Reading List, Nov. 28

A weekly roundup of job-hunting tips, career advice and interesting articles relevant to the magazine industry and being an editor. 

• "Women Journalists Confront Harassment, Sexism When Using Social Media" by Jeff Sonderman on Poynter. Ladies, you don't need to grin and bear those nasty, or even slightly uncomfortable comments left on your online work. Take action.

• The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks by Bethany Keeley. Check out the sidebar for additional amusing blogs.

• "How Do You Deal With Having to Fire Someone?" by Alison Green on Ask a Manager. Getting fired is no fun, but neither is having to fire someone, and there's usually a lot less advice about it. Here's a little.

• "Famous Magazines' First Covers" by Judy Berman on Flavorwire.

Reading List, Sept. 19

A weekly roundup of job-hunting tips, career advice and interesting articles relevant to the magazine industry and being an editor.


• "10 Good Things To Do While Between Jobs" by Blessy Vaidian on JobMob. If you're looking for work, do more than just send out resumés and mope around the house: network, volunteer or learn something new.

• "5 Tips for Hiring Startup Interns" by Kwame Kuadey on the Young Entrepreneur Council. Although aimed at start-up companies, this piece offers a basic guide suitable for any company that hires interns. Tips 4 and 5 are particularly important: set expectations upfront, and consider interns as potential candidates for future staff positions.

• Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, by Keith Houston. I highly recommend this fascinating blog, which tells the surprisingly intriguing stories of punctuation marks, their use and their histories. Trust me, it's not as dry as it sounds.

A Wordle (word cloud) of the most commonly used words on Dream Job TK.

• Wordle. If you need an inexpensive (read free) illustration for an article, try out this cool toy created by Jonathan Feinberg (yes, the rights allow for commercial usage). Enter the article text and this tool will create a word cloud that you can customize by colour, font and layout. Also a handy tool for seeing if any words have been overused in a story.

• The Fantastic Man editorial offices on Where They Create by Paul Barbera. Photographs of the magazine's editorial offices in Amsterdam. Also on the site: the offices of interior design magazine Frame in Amsterdam, Monster Children magazine in Sydney, and Sneaker Freaker magazine in Melbourne. (via magCulture)

Reading List, Aug. 22

A weekly roundup of job-hunting tips, career advice and interesting articles relevant to the magazine industry and being an editor.

• "5 Ways to Save Your Writing Clips From Oblivion" by Susan Johnston on The Urban Muse. Practical tips on how to keep your digital clippings.

• "One Mentor’s 10-Step Job Interview Process: Where do You Fall Out?" by Todd Herschberg on YouTern's The Savvy Intern blog. The inside scoop on how one employer weeds out job candidates.

• "Boston Globe Creates a Twitter Board for the Newsroom" by Justin Ellis on the Nieman Journalism Lab. If you want staff from all departments to get more involved in social media, increasing awareness about what your brand is doing may be the ticket.

• "How Journalists See Each Other" on DigiDave.

• "Making the Leap from Editor to Content Strategist" by Sara Zailskas on the American Society of Business Publication Editors blog (via WordCount). Lost your job as an editor or just tired of magazine publishing? "Content Strategist" could be your next career move.

Fill-in-the-blank Rejection Letter

I think every editor would love to use a rejection letter like this at times:

Via @graphicologycom

The The Impotence of Proofreading

By Taylor Mali, found on Lindsay Olson's blog.

i love the exclamation mark!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Did you catch the sarcasm? For you grammar geeks, an interesting piece on the overused exclamation mark. Blame its proliferation on email.

bossnapping

Last week, 3M workers in France held the company's chief executive hostage for two days in anger over layoffs. They didn't gain much – just a promise from 3M to return to the negotiating table to discuss redundancy deals – but I can imagine they certainly got some satisfaction from taking revenge on the big boss.

interview taxonomy

Some interviews go swimmingly. Others, well, not so much. Sometimes you walk out of one and think, What the hell was that? And it's not always necessarily by fault of your own. MojoGrad has provided a very thorough illustration of common "hideous" interviews. Below is the list, with comments on my own experiences with each kind, but I also recommend visiting MojoGrad for some funny tales and decent advice (it's a longish but good read).

