Will Sullivan, yet again, has a fantastic post with job advice for journalists, especially new grads.

First, I recommend you check out his full list of 32 tips. I’m going to highlight a few here and make some comments:

1. Your boss matters way more than where you are working.

Horrible, stifling, untrusting, unengaging, uncaring bosses will crush your soul faster than anything. Choose your boss wisely. I’ve been pretty fortunate throughout my career to have bosses that gave me some leash and threw me some bones.

If you don’t get along with your boss, you’re screwed. If you’re with a boss that doesn’t allow creativity, you’re screwed. If you’re with a boss who doesn’t really care about your work or journalism, you’re screwed.

2. Your coworkers / your environment matters a lot too.

Nothing is worse than being in a toxic environment where people just show up to collect a pay check. The kind of environment where creativity and risks are discouraged. Stay far away from places filled with lifers. If your coworkers aren’t willing to lose their jobs, they’re not willing to fight for a better future.

3. Being good at ‘networking’ helps. A lot.

I’m not a fan of this either, but it’s true. Deal with it and evolve accordingly.

Networking is the name of the game for journalism. Don’t like it? I don’t know what to tell you. I can tell you this: It is about who you know and what you know. It doesn’t matter if everyone knows you to be a talentless bum. You want to be memorable for all the right reasons.

4. Keep studying.

I don’t think you need Will or I to tell you this, but dedicate yourself to a life-long quest of learning. It will greatly help your career. I have many, many more skills today than I did when I graduated two years ago.

5. “On the job experience” is still more valued than “Technical or skill experience.”

Unfortunately, there’s still a culture of ladder climbing and ‘putting your time in’ at many organizations. Most really skilled, smart tech people aren’t going to sit around doing web monkey producer work while they ‘put in their time.’ This is one of the reasons newspaper journalism in it’s current form will continue to fail unless it gets corrected abruptly.

Journalism often operates more like a union than a corporation, which means time served is often more important than actual skills or talent. It’s strange. It’s bizarre, but it’s reality at many publications.

Frankly, I don’t know what to tell you, because that makes no sense, especially in an industry that desperately needs an injection of talent. This is either one of those things that has to change quickly, or the industry will continue to die. For young graduates, don’t be surprised if you’re passed over for someone who has “paid his dues,” even though your skill set and talents fit the job better.

Honestly, you don’t want to work at a place like that anyway. It might not be around in five years.

6. Freelance like your life depends on it.

…Because at the least, your livelihood does. It’s very likely at this early point in your career, you’re going to get stuck doing the lower-level work. Freelancing often allows you the opportunity to pick up jobs and learn skills that you otherwise wouldn’t because you’re working third shift night cops. Or copy-and-paste web producing. Or shooting mugshots of buildings. It also requires you to have some business sense, which is critical for all journalists in this age.

Most young graduates will find that their first job will involve a lot of work they don’t want to do, especially for many entry-level Web jobs. This is were freelancing comes in. Never give up on doing what you love, and maybe one day you’ll get to do it all day, every day at your main job.

7. You should really be trying to get fired.

But do speak out with passion, vigor and conviction to any and everyone, regardless of rank, when you see your company doing stupid things in the dying, old media way. Your company probably needs you more than you need them. You can either speak out now and try to save both your butts, or sit back, fall in line and wait for them to cut your job to save theirs.

Journalism is filled with cautious people who fear being fired. Don’t be one of them. Be a rebel, a trailblazer, a maverick, an iconoclast.

Yesterday the JI had about 50 different posts receiving traffic.

You might wonder why that is a big deal? It’s a big deal because I usually write about 30 posts a month, which means that many older posts were being read and discovered. I keep harping on the need for rich SEO and social networking integration, and it’s because harnessing those concepts can bring new life to old content.

People are still finding and enjoying posts from 2007. And why not? It’s also important to actively encourage your readers and the Web community to link to your content.

I’m actively working on improving my SEO. I’m going to be changing my ugly looking URLs soon (hopefully if I can do it without breaking my old ones) to cleaner, more SEO friendly ones. I’m also looking into sitemap tweaks.

Perhaps the biggest change I’m looking to implement is making my individual blog post pages more sticky. Most people access this blog via subpages, not the main page. The main page has a right side rail with useful stuff in it like the hottest posts (top 5 most popular posts in the last week), recent comments, categories, etc.

In short, my subpages aren’t serving their purpose. I’ll greatly lower my bounce rate by making my subpages more sticky. These proposed changes should further increase the amount of non-direct traffic this blog receives.

And those changes will further breathe more life into old content.