By Michael Gauger

For nearly 20 years, I was a newspaper copy editor in Milwaukee, where I was born and grew up. But in the last few years, the Journal Sentinel had been cutting its staff through buyouts. In the summer of ’09, a round of buyouts didn’t yield enough cuts for the company, and in August I was laid off, among dozens in the newsroom who lost their jobs.

One year later, I’m happy to report, I have landed in a rewarding position: grant officer/writer for the Columbia St. Mary’s Foundation, which cultivates philanthropic support for the healthcare system serving the Milwaukee area.  When I told this to Susan Older, whose Displaced Journalists online community shines light in a gloomy time for journalism and employment, she urged me to write about it, to show out-of-work journalists that we should and could survive, even in a wretched economy. So I’m writing this for Susan, for my friend and fellow writer Julie Weber, who writes a blog that I recommend  (Tales from an Unemployed Interior Designer ) – and for you.

I knew that I could do the job with the foundation. And I wanted to do the job, as I would be writing applications for grants to support programs such as free health clinics for the poor. I would be telling important stories about a vital resource, and how it could be brought to people who lacked access to it. Like journalism, the foundation would call on my communications skills to comfort the afflicted. For me, it was the right opportunity at the right time.

Yes, before making that case and getting the job, I needed to hear numerous résumé critiques and make revisions, to do lots of networking and to profit from luck. Most important, however, was that I could talk about significant transferable skills from journalism: writing, editing, research, working on my own and as a member of a team to meet deadlines. (That set complemented one from my background as a scholar in American history and political science.)

Earlier, I had put those skills to work for scholars who had me edit their grant applications. More recently, I used the tools in volunteer work for two nonprofit groups. I sought out the work after getting excellent advice from a grant officer who was kind enough to give me an informational interview. Build a track record, he said. So I did some cold-calling, got a lead from a networking contact, consulted websites listing volunteer opportunities, and found Make a Difference – Wisconsin and Daystar Inc. The former recruits and trains volunteer instructors who present seminars on basic financial literacy (how to handle credit, make a budget and manage a checking account, for example) to teenagers. The latter operates a long-term shelter for women who are recovering from domestic violence. My work for these groups was very gratifying because it enhanced my credentials and references, showed initiative, gave me a chance to do some good work, and allowed me to add nonprofit experience on my résumé.

In the meantime, I was taking courses at Milwaukee Area Technical College for a certificate in information design and publishing: introduction to digital media, website development, Photoshop and InDesign. The coursework was a step toward another important credential (I need just two more classes to finish): It showed employers that I wasn’t standing still during unemployment, and it let me meet instructors and students who gave me job leads, contacts and valuable advice.

All these things put me in a good position to get the job that I’m fortunate, grateful and proud to have. I’m glad to tell this story, and share some advice that I hope will be helpful, even if it isn’t new to you:

• Get out there and network, network, network. And network on the Web, especially on LinkedIn. If you’re not on LinkedIn, get busy and get connected.
• Get some retraining. Go to school or seek resources on the Web that will add to your knowledge.
• Do volunteer work. You will feel better for it, you will help someone with your skills, and you will make good networking contacts.
• Seek out informational interviews with people who work in jobs or at companies in which you’re interested. They can give you valuable information and lead to job contacts.
• Identify transferable skills and promote them. Journalists: Remember that grant writing requires the type of skills that you have honed for years. So does RFP (request for proposal) writing. Think of how you can communicate important messages, for your own cause and for others you make your own.
• When you see a need for your skills, offer to fill it. You’ve seen many business brochures, PowerPoint presentations and promotional and informational literature filled with typos, grammatical errors and infelicities. So fix them. Look at it as a chance to make freelance money, or to do pro bono work that will make you feel good and gain networking contacts.
• Even though opportunities aren’t abundant in this economy, do not – do not – give up easily. Find a place for yourself. Make a place for yourself.

– 30 –

Michael Gauger blogs here. His LinkedIn profile is here.  On Twitter he is @mtgauger.

By Elizabeth Garone, 
The Wall Street Journal
Posted 7/22/1020, 10:57 EDT

In a tight job market, building and maintaining an online presence is critical to networking and job hunting. Done right, it can be an important tool for present and future networking and useful for potential employers trying to get a sense of who you are, your talents and your experience. Done wrong, it can easily take you out of the running for most positions. Read more at The Wall Street Journal.

By Holly Kerfoot

“Dead man walking!”

The feeling that this should be shouted in the newsroom when I pass by has faded, as have the murmurs of sympathy from those who – for now – will be keeping their jobs.

What remains is the uncertainty.

