Ron Davis and I while waiting to be seated. Photo by Bri Barry.

I remember sitting in the nurse’s office in the 5th grade as she looked up my name on the computer. In my file, right below date of birth and next to my address, read “Date of HS Graduation: 2004″. I remember thinking: “2008. That’s the magic year when I’m done school forever.” Fast forward to this past Thursday, and there I sit in Temple’s Liacouras Center with thousands of my closest friends listening to a former dessert spokesman.

Two things I thought would never happen.

In 2004, Bill Cosby promised the Class of 2008 he would speak at our commencement. Yet, as the date approached he was never announced as a speaker. I, thinking he wouldn’t come, even wrote an op-ed lamenting Cosby’s broken promise. He then surprised the class by speaking. In a cheesy way, it made my graduation.

But now that my diploma is in the mail (or so they say) it’s time to move on to that pesky “real world” thing. Starting this Tuesday, I will be working as a part-time Web designer for the Philadelphia Citypaper. The Citypaper is one of the two alternative weeklies in Philly, and a publication I have read every week since I was a freshman. The Citypaper’s location allows me to work in beautiful Old City Philadelphia, which is a subway ride away from my house. I also enjoy the fact that I will be working with a small independent paper as opposed to one in a national chain.

I will also hesitantly admit that I am not ready to dive full-time into journalism (or any job). The time after college is one of minimal obligations, and I plan to take advantage. There is a great deal of traveling I want to do while I have the chance (and while the student loans are deferred). I also have a list of side projects and business ideas I would like to explore.

In other news…

I was lucky enough to be selected as one of the UWIRE 100. Special thanks to all of my fellow Temple News staffers, many of whom you can find in the blogroll to the right. Fellow Temple Newser (and commencement speaker) Christopher Wink also shared honors.

Recognitions are also due to fellow nominees and Twitter addicts Greg Linch, Kyle Hansen, and Chelsea Otakan. I’m currently on a quest to find the sites of the other 95…

George Blanda played the longest of any player in NFL history and had the most points in the history of the league until Gary Anderson broke both records. This distant relation was fine for anecdotal reasons and good for a story when I met anyone over the age of 60, but bad for Google rankings.

Every time anyone ever typed “Blanda” into Google, I would be buried under a mountain of stats and game recaps. That is, until I launched this site. Nearly a year later, I am creeping ahead.

I’m sure you have your own George Blanda, a person that is crowding a term you would like to rank high for. My personal favorite is my friend Chris Wink, who has the misfortune of sharing his name with one of the founding members of The Blue Man Group. However, he was able to quickly usurp his azure menace. How? He started a blog.

While starting a blog is certainly the biggest step, here are some tips to further help you quash your own personal George Blanda. These may seem obvious if you already maintain a blog, but to any student contemplating what to do try these four steps:

1. If possible, buy the domain name of the term you would like to rank high for. If you have a common name, this may not work, but you can get creative. Take advantage of subdomains and subfolders. For example I could buy isawesome.com and host the site in a subdomain that reads seanblanda.isawesome.com in the URL bar. The example is a little cheesy, but you get the idea. Search engines place a lot of weight on what is in the URL.
2. The currency of search engines is links. Frequently update your content, and make it compelling. Easier said than done, but good content equals links. If you primarily write under the “brand” of your own name, then most links to your site will be embedded in text that contains your name. For example a fellow blogger may write: I enjoyed this post by Sean Blanda about X.
3. Share the love. Don’t be like the mainstream media, give out links. When you link to someone you are essentially raising your hand and saying “hey, I’m over here”. They in turn, should have you on their radar.
4. When you launch your blog be sure to put the URL on your resume, business cards, and email signature. You may even want to warm your contact book and let everyone know you have started a Web site.

I’m aware that articles about search engines are often a little skeevy, but nothing I advised above is radical or illegal. Have any other basic ideas for overcoming your own Google nemesis?

I had a former professor and Inquirer writer Tom Gibbons speak my “Journalism and Trauma” class (one of my favorites, taught by Pulitzer Prize winner Jim MacMillan). In the lecture, he said he often gave students extra credit for getting published.

Why isn’t this done more often?

This would help combat reason #4 in my “Confessions of a Journalism Student” post, where students are often forced to choose between doing work for an internship/school paper and doing work for class.

