Here’s a reminder: Apply by April 15 at 11:59 PDT to receive a multimedia editing fellowship from the Maynard Institute at the Reynolds School of Journalism, University of Nevado-Reno.

Be part of an immersion program that will teach you the range of multimedia skills: video, audio, blogging, slideshows, tagging, databases, maps, HTML, producing stories using mobile, Web strategy, social networking and content management systems, and how they all connect.

At the Maynard Institute’s Multimedia Editing Program, classes are in-depth and hands-on and taught by leading practitioners.

Tuition for this month-long program is $6,000 and includes all sessions, housing and some meals.

If you are a journalist who works for a U.S.-based newspaper with a circulation of 50,000 or below, you are eligible to apply for one of 12 fellowships to attend the program. The fellowships are funded by a grant from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation. Independent journalists are also encouraged to apply.

If you do not qualify for the fellowship you are welcome to apply for regular admission to the program and must cover your own tuition.

For four decades the Maynard Institute has trained journalists of color to:

• Become savvy editors, in print and now online
• Improve copy editing & headline writing skills
• Become effective supervisors

This program has produced effective newsroom leaders of all races who promote team work, introduce & manage change, and improve the quality of journalism.

Maynard equips participants to help their news organizations build a robust online presence and strengthen the print product.

Like all Maynard programs, the Multimedia Editing Program is open to people of all races.

The program runs from June 1 to 30, 2011 @ the Reynolds School of Journalism – University of Nevada, Reno.

Participants will have time for practice, critique and improvement, giving them a working knowledge that can be applied immediately.

Apply today and upgrade your career.

Contact Evelyn Hsu, program director, at Ehsu@maynardije.org. Or Elisabeth Pinio, manager for outreach, at 510-891-9202 or epinio@maynardije.org.

By Aaron Crowe
Tales of an Underemployed Dad

I’m taking meetings for the next two weeks as I try to decide if my career choice to be a journalist is a dying profession or a thriving one. I think it’s a thriving one where storytellers are still needed.

Aaron Crowe

Instead of going door to door, applying for jobs online or seeking out businesses to hire me, I’m turning the tables and offering my services for the next two weeks so I can be an exclusive writer/editor for companies that need such work. I’m calling it “Rent a Journalist.”

As a freelance journalist since being laid off at a newspaper about three years ago, I’ve spent a lot of my time chasing down job leads, applying for jobs, and doing everything I can to get the next freelance assignment. I’ve had steady work for most of that time, writing personal finance stories for WalletPop. But that’s going to change soon.

The AOL site is being absorbed into another website as part of the Huffington Post acquisition by AOL. I work on a monthly contract and have been told to reapply for my job as a fulltime writer, which I’ve done, but I’m unsure if I’ll be hired fulltime. Since the company has offices in New York and Los Angeles, and I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, I don’t know if they’ll hire me fulltime to work from home, as many writers/editors at WalletPop do.

If we come to an agreement, great. If not, this is part of my backup plan, which I’m trying out for the next two weeks as I offer my writing and editing services, among other things, such as social media liaison, to businesses. I’m pitching my services to existing or past clients, abut I’m also approaching websites I’d like to work for, the ones who I think would like my work.

This is my pitch:

Instead of wondering if I’ll be available to write for your website or publication in the future, you can lock me in with an offer now to work for you. I’ve covered personal finance for WalletPop for a little more than two years, and have some of the highest-trafficked posts on the website. I can do the same for you.

I’m open to long-term contracts or month-to-month; but what I’m mainly looking for is steady work and a commitment. It can be exclusive on a subject — family finances, for example — but that will take a longer commitment, such as daily blog posts. Or it can be a weekly column on something like personal finance and the food industry, that will still be a long-term contract but will only be for writing once a week.

The advantages to your company in signing me now? You get my time and work before anyone else does, guaranteeing you a steady stream of quality work that will be unique to your publication. As a journalist I’m trained in general assignment stories, and can provide original reporting and writing on any topics you need. Again, I’ve specialized in personal finance writing for the past few years, so I can write for your site on those issues, or expand to tech, families, food, retail, education, health, and many others. For example, I currently write for Dealnews.com about the psychology of shopping each week, so I wouldn’t be available to write about that topic for other sites.

I have other services I can provide, including helping with social media campaigns, writing publicity and press releases, covering corporate events, and photography.

Don’t let this opportunity pass. Rent a journalist — this journalist — before it’s too late.

