We’ll have more details about our annual Lunar New Year Banquet, but put the date and time on your calendar now:

• Date: Jan. 28, 2012
• Time: 6 – 10 p.m.
• Location: Acquabar in Belltown, Seattle

We’ve reserved the entire venue until 10:00 p.m., with the option of staying after 10 p.m. when the music and dancing starts. Stay tuned for information about activities, speakers, food, pricing and ticket purchasing.

Outgoing and incoming AAJA members hold a retreat to discuss 2012.

Sanjay, the outgoing president, outlined the chapter history for new board members:

• Founded in mid-’80s, 1986. Third nat’l chapter after LA and SF
• 2006 reached milestone of raising 100k
• Founders scholarship, try to give out one per year

Three priorities that AAJA Seattle has established

1. Outreach – partnership with SPJ for savings for AAJA members. Trying to figure out how to engage members more.
2. Mentoring
3. Training

A few words of wisdom from outgoing president Sanjay Bhatt

• “If you’re doing it right, it should be a lot of fun. It’s a way to make an impact in the community,” Sanjay told us, adding that success only comes with everyone stepping up to lead in their own way; an ethic of giving.
• Encourage all of you to think of leadership at the national level. Back in mid- 80s it wasn’t trendy to back diversity. They were viewed suspiciously back then. But Seattle Times and KING5 have been huge partners.
• Hoping we can figure out ways to get a lot more people involved. We’re here for the members, we can only do
• People renew with us because we’re a tight-knight community, more so than any other organization.

Challenges:

• AAJA is doing an audit with all chapters
• Relationship between national and chapter — we all operate under the same TAX ID#. Need to send reports to national finance board.

Finances

• $600 carryover from last year
• Need to be more creative about how to make money without sacrificing our principles. Don’t ask a company you cover to pay for money.

• Reach out to new members, welcome them to the area– look at membership trends. Fastest-growing segment was students and freelancers — bulk is print and broadcast
• What are the issues they’re dealing with?
• Holding smaller events, training is effective

Design workshop

The second part of the retreat was a “design workshop” where all board members (outgoing and incoming) got post-it notes and were asked to write down three answers to each question Sanjay posed.

Question 1: What do we love about what AAJA Seattle already does?

What we love: Community, outreach

Question 2: How do we want to improve AAJA Seattle in the upcoming years?

Plans for the future: Outreach beyond UW students, financial stability & fundraising, larger pool of active members, broader range of involvement from active members, Web video film festival, more transparency, more journalism (TECH) training, engagement with the wider community – awareness, brand awareness, job board, visibility, transparency, journalism inspiration.

Areas we’d like to strengthen:

• Member involvement/engagement
• Member growth/student recruitment
• Financial stability/fundraising
• Student/univ involvement
• Training
• Job board
• Engagement w/public
• Fairness & accuracy in coverage of AAPIs
• Training: Free for AAJA student members and recently-laid off members, different levels of training, constant surveying of the needs of members

Stay tuned for more details soon on the AAJA Seattle Lunar New Year event. We’re finalizing a few details now and will start selling tickets soon!

But this week, the possibilities for Spot.us just got a lot more interesting: They were acquired by the Public Insight Network. As part of American Public Media, PIN is a platform that gives journalists access to a repository of knowledgeable sources to help make their reporting stronger.

So the merger means that freelancers who pitch stories will have both the means of raising money, plus the access to people who can give quality information about those stories. Read more about it here.

A native-born Seattleite, Sunny Wu knows his microbrews.

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Want a journalism job? Carry more tools to get hired, survive and thrive in the news industry. (Photo by Furhana Afrid)

You may have invested the last few months or years doing everything you could possibly do to help secure that next job. You’ve sent out hundreds of resumes tapes, relentlessly telephoned news directors to tell them why you are the “One,” hit the journalism conventions running and networked until you are blue in your face. You tweet and follow the who’s who on social media, and perhaps you accomplished all that on a very tight budget. It’s no wonder that your backpack feels heavier with discouragement and doubt about your future in journalism.

You thought you paid your dues by busting your rear end when you were trying to break into the journalism industry and then working yourself to the bone at your first or next job. Now it seems you are back to ground zero. Not really. You are a backpack journalist! (also known as a video, multimedia, multiplatform, digital or one-man/woman band journalist). You are accustomed to producing several stories a day under deadline. The tools in your backpack and your story-telling skills make it all happen. And with so much versatility at your fingertips you can do it all over again even if you are not working in a newsroom right now.

So journalist what’s in your backpack that can turn that long or short spell of unemployment or underemployment into an opportunity to innovate, explore and keep your skills sharp?

Three Tips to Strengthen Your Job Search Backpack:

Create Web Footprint: Employers are looking for creative self-starters. Your website is your broadcasting channel to showcase your multimedia skills. It’s your story-telling portfolio for video/online/audio stories, photographs and news writing. Many journalists are using WordPress.com or WordPress.org to create their sites and tell their stories. The good news…website design credentials are not required to own your own piece of real estate on the internet. You can also use other website developers like Tumblr, Drupal or Joomla. Plus free online tutorials will show you what to do. I’ve been using a WordPress tutorial from the Knight Digital Media Center. It’s an easy to follow, step-by-step approach. Try it.

Practice Super Story-telling: Jobs will come and go. So will tools. But your story-telling skills will be yours to keep and nurture. NBC multimedia journalist Thanh Truong told me at a recent AAJA convention that many journalists can shoot video, edit and deliver the news. But it’s how well you capture the essence of a story that differentiates one storyteller from another. As a master story-teller your chances of hitting a home run to your next journalism position improve significantly. So put your video gear to work. Check out Poynter’s News University online courses. These courses are affordable, sometimes free and will really help you craft compelling visual stories.

Nurture Strong Relationships: The journalism industry continues to shed jobs. CNN is reportedly one of the latest casualties with some fifty out the door. You know that you are not the only one. But when times are tough it is easy to spiral down into the abyss of pessimism, low self-esteem and isolation. So don’t turn into an island. Reach out to your trusted family, friends and peers. They will help you weather the storm and encourage you to stay afloat. Stay active in your community. Start groups with like-minded people. Volunteer your skills for a worthy cause. You have the ability to help change lives and your circumstances.

So journalist what else is in your backpack?

Furhana Afrid is a backpack journalist and social media manager.