You see, I work on a copy desk that is being phased out. In April, we learned that Media General had decided to eliminate the 18.5 positions on the Winston-Salem Journal’s desk and split its work between “consolidated” desks in Tampa and Richmond by the end of October. We were told that five positions will be available for those who would consider moving, and the company presented its layoff-compensation package. As of mid-June, we have heard no more, except that plans are moving ahead, though more slowly than expected.

And so we follow the routine, do our jobs, and wonder.

The waiting, oh, how it wears on my soul. I have experienced waiting before, when I turned in my two-week notice and looked forward to a new job. But this is different. I look ahead and see nothing, because how can I plan when I have no idea of what the future will bring? I’d like to think I’m a shoo-in for one of the consolidated jobs, but there is no way of knowing. My 30+ years of experience may price me out of their market. I’d take the job, if it were offered, because at age 53 the bird in the hand definitely is worth more.

I have considered other fields of work – maybe something in health care – but that requires time and money for schooling, and I wouldn’t make what I earn now.

There are in-state jobs involving editing that I probably could do, but some of the expectations frighten me. The level of fear surprises me, too, and I realize the ways in which this forced change has demoralized me.

Some days, I feel some of the old excitement about what new and interesting twist fate will bring me. If I don’t get a job with MG, perhaps another paper will hire me. When I was a child, my family moved frequently, so I like exploring new towns (even if moving is a pain).

But some days it is as hard to be optimistic as it is to really care about the tasks at hand.

And so I plug along, and I wait.

– Holly Kerfoot has worked as a news copy editor at the Winston-Salem Journal in North Carolina for 11 years this go-around. And she has been laid off by its parent company, Media General, before. She was a novice copy editor at the Journal when the afternoon paper, The Sentinel, was closed in 1985.

Hi, everyone. I agreed to publish this first-person piece from a member of our community without a byline because sometimes finding catharsis is hard enough without having to put your name up there in bright lights. As much as I’d love to have Displaced Journalists write and sign their stories, it’s getting to the point where blows to your ego take such a toll that I think it’s better to offer anonymity than to have people afraid to write at all.

– Susan Older, founder of Displaced Journalists

Got Work?

I won’t always be unemployed.

Pride slipped away long ago with my looks, so even though I’m the editor who rocks at managing breaking news coverage, I am applying now for every job from bookseller and barista to house painter. I will work for whoever will have me. Something part-time came trickling in this week and it will be too much work for too little pay. Still, money is money.

I expected to get pushed out of jobs after age 60, because older, experienced journalists cost more in salary and benefits. But not so soon – and not after bullying and harassment and being blamed for a bad economy. I know I’m not alone. I just can’t afford to stop and care about that yet because all of us are competing for the same jobs.

The state has been holding up my unemployment benefits for more than a month. How am I supposed to live and pay my mortgage when I can’t appeal the delay? And why am I not given the reason the state is questioning my eligibility? I walk on quicksand all day long.

I try to ration the panic attacks to no more than one an hour. Bedtime is worst – it takes three or four hours to wear myself down because the minute the lights go out and the room is quiet I can hear my brain churning and feel the physical motion of dropping into a deep, deep hole.

With friends I feel testy, obliged to account for my time and efforts to find work, something I already do weekly for the unemployment people. My friends bring me leads and I think, “Oh God, not another one,” but am also grateful in a not-exhausted corner of my brain. We have a cup of coffee and they talk about how bad their employers are or how much they spent on their vacation to Tanzania.

Seriously? I mean because if you’re spending that kind of money, toss some my way for groceries and medicine and socks without holes. Or like a good neighbor, invite your unemployed friend to dinner.

Watchdog reporting is at an alarming low at many federal agencies and departments whose actions have a huge impact on the lives of American citizens. This article appears in the June/July issue of American Journalism Review. It was funded by the Open Society Institute.

By Jodi Enda

After an explosion killed 29 coal miners in West Virginia in early April, the Washington Post and the New York Times quickly produced lengthy exposés detailing a plethora of safety breaches that preceded the nation’s worst coal mining disaster in a quarter century. The Times reported that mining companies thwarted tough federal regulations enacted after a spate of deaths four years earlier simply by appealing citations. The Post wrote that federal regulators had cited the Upper Big Branch mine for a whopping 1,342 safety violations in the past five years, 50 times in the previous month alone.
These are the kind of powerful stories that can goad public officials to make changes–sometimes life-saving changes–by shedding light on dangerous conditions. They also are the kind of stories that more and more often come too late, or not at all.

Just ask the families of the 29 miners.

As daily newspapers continue to shed Washington bureaus and severely slash their staffs, fewer reporters than ever are serving as watchdogs of the federal government.  Read more at AJR.