By Logan Braman
Special for Displaced Journalists

I’m a journalist, but I don’t consider myself displaced. If anything, I’d say I’m a journalist who has been set free. I, along with three co-founders, just launched the first part of Rooted Austin, a local news portal for Austin, Texas. We think it’s the best time to be in the business of journalism, and you should too.

The journalist part of me started growing when I was very young. I remember reading two newspapers a day, every day. Surprisingly, Fort Wayne, Ind. is still a two-newspaper town. I loved every bit of the papers, but the features and comics sections always got my attention first. I was a voracious reader anyway, and the newspapers became part of my daily routine. I thought it would be neat to be one of the people writing the stories or taking the pictures, but I didn’t really think I would do it in the future. I thought I was going to be a Blue Angels pilot. I never thought I could find something more exciting than that in journalism, but I have.

I didn’t use the computer every day when I was young, but my time with it increased quickly as college approached. By the time I got my first laptop, about 90 percent of my news consumption took place online. This trend continued through my time at Ball State University when I was completing the requirements for my magazine journalism and journalism graphics majors. I worked for the student newspaper and magazines (both print and digital) and eventually found myself creating and consuming news in an almost purely digital format.

When I got a smartphone, the amount of information I consumed in any kind of print medium dropped to almost nothing. I tend to be interested in how the tools I use work, so the next step of my journalism education included mobile development. The mobile aspect of things also pushed me to familiarize myself with social media more than I had in the past.

I worked at a professional newspaper, and the state of the industry was scary. People were taking buyouts, layoffs were in the future, and everyone was working at breakneck pace to get the basic product out the door. It was (and still is) a great paper, but it was an environment where the revenue generator (the paper) came before everything else. It needed to be that way, but I wanted to focus more on the Web and its potential. I lived on the Web, and the people like me did too.

All that goes to show you why I think the way I do about journalism and information in general. The future (at least for people like me) will mean everything comes on a screen of some kind. According to a 2009 study by the Council for Research Excellence, we already spend an average of about 8.5 hours a day in front of some kind of screen. It doesn’t seem like that can increase, but I know my average is around 12 hours in front of a screen on a work day.

It’s simple then. The future is on screen, whether it be a television, desktop computer, laptop, netbook, tablet, mobile or something completely new. What isn’t so simple is figuring out the future and, for some, switching gears to make it work.

That’s where the idea of Rooted came from. I knew I wanted to continue my work in digital journalism, and there just weren’t any jobs in traditional media that fit the bill. At best, the digital jobs involved limited multimedia creation, and at worst they were all about social media and shoveling everything out of a print product to the online space. Fortunately, three other talented journalists were in the same boat, so we decided to make a run at a journalism start-up on our own.

If we couldn’t find the jobs we wanted then we would make them.

We want Rooted to be Austin’s home page. We will curate the best of existing news and give users the tools to tell us what’s important. When we find a story our community loves, we’ll step in and fertilize the story with our own special blend of storytelling.

We think storytelling that is based on what the community wants can be monetized. We also think the storytelling should be deep, immersive and interactive on the Web. Text and photos are fine for presenting information, but we also want to take advantage of sound, video and motion graphics to help us tell the stories of Austin. Perhaps most importantly, we want the people themselves to tell the story in their voice or with their likeness as much as possible. Eventually, we plan on including text, photos and videos from our community on Rooted as well.

Another crucial component for Rooted’s success is interaction with the community. We think it’s important for journalists to be completely transparent and open with information. We already do it on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, and we’re going to do it in our work as well. We want to be seen as the people we are, and we hope that will lead to richer and fuller community interaction. On the Web, it’s less about the organization and more about the people – when it comes to both creators and users alike.

Can we make it profitable? I think so. More importantly, can we provide something of value to the Austin community? If we do it right, certainly. What should other journalists do? That’s where the answers get a bit harder.

I decided to do what I love. You should too. If you have an entrepreneurial streak, find a good idea with a revenue stream to support it and go for it. You’ll notice I didn’t say, “If you have a good journalism idea,” and that’s because there are opportunities everywhere for people with the skills we journalists have gathered over the years. You also don’t have to have the great idea in the first place. If you see a start-up you want to work at, go pitch yourself with all the passion you have

Get outside of your journalism-only mindset if that’s where you find yourself. If you’re an information junkie, find someone who will pay you to gather data. If you’re a wordsmith who loves finding the exact word for the job, then find someone who needs beautifully written copy. If you’re a designer, branch into a different area that utilizes your specific skills. If you’re interested in the Web, get a programming book and start learning a new language.

I followed my passions and the result is Rooted. You can follow your passions to anything, so long as you have the passion. As a fellow journalist, I know finding something you can pursue with relentless energy isn’t the problem. So get out there and do it!