The Interview Where I Was Completely Out Of My League. I've done this more than once. At the end of university, I applied to be EIC of a small, local arts publication. My only experience was running the school's student magazine, but I thought I could totally do the job. It wasn't until I was facing the interview committee that I started to wonder why the hell they had even called me in the first place.

The Interview I Was Late For. My first publishing gig. My sister was supposed to pick me up and drive me, and she was late. (Can you tell it's still a sore spot?) I had to call the interviewer and say I wasn't going to make it on time. I got the job, however.

The Interview In Which I Tried Desperately Not To Laugh At The People Who May Employ Me. Luckily, haven't had this experience.

The Interview That Was Frankly So Much Trouble I Shouldn’t Have Bloody Bothered. One of those times I was desperate for a job. A temp agency sent me out to a place in the middle of nowhere Mississauga – you know, where public transit doesn't seem to exist. My mom drove me (slightly embarrassing) and we got a speeding ticket on the way. Then in the interview, the company was super-sketch. The owner's cars sat in the back of the warehouse under tarps, and "my office" was an empty, badly lit room with one desk set up in the corner and miscellaneous equipment piled in another. I never really got a sense f what the job actually was – I'm convinced it had something to do with the mafia. The guy offered me the job on the spot, and then called a few days later and the position magically didn't exist anymore. For the better.

The Interview Where The Questions Are So Clichéd You Wonder If They Actually Found Anything Out About You. Nearly every interview with an HR representative. (Sorry HR peeps.)

The Interview Where You Already Know The People Interviewing You. Done it. A little odd, but not so bad.

How about you? Any stories to share?

Thanks to Briony Smith.

that's what I call memorable branding

A very cool business card (pretty obvious what company it's for), from Save the Assistants.

dream job found

To escape the cold, I'd give up magazines for a job like this:

Tourism Queensland is seeking applicants for the best job in the world! The role of Island Caretaker is a six-month contract, based on luxurious Hamilton Island in the Great Barrier Reef. It’s a live-in position with flexible working hours and key responsibilities include exploring the islands of the Great Barrier Reef to discover what the area has to offer. You’ll be required to report back on your adventures to Tourism Queensland headquarters in Brisbane (and the rest of the world) via weekly blogs, photo diary, video updates and ongoing media interviews.

Other job duties include feeding the fish, cleaning the pool and collecting the mail. Salary is AUD $150,000 (approximately $124,200 CAD) for the six-month contract, plus return airfares, accommodation and transport on Hamilton Island, plus travel to other Islands of the Great Barrier Reef.

Competition is fierce, though. Reuters reported that there's been so much interest in the position worldwide, the site advertising the job couldn't handle the traffic and crashed.

(re)writing better copy

This is from a post on Seth Godin's blog – an inner dialog on improving signage for a coffee brand, which reads "Unlike Any Coffee You've Ever Tasted Before.":

Wait. Why the capitals?

"Unlike any coffee you've ever tasted before."

"Before" is redundant.

"Unlike any coffee you've ever tasted."

Too negative. And why is "unlike" a positive trait? I mean, boiled leech guts is also unlike any coffee I've ever tasted, that doesn't mean I want to drink it. How about:

"The best coffee you've ever tasted."

Well, the thing is, the only coffee that matters is coffee I've tasted, right, so we could get shorter still:

"The best coffee."

The problem with that is that it's nothing but bragging. Of course you think it's the best coffee. So what? You're lying. And even if you're not lying, how do you know it's the best? Compared to what?

This is where the smart copywriter becomes a marketer.

"Better than Starbucