SABJ’s Career Reinvention Workshop: Helpful tips for personal brand building

Our friends at SABJ (Seattle Association of Black Journalists) organized a very useful, productive and inspiring event: the SABJ Career Reinvention Workshop, which I attended Saturday morning. In three hours at the Communications building at UW, it not only reaffirmed the path I’m currently on, but it also reminded me of the things I loved doing as a reporter and how those skills can translate to other endeavors.

The first panel focused on 4 former journalists who had transitioned — or are still in the midst of doing so — into other fields, while the second panel gave the audience practical tips and advice on how to self-promote and create an appealing personal brand for potential employers.

Paul Hollie, the first panel’s moderator who is the vice president of public relations for Safeco Insurance, still identifies as a journalist, nearly a decade after he left a newsroom. This is something that rang especially true to me, because even if I end up in another field, I will always identify as a journalist, having spent 13 years in the business. That’s part of who I am, my history, but also my legacy.

Former Seattle Times reporter Alex Fryer, who now works in the Mayor’s office as a media relations manager, said he still missed the newsroom and that it was the best atmosphere he ever worked in.

I feel the same way. Luckily, I have retained a sense of community by staying in touch with my P-I friends and staying active and involved with AAJA, where I am on the national board of directors.

Consistent in each of the panelists’ discussions about dabbling or being dunked into the non-newsroom world: culture shock. Hugo Kugiya, a former national reporter for the AP, said he did a brief stint in the corporate world as a researcher and in hindsight, wished he would have braced for it better, prepared himself for the fact that this was a much different world from a typical newsroom, where people pretty much come and go as they please so long as they produce. (Sometimes, not even.) The reality, he said, is that freelance life is a lot like living the “starving artist” life.

In the new world sans newsroom, my former P-I colleague Gary Washburn spoke on the array of skills used to do reporting and writing — something a later panelist would reiterate in resume writing — as a means of selling yourself as an appealing package.

While all were hooked into some kind of social media — Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn — they couldn’t emphasize enough the importance of personal connections helping them land jobs, assignments and other opportunities.

Justin Carder — vice president of business development for the start-up Instivate, maker of Neighborlogs — told us to think of “writing as an asset” that shouldn’t be underestimated, especially when the hunger for information is so ravenous.

The panel brought up some deeper issues, such as the current state of the industry. Kugiya made a statement that can’t be said enough: It wasn’t journalism that collapsed. It was the advertising model that had fueled it for so long.

I think papers need to be more transparent about that process. I think the Joe and Jane Public have very little idea the work that needs to go into a story, even a short one.

In the future, the public might not have the benefits of all the moving parts of a paper, and there are many the public never sees : the process of choosing stories, reporting them, holding them up to standards of credibility and accuracy, writing it as a narrative (something Fryer says he rarely sees on those blogs, which he does credit with giving the public very relevant information) and editing it.

Now, all the information is out there and readers have to sort through it. Finding a place in that world is a challenge for many of us.

The second panel gave us some concrete tips toward overcoming those challenges.

Natasha Jones, deputy communications director for the King County Executive’s Office, and a former TV journalist, told us to pump up reporters’ skills and translate them for a broader audience: research (reporting), project management (stories) and networking (interviewing), for example. Her advice: break down jobs into actual tasks.

Susan Long-Walsh, who runs her own consulting business after years working for Starbucks and Paul Allen, told us to spend a lot of time on our resume. “That’s your Superbowl ad,” she said. “You want someone to eat your hot dog and drink your beer.”

That stuck in my head, as did her advice about looking at a resume as a brag book where you not only list your key accomplishments but reel them in with a summary. Other points I took away from her: Make your resume neat and easy to read, emphasizing points that show you can grow with the organization.

In short: Sell, sell, sell yourself, but do not sell-out. As Scott Battishill, vice president of DDB, put it, build your own personal brand.

Jones told us to volunteer for non-profits and other organizations to pick up skills and add more to a resume while you’re looking for a job. Rhonda Woods, human resources recruiter for Seattle University, encouraged by saying what a natural transition it was for journalists to go into communications, even ponying up a recent opening at the school for a New Media specialist (I know a few people who have already applied for it.)

Jack Evans, director of public relations for legal and policy issues at Microsoft, was an early victim of one of the low points in the industry — not quite as dire as now, but definitely one of the dips in the roller coaster — in not even getting an interview with the P-I back in the day because he happened to arrive for it on the day they announced lay-offs. But it worked out for him and he offered something we all need: a message of hope.

I left Saturday feeling not only hopeful, but better equipped toward finding my own way post P-I. But that’s another story and another post, which you’ll soon see here.

Posted in Events, News, Uncategorized | Tagged AAJA, brand, Job Postings, journalism, journalist, resume, SABJ | 1 Comment