Now, I understand not enacting this policy if you are teaching the class to write features and they are only getting hard news published.

But for more general writing and journalism classes, why not?

Every time I thought I had an original point about j-schools someone beat me to it, dangit. If you have been scanning your feed reader lately, you probably noticed a flurry of posts directed at students with advice on school, and linking that advice to the future of the industry.

However there is just one problem: none of these posts are written by students.

Most criticisms about journalism schools are all written by the people on the other side of the fence: teachers or professionals. But as someone on the other side, here is what’s really wrong:

The real problem here is “college” not “J-schools“. The problems facing journalism schools are similar to those facing colleges overall: industries moving too quickly, lower barriers of entry into certain job markets, and the cost of education outpacing the reward. For example, two of the best journalism schools in the country (so I hear), Syracuse and Northwestern, have price tags that far exceed most starting salaries. So, if you have to loan out your education why would you go?

I kant spel. Between Google, spell check, and auto correct I can get by without many of the fundamentals. I do everything I can to not work this way, but I would be lying if I said it didn’t affect my writing.

Too often when professors tell me to “learn multimedia” they really mean “learn how to be a broadcaster”. At Temple, that essentially consists of former broadcast news people instructing print students on what a SOT is and how to do a stand up. The problem? The current trend in newspaper video is completely different from tradition broadcasting. This was evident to those who attended the CICM conference. Some students constructed their videos as pieces to be aired on the 10 o’clock news, despite the examples given to us by people leading the charge for a more documentary style of newspaper video.

Journalism is one of the only fields where you are expected to produce the very product you are studying while still in school. This is a biggy. For example, many students have internships that would have their clips appearing in large metropolitan newspapers such as the Philadelphia Inquirer. At the same time, we are receiving assignments for classes that will only be read by a handful of professors at most. Are architects expected to design real buildings while in school? Are business students required to start a business while in school?

So I ask, if a GPA isn’t a concern to most job recruiters, and you have two assignments due: one for you internship and one for class, which one are you going to spend most of your time on?

On top of all this, the internships don’t pay. So essentially, you have students who have to go to school, have a “free” internship, and work part or full time. Some even do all of this and join the student newspaper or magazine (as Mindy McAdams wrote in the best journalism-related post all year).

Any change must come from the students. Change costs money and insulating yourself from it doesn’t. And considering the industry doesn’t know which way is up, does it make financial sense to invest in something you don’t know will be there tomorrow? I am not defending this mindset, as I think it’s the plague of any entrenched institution. But I can understand why a college would be the slowest body to change. Any innovation is going to come from the bottom up, and not the top down.

Many professors know that they have to adjust the curriculum to help the students, but they are several years (sometimes decades) removed from the newsroom and job search. I had a teacher say “You guys should learn this new stuff, I won’t have to, of course, because I’m on my way out.” (Then he may or may not of cackled and ran off).

I would venture that the majority of professors are introduced to new technologies by the students, not the other way around.

Niche Media is king. As much as I may hate to say it, it is easier to build an audience based on your knowledge and observations than with your talents as a writer. We are nearing the day where we don’t study journalism, we study the area we wish to write about. For example, a wannabe movie critic would go to film school.

At Temple, a prominent Philadelphia blogger spoke to a journalism class about how a journalism degree was useless and that the students should major in their topic of interest and write about that. It was met with resistance among many students, but I couldn’t help thinking he had a point.

My GPA doesnt matter. I have been told this by nearly every journalist I have asked. All they want are clips, clips, clips. So what is my incentive to do that absurdly mundane assignment I was just given in class?

They don’t give students free ice cream. Okay, kidding.

With many predictions swirling around for what 2008 will hold, allow me to continue the gimmick.

I believe that 2008 will be the beginning of a movement in journalism where graduates will opt to carve their own path rather than be another layoff at a slow adopting newspaper or magazine.

What do I mean by “carve their own path”? In short, the Internet and the entrepreneurial spirit.

I think some young journalists are growing increasingly frustrated with playing by someone else’s rules. Rules that require innovation to shoot up the corporate hierarchy and back down again. Thus making someone’s bright idea in January old news by February. These rules still play by the old concepts of distribution. And these rules have journalism students busting their asses for an internship that pays nothing, when a well-written blog can pull in enough to at least pay for

One, “Generation-Y” (I absolutely hate that term, but thats most likely another blog post) features a large number of entrepreneurs. Enough that Inc magazine declares “may well be on its way to becoming the most entrepreneurial generation in our nation’s history”. The article rightly states that we saw many of our parents that were laid off or outsourced, and we want avoid that fate.