Send Logan a message at logan@rootedaustin.com. Find Logan on Twitter at twitter.com/lmbraman.

By Curtis Brainard
The News Frontier, The Observatory — August 03, 2010 12:48 p.m.

When Investigate West, an investigative journalism site, sprung up last summer after the virtual collapse of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, we called its founders—former P-I staffers committed to finding a fresh models for the news business—the “new pioneers of the west.”

Now, a little more than a year later, those pioneers have established a respectable and relatively stable homestead, and earned the esteem of the news partners to whom they have farmed content so far. Life on the frontier hasn’t gotten any easier, though. Members of Investigate West’s small staff worked on “sweat equity” until June, when they finally began paying themselves, and they have had to adapt in order to survive.

Read the entire story at Columbia Journalism Review.

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 Amy Webb
CEO, Knowledgewebb

Knowledgewebb is pleased to partner with Displaced Journalists to offer community members a deep discount on its annual membership dues. Knowledgewebb offers hands-on training, self-directed courses, ongoing webinars and more for professionals working in publishing and small-business communications.

Need pointers on how to edit an audio podcast? Want to brush up on Flash as a storytelling tool? Curious about augmented reality? Knowledgewebb was created as a support resource for people working in all areas of media who are trying to reinvent themselves and reinvigorate their careers.

To kick off the partnership, Knowledgewebb will conduct a free webinar at 2 p.m. EDT August 5. The online seminar “10 Steps to a Tech-Savvy You” is designed primarily for displaced journalists, stay-at-home entrepreneurs, seasoned academics, C-level corporate managers and retirees. Think of it as a digital media makeover. It will help you explore the critical websites, social networks and gear you need to survive in an increasingly digital world. Knowledgewebb will also offer a free primer on how to manage information overload. As always,  attendees will receive notes, worksheets and a list of recommended tools.

Knowledgewebb has been featured on MSNBC, FOX and NPR, as well as in Entrepreneur Magazine, as the go-to website to learn digital skills.

Space is limited and past webinars have filled up rapidly, so check out the technical details and book your reservation now. After you reserve your virtual seat, Knowledgewebb will email you a link that is unique to you. It cannot be shared with others. You must be pre-registered for this free session, with a confirmation email, in order to participate.

We have more than 200 lessons and webinars in our archives, with more added each week.

Recent additions:

• 3 Tools to Make Interactive Maps
• Your First Facebook API
• Monetizing Your Website, Part I of a series

And don’t overlook your access to our custom curriculum service, our expert answers to your questions on our forums, and a career coach as part of this dynamic community. We’re the first training site to offer a badge system, which makes learning a bit more interactive, and a lot more fun. (Hint, you’ll be rewarded with badges as well as points, which are used to earn real-world swag like Knowledgewebb gear, iPads and more throughout the year.)

Best of all, there’s never an additional fee for a course – your annual membership is an all-you-can-learn deal.

The regular price is $129, but your relationship with Displaced Journalists means you can sign up for just $89 (US) – that breaks down to .44 cents per lesson. Just use the discount code DISPLACED (all caps) in your cart.

We welcome you to our community!

The Pulitzer-prize winning Point Reyes Light is now owned by the Point Reyes Light Publishing Co. L3C, a low-profit limited liability company, which is owned by Marin Media Institute, a nonprofit corporation that has applied for 501c3 status.

From The Investigative Reporting Workshop, American University School of Communication

They had a choice.

They could watch the Pulitzer-prize winning Point Reyes Light newspaper continue to divide their rural Marin County community or worse, sold to someone with little desire of continuing the paper’s long tradition of quality journalism. Or they could buy it and turn the money-losing newspaper into a media institution that fosters community outreach and educates journalists from the region.

So at a time when many U.S. cities are seeing mastheads disappear or newsrooms shrink in size, longtime West Marin County residents Mark Dowie, a venerable investigative journalist, and Corey Goodman, a scientist and educator, decided to buy the Light.

But the pair didn’t just buy the Light and reinvigorate a dispirited readership; they established the country’s first newspaper under a business structure that to date has been used to revitalize many struggling industries, but not journalism. Read more.

By Angela Atkinson, Writing Careers Examiner

The working life of a writer can be quite solitary, and while many writers join  supportive online communities to share ideas and get advice from other writers, there’s something to be said for a personal relationship with a writing buddy.

Many writers report a marked improvement in their productivity and even their income levels when they work with a writing partner. And, thanks to modern technology, you don’t even need to be in the same region of the country as your partner. Read more at Examiner.com.

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.