Jodi Enda (jaenda@gmail.com) is a Washington writer and former White House correspondent for Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau.

Sidebar: Abandoned Agencies

Also Read Jodi Enda’s piece on Abandoned Agencies, complete with an interactive chart and spreadsheet showing which news organizations are covering which government agencies.

As I walked in the headquarters of the Jawa Pos—the flagship newspaper of one of South East Asia’s largest print media empires—I was wondering just how screwed my profession is; globally I mean.

Is the death of print a world-wide certainty or merely an American reality? After all a lot of “old economy” businesses are thriving in emerging markets thanks to Greenfield advantages and rising middle class economics. Spoiler alert: I walked out a few hours later not hugely convinced print is the future but willing to believe that in some places the death-blow of digital might be limited to a mere-crippling. How’s that for bullish?

Language difference and a preponderance of statues aside, the Jawa Pos felt like any other newsroom of a large daily. It was almost…  Read more at TechCrunch.com.

This is “Multimedia Immersion Rap” — a fantastic video about being multimedia journailsts produced by Evan Vucci and Matt Ford to kick off  the NPPA Multimedia Immersion workshop in Syracuse, N.Y., in May. It’s a parody of Jay-Z’s “On To The Next One” and just one of 10 wild and crazy short videos about journalism you’ll find at the content-rich website: multimediashooter. Watch them all. The 10th one is most about us.

Multimedia Immersion rap from News Photog on Vimeo.

M.E. Sprengelmeyer is ”reporter/publisher” of The Guadalupe County Communicator, a 2,000-circulation weekly in the colorful Route 66 community of Santa Rosa, New Mexico.

M.E., as he prefers to be called, was Washington correspondent for the Rocky Mountain News when the Denver-based newspaper published its final edition February 27, 2009.

He was a displaced journalist, but not for long.

The 1989 graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism bought the Communicator in August of 2009. It’s not available online. Instead, M.E. is determined to prove that newspapers are not dead. If you want to read it, it will have to be in print. However, you can check out the paper’s Facebook page: Guadalupe County Communicator.

Sprengelmeyer, 42, had been a reporter for 22 years, the last 10 of them with the Rocky Mountain News, a highly esteemed newspaper that had won the Pulitzer Prize four times since 2000. During his career, he has covered stories in Mexico and the Philippines; he covered the Oakland Hills fires and the Northridge earthquake; he reported from the scene of the Columbine High School shootings in 1999, and the Pentagon disaster on Sept. 11, 2001.

M.E., as he prefers to be called, traveled with U.S. Marines in the earliest days of the ground war in Afghanistan in late 2001 and with the 101st Airborne Division’s 3rd Brigade during the initial invasion of Iraq in early 2003. He also covered the U.S. Congress, with occasional trips to the U.S. Supreme Court and White House, and in 2007 embedded himself in Des Moines, Iowa, for more than a year chasing Barack Obama and friends (not) down the “Back Roads to the White House.”  (It’s a long story, but he also acquired Jack Abramoff’s pinstriped suits somewhere along the way. We’ll ask M.E. to tell us that some other time.)

When the Rocky closed a few weeks short of its 150th birthday, M.E. decided it would be pointless trying to find another corporate newspaper job as meaningful as the one that he had just lost. Instead, he sunk his entire life savings into buying a scrappy little newspaper in New Mexico — one where he hopes to learn lessons that can one day be applied on a much larger scale.

Below, we present to you a story he published in this week’s edition of the Communicator, because, you see, M.E. is about to appear in a rather important film.

———

By M.E. Sprengelmeyer

Publisher, The Communicator

Santa Rosa, N.M., April 22, 2010 – No, it’s not a horror film.

Still, this week you might have seen a small documentary film crew running around downtown Santa Rosa, trying not to terrify the populace as they documented Santa Rosa’s little part in a big, national story.
Adam Chadwick and Derek Callahan are from the film “Fit to Print.” It gets its name from the New York  Times’ motto: “All the news that’s fit to print.”

That’s no accident. Chadwick was working as a copy editor at The Times when he decided to begin chronicling the tough times facing newspapers all over the country. He watched from afar as papers like theRocky Mountain News in Denver and Seattle Post-Intelligencer closed, and severe workforce cuts hit most other major newspapers, in one way or another.

He decided to begin chronicling the tough times facing newspapers all over the country. He watched from afar as papers like the Rocky Mountain News in Denver and Seattle Post-Intelligencer closed, and severe workforce cuts hit most other major newspapers, in one way or another.

He started working on the project and, then, irony hit.  He lost his newspaper job, too.

Perhaps 50 years from now, future Americans will look back at the Not-So-Great Recession as a watershed moment for the old school, ink-on-paper era of journalism.

