.

When we fight our users and try to keep them at arms-length, we’ll never fully understand what they want. Ultimately, we cannot survive without making products that people care about.

We must trust our audience before they can trust us.

The New Yorker has an article this month about the state of newspaper journalism (hint: it’s not good).

It’s a must read for anyone in the industry or anyone thinking about going into it. Here are a couple of gems from the article:

“Since 1990, a quarter of all American newspaper jobs have disappeared.”

“Only nineteen per cent of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is fifty-five and rising.”

“According to “Abandoning the News,” published by the Carnegie Corporation, thirty-nine per cent of respondents under the age of thirty-five told researchers that they expected to use the Internet in the future for news purposes; just eight per cent said that they would rely on a newspaper.”

“The Web provides a powerful platform that enables the creation of communities; distribution is frictionless, swift, and cheap.”

That’s why when I say it’s time to panic, it is time to panic!

There is nothing cyclical about what is happening to newspapers. Even when the economy comes roaring back, newspapers that haven’t changed will still continue to die. We need to radically rethink the product.

But America needs newspapers. Newspapers have long been the keepers of democracy by investing large amounts of resources into original reporting. That’s why newspapers need to realize that just because print is dying, doesn’t mean they have to do die.

I’ll leave you with this final passage from The New Yorker:

Finally, we need to consider what will become of those people, both at home and abroad, who depend on such journalistic enterprises to keep them safe from various forms of torture, oppression, and injustice. “People do awful things to each other,” the veteran war photographer George Guthrie says in “Night and Day,” Tom Stoppard’s 1978 play about foreign correspondents. “But it’s worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark.” Ever since James Franklin’s New England Courant started coming off the presses, the daily newspaper, more than any other medium, has provided the information that the nation needed if it was to be kept out of “the dark.” Just how an Internet-based news culture can spread the kind of “light” that is necessary to prevent terrible things, without the armies of reporters and photographers that newspapers have traditionally employed, is a question that even the most ardent democrat in John Dewey’s tradition may not wish to see answered.

The No. 4 source of traffic to the JI is Twitter.

And yet, I’ve only been a serious user of Twitter for a few months. The traffic this blog gets from Traffic seems to grow by the week. Anyone in the content business needs to realize what a traffic boon Twitter can be.

But, as I’ve said before, the best way to get meaningful traffic from Twitter is to engage in a two-way conversation. Pushing headlines onto Twitter is a really poor use of the technology, and much worse than an RSS feed. I have Google Reader for the RSS feeds I want to subscribe to.
Twitterholic has the top 100 Twitter users by followers. Very few Mainstream Media members are represented, and yet many individual bloggers and new media mavens have managed to attract thousands of followers. Twitter is a fantastic brand-building experience for those Twitter users.

I’ll leave you with this thought from ReporTwitter:

Journalists that Twitter personally about their professional lives know first hand, as do many bloggers, that Twitter is all about conversation. The potential is huge for driving noticeable traffic to websites by actively Twittering about what you’re writing about.

Here is the original Twitter can drive traffic post.  

Let’s have a little straw poll: What print publications do you subscribe to?

I’ll go first. National Geographic is the only print publication I subscribe to. I let my Economist subscription lapse because it’s pretty expensive, but I’m thinking of renewing it now that I have settled into a new place for the next year (I’ve lived in three different places in the last year).

Neither publication is a good source for up-to-the-minute news coverage. Both, however, excel at analysis pieces.

National Geographic has some fantastic long-form journalism. It’s the kind of writing that I do not like reading on a computer screen. I regularly click out of articles I find on the Web that are too long.

I have Web ADD like many computer users. I like to read journalism that understands that the Web is a fast and immediate medium. And if your story takes to long to get to the point, I’ll quickly find something else to occupy my time.

The Economist is firmly focused on news analysis, and that’s how I like my print publications. I have Google Reader and the Web in general to keep me up to date on the latest news, but The Economist is a great resource to get through the static of the Web, and provide me with a long-term look on news and world affairs.

So, what if anything do you still subscribe to and why? And if you’re daring, leave your age.

Ryan Sholin compiled a list of the reasons why he used to read the print edition and how those reasons aren’t the same reasons why he reads news Web sites.

Here are the reasons I picked up a newspaper growing up:

1. The sports section - In some ways when I’m home in Ohio I still prefer to read the print edition of the Plain Dealer over the Web edition because cleveland.com sucks.
2. Comics
3. TV guide
4. Movie times
5. Occasional story that caught my eye in the Wall Street Journal.

My family also subscribed to Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report while I was growing up. I read both of those, but strongly prefer the Economist these days. The Economist, with its weekly analysis pieces of news from around the world, is the kind of printed product that makes sense today.

Most of the reasons I listed for reading a newspaper don’t make sense anymore for a newspaper. TVguide.com is way easier to use than an actual TV Guide. Movies.com is a Godsend when compared with hard-to-decipher-and-often-wrong movie listings in newspapers.

And certainly, a newspaper should never, ever pay to put weather or movie and TV listings on its Web site. The Web is filled with free Web sites that do those tasks very well. Heck, I have a weather widget on my computer.

Even cleveland.com has several features — like podcasts from beat writers and columnists five days a week — that make the sports section of cleveland.com a better product than the print edition, even if the layout is not very good.

Now, I can’t really read the Wall Street Journal online with its paywall, and I’m not paying the exorbitant fee to get access. That’s the Journal’s problem, not mine.

Sholin wisely points out that the content a newspaper has online shouldn’t be the same as the Web edition:

I think you’re better off sticking with what makes online different: Breaking news, blogs, video, conversation, community, links, aggregation, audio, slideshows, galleries…

Please, don’t try to throw Ann Landers at me online and tell me readers demand it. They want Ann and Abby, they can pick up a print edition. Don’t waste your money and your Web staff’s time by signing sixteen partnerships for movie times and TV listings and comic strips. If I want that online, I know where to find it.

The important take home point here is that the the Web is fundamentally different from a printed product. We all know that from how we use both of them. That’s why newspapers should have unique content in each medium that highlights that mediums strengths.

Newspapers also have to realize that the majority of people get their news from the Web. Printed newspapers don’t fit many of our lifestyles, as Mindy McAdams put it:

In my current lifestyle, I concluded, the printed newspaper just does not fit. I spend a lot of time in front of a computer, in various environments.

In that, I’m not so different from most people in North America.

Journalism is a defender of democracy.

Journalism is a freer of societies.

Journalism is the last line of defense against tyranny.

Journalism is the voice of the lowest common denominator.

Journalism is for the people, by the people.

Journalism is not created for journalists, but for readers and users.

What does journalism mean to you?

“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” - Wayne Gretzky.

So where are you looking?