And two, our generation is increasingly becoming disgruntled with larger national trends such as paying into Social Security that we will never see, the decrease of medical benefits, and the loss of pensions from the job market. To me, this takes nearly every advantage away from being part of a large corporation. I’m aware that the increase in individual student loan debt might counteract this, but I feel that we more than any other generation literally have nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Perhaps I am being short sighted, and I know that nearly every writer would like to start their own magazine someday but never before that the resources been so cheap and so readily available. And never before has the “traditional path” looked less appealing.

Hear that?

That’s the sound of thousands of college students exhaling as finals week draws to a close. After a weekend in Jersey, I’ll be back in Philadelphia with the following tasks on my plate:

A new Temple-News.com: at the Temple News we have been quietly working on a few changes to our site.  If all goes well we should be doing some things that no college newspaper has done/is doing. I can’t wait to show it off here.  This should be done by the first week in January.

A new seanblanda.com:  Now that I plan on taking on more freelance work, I need a better Web site. I have a new layout all done in photoshop it’s just time code.

Speaking of freelance work, Ill be catching up with some clients who I had to put the work on hold for finals.

And graduation nears, it may be time to *gasp* look for jobs/internships…

Robert Niles over at the Online Journalism Review wrote an excellent post about journalism students and why “fake” news shows matter.

In summary, he said that the reason people enjoy The Daily Show and The Colbert Report is that they have the balls to call political and governmental figures on their BS.  This is, in part, what I was getting at when I wrote that you’re getting young people all wrong, although Niles had a better way of wording it.

He also noted that newspapers are “seeking [more] online journalism students than we have students to refer them.”  This also is why journalism students should not be buying into the doom and gloom speeches. There is still a demand!

So if any professor attempts to tell you otherwise, do what any good journalist would do: call BS.

And be sure to read Robert’s post.

Mark Dueze , media theorist and writer of Deuzeblog, stopped by Temple Multimedia Urban Reporting Lab (where I work) to speak to the students and to promote his new book MediaWork. The book, as well as much of his presentation, is about Mark’s many interviews with creative professionals such as journalists, video game programmers, and advertisers. And I have to say it was one of the best lectures I have heard in my four years here.

First, he didn’t give us the usually doom and gloom, something that, as a student, pisses me off to no end. He also admitted as a journalism educator that colleges aren’t doing the best job of preparing students.

The video

Below are two videos that encompass the first half of the speech. I warn you, I recorded the presentation with a $100 camera, which was then compressed and put on YouTube. Therefore, the quality isn’t that high. Let me know if you are interested in the raw files.

Part One
Part Two Edit: (problem with number 2, will be fixed tomorrow)

Click through if you’d like to see a summary of his speech.

During his speech he covered the following three main points:

1. Zombification – Journalism as it stands is just like a zombie. Reporters are all doing the things they normally do just waiting for someone (or something to put them out of their misery). Unlike most other new media gurus, he said the content was a bigger problem that the technology behind. He found that journalism is turning inwards. As a example, he pointed to cable news that features journalists talking “as if they were at a bar”. Think of when Wolf Blitzer talks with a foreign corespondent. Thus, as news shows get longer, the actual news being presented is actually shrinking.As part of the “zombification” section of his speech he also noted the coniditions in which journlaists work. Often in buildings with no windows that literally has the reporters cut off from the rest of the world and focused on themselves. For example check out the lack of windows in the new New York Times building (an example he used).
2. Globalization – like many industries, media production is now a global affair. 56% of TV and Movies are shot outside of the U.S. 60% of video game work takes place outside the United States. As a result, there is a huge localization effort. Mark gave the example of Ghost Recon 2 that sold terribly in France because it depected American soldiers. Soon as Ubisoft changed the soliders to French, the games sales picked up.
3. Participation- readers are often looked at a screaming maniacs. Often journalists just care that there work garners a response while not really caring what that response says.