These next few years will decide whether printed newspapers survive, and whether future generations will ever get the pleasure of having ink rub off on their fingertips while they’re sipping their coffee over breakfast and learning about the world.

Some might rush to say that the Internet is the future of everything.  I argue that would be terrible for our country. The World Wide Web does expand our brains by letting us travel to far and exotic lands, but it lacks the physical presence and local connections to keep us grounded in the communities where we actually live, love, laugh and, yeah, cry.

I still believe that there’s a great future for newspapers that don’t give in to the doom and gloom, and instead try to make themselves more important to the communities they serve.

And, so, I guess that’s why the guys are here.

It has really been fun watching Adam and Derek running all over town. They live in the big, bright lights of greater New York City, and so it was hilarious taking them on a little tour of Santa Rosa after dark. We drove a couple miles past the airport, into the pitch-black stretch of U.S. 84. We turned out the car’s lights, parked, and as they stared into the brilliant, star-dotted sky, they sounded like every small-town resident who sees the blinding lights of New York’s Times Square for the first time.  “Whoa!  Amazing….”

They’ve been working at a frantic pace here in Santa Rosa, and I think they’ve learned as much about our lively little community as they have about our lively little newspaper.

We’re just a small part of the big picture they’re examining.  Next, I think they’re on their way to interview philosopher Noam Chomsky about the media landscape, and they’ll be focusing on a bunch of journalists more famous, more interesting and more photogenic than me and Davy Delgado.  (Even more, I mean….)

If you’d like to follow the progress of their documentary, go check out: Fit to Print They also have a fan page on Facebook, where they explain what they’re doing and provide all sorts of updates on the real life drama facing the newspaper industry.

I think it’s great that Santa Rosa and Guadalupe County are getting a little time in the spotlight.

These guys are tireless, and they haven’t been sitting still in our newsroom. They’ve been driving Route 66 and the back roads, popping in at City Hall and a whole bunch of other places. For them, the hard part will be taking hours and hours and hours of Santa Rosa footage and figuring out how to whittle it down.

Lord knows we have more colorful characters than you can fit in the typical Hollywood film.

By Susan Older

Founder, Displaced Journalists

We have a rapidly growing, multi-talented Facebook community. What shall we do next with this initiative?

As one of our writers, Melanie Kolden, pointed out on our site in March, we really don’t know one another. (Of course, we just started in January.) We share articles, links, and comments. But we seem to have more trouble sharing advice or ideas that we could implement together to improve our collective dilemma.

I’m slowly redesigning the actual site to be more flexible — reinventing myself as a web developer along the way.

Do you want to post yourselves on the site for headhunters and companies seeking smart, seasoned, multi-talented people who just happen to be displaced?

Do you want to find additional tech training, get into other fields, find and finance continuing education? Should we go the route of career fairs, reaching out to headhunters and specific companies?

Could we create one or more content co-ops (definitely not sweatshops) of some sort?

Would you like to do something on an international level? I’m working on one idea already.

We’ve done big things before. Let’s do big things again.

Bring on the ideas — here or on the Facebook page: Displaced Journalists.

AOL is still hiring. If you are interested in any of the following positions, go to the AOL Careers Site, submit your application, and make sure to mention that Andrea Stone, senior Washington correspondent for AOL News, referred you. Then send a your resume to Andrea at andrea.stone@corp.aol.com, so she can pass it along and call attention to it.

Regional Editors:

City’s Best is looking for smart, innovative journalists to join its team as full-time Regional Editors. They will be responsible for developing local sites dedicated to finding the best dining, nightlife, shopping, entertainment and more in select markets while providing guidance in terms of content and information.

The candidate: A quick study, able to grasp the interests, rhythms and identity of a region and its constituent communities, passion for all things digital, journalism and an entrepreneurial bent.

•    The mission: Drive a region’s site to become a landmark in the communities; become a dedicated site to provide the best original content on the Web. AOL is making City’s Best even better by “innovating from the ground-up.”

•    Experience: Candidates should have BA in journalism, English, communications or equivalent, experience managing others, a minimum of 3- 5 years online editorial experience with an emphasis on local journalism or media, and must be comfortable with the technical aspects of web publishing and have working knowledge of social media tools and trends.

Locations and the areas they will cover:

• LA-based editor: Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, San Francisco, Seattle
• Dallas or Austin-based editor: Dallas, Austin, Houston, Denver, Phoenix
• Chicago-based editor: Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Twin Cities, St. Louis
• Miami-based editor: Miami, Tampa, Orlando, Atlanta, Charlotte

For other openings, go to Displaced Journalists Jobs.