Joe Grimm will lead an API workshop on personal branding

Here’s more help on personal branding: Joe Grimm, perhaps the leading voice on career development in journalism, is leading a workshop on personal branding Sept. 16 for my old friends at the American Press Institute. At $15, including lunch, it’s practically free.

Joe’s a longtime friend who used to recruit for the Detroit Free Press and for a few years wrote the Ask the Recruiter blog for Poynter (he now continues it independently). His Jobs Page is an essential resource for job-hunting journalists, and I linked to his post on building your own journalistic career brand in yesterday’s post on my own branding strategy.

I’m pleased to see Joe leading this workshop and to see API offering such valuable help for journalists at such a great price.

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A salute to No Train, No Gain, a favorite experience

I hope this blog post is premature. I would love to retract it tomorrow as an error, but it appears to me that No Train, No Gain is dead. The website launched 10 years ago, so it lived a long life in Internet years. But I mourn nonetheless.

I got involved in newsroom training as a sidelight in 1997, and after I added it to my official duties with a 1998 move to the Des Moines Register, I joined a listserv for newsroom trainers, Newscoach. The group, which never formed an official association, met annually at the old West Coast office of the Freedom Forum in San Francisco, under the leadership of the late Bev Kees. I can’t remember if I was aware of the 1999 conference. I very much wanted to attend the 2000 conference, but it met just as I was changing jobs from the Register to the Omaha World-Herald. While I negotiated for the World-Herald to send me to the conferences every other year, I couldn’t go that first year, because the conference fell right before I moved.

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Thoughts on redirecting and rejuvenating a career

I knew a lot about journalism in 1997. I was 26 years into an exciting career, enjoying a rewarding run as a reporter following success as an editor. But I’ve redirected and rejuvenated my career twice since then. Those efforts led me to opportunities and success I could not have imagined 13 years ago.

From 1997 to 2005, I consciously developed my skills, experience, connections and reputation in the field of journalism training, eventually getting a full-time job in the field. I was always interested in innovation and took steps in the mid-1990s to learn digital skills. Starting in 2006, I made digital innovation my primary pursuit and have consciously developed my digital skills, experience, connections and reputation (I still have a lot that I need to do). That pursuit led to two new jobs, first as editor of The Gazette and gazetteonline and now I’ve left the newspaper business to join a digital local news operation in the Washington metro area.

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Elevate your journalism career

I will be meeting this evening with some journalism students at the University of Kentucky. As I pulled together career advice to share with them, I thought I should share it on my blog as well. Whether you are a student or a professional journalist, I recommend checking out Joe Grimm’s Jobs Page and his Poynter Ask the Recruiter blog. I also recommend my earlier post on building your digital profile.

The advice that follows combines and updates handouts I developed years ago for workshops for reporters and editors on boosting their careers:

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