Above all, Mark said, we are all just fans. Journalists love what they cover and would do it for free. In fact, many bloggers, podcasters, and other proponents of new media do it simply for the love. There is nothing seperating the soccer blogger and the soccer columnist for Sports Illustrated. Human beings just want to be heard no matter what.

In closing his speech he offered the room full of undergrads this advice (and I paraphrase from memory): Whatever you are into now will probably gone tomorrow. But thats not necessarily a bad thing because there are a lot of new and beautiful things waiting for you, so go experience them.

Afterwards, I was lucky enought to have a quick chat with Mark and get a copy of the book, which I can hopefully read and review here after the murderous onslaught of finals are over.

First, we must see that there are several Pros and Cons to our current situation (by “our” I mean my fellow students):

Pro:

1. The Baby Boomer effect. Over the course of the next few years, the Baby Boomers will be retiring creating a huge vacuum of talent in every American industry (however, see #1).
2. The Unknown. The reason I’m so excited to enter this field is that most of the conventional wisdom of the industry is no longer holding to be true. New ideas are needed, and I think we students can help. Nobody can even pretend they know what direction the media landscape is headed. Therefore the ability to learn quickly and adapt are almost as important as what you know.
3. Everybody can be a star.  For the first time ever, it is possible to establish yourself as a journalist or writer outside of traditional channels.  Can’t get a job?  Then make one.

Con:

1. The hiring freezes. I can’t fill in a personal anecdote here, but I feel like I see story after story about layoffs, downsizes and hiring freezes at newspapers and magazines
2. The rich kids. I think journalism’s (especially in magazines) dirty little secret is that it is incredibly hard to support yourself on an internship of entry level job. In magazines you pretty much have to move to New York City where the cost of living is high and the entry level jobs pay $10-$13 an hour. Many internships require a student to move away from home, find housing, support themselves all for a low end stipend or no pay at all. Now I am sure there are exceptions, but as a whole, students who need to support themselves cant land themselves in the more prestigious internships.
3. Nobody knows what to do. Its a very disturbing feeling to be sitting in class learning “new media” that you know will be obsolete in a few months (and that’s even if they teach new media at all). Which is why I love professors who are just adjuncts who hold a day job at a newspaper or magazine, I feel like they have to keep up as part of their jobs, and pass that wisdom on to students.

So what to do?

Its not new that we need to know how to tell a story on any platform and know how to write. But I think the best advice is to step outside of journalism and into business and economics.

We have been called the selfish generation and I think young journalists need to start acting like it. Think of yourself as a business.  Realize that you need to be able to sell yourself.  Step out of the employee-employer dynamic and into the contractor-client dynamic. There are going to be a glut of journalism majors graduating in the next few years into an industry that is scared to hire anybody. So we have to separate ourselves more than the previous generation in terms of skills and talent sets. There is more of a survival of the fittest aspect than ever, so make sure you have your act together.

We also need to come to the realization that most professors are not going to teach us the practical skills we need to know and will simply talk in abstracts like “the industry is changing” and “learn web stuff”. Lock yourself in your room for three hours with a Photoshop book and poke around. Become proficient in all of the programs, techniques being used in newsrooms, and even come up with some new ones.

Unfortunately, no one is going to help the next generation of writers. That’s not to say that no one wants to, but no one can. It up to us to help ourselves and each other.

Or maybe we should just stop trying to change the current system and start from the ground up.  But that’s another post…

From Thursday to Sunday, Washington D.C. will be play host to all college media types at the National College Media Conference.  Unfortunately, I can only make it Friday.  So right after my Thursday classes I’m going to take the long (and freakin’ expensive) journey down 95 to our nation’s capital.  If any one who reads this blog is going to be there, let me know I’d love to chat.

The reason I made great pains to get down there Friday is that College Publisher is previewing their new CMS.  And if my ears serve me correctly, I’d say many editors believe this is a big moment for them as they have to do a little catch up to other CMS’s.  And, as the Innovation in College Media blog mentioned, knowledge of the upgrade has placed some of our plans on hold.

So, I will definitely be at CP’s presentation on Friday at 12:30 p.m.  And I really would like to catch up with Mr. Curley of the Washington Post (whose contact form never sends me a confirmation e-mail, so I hope this trackback works).

And on a side note: Honestly guys, there are WAY too many acronyms here.   If I have this right, its the ACP/CMA NCMC in DC.  Either way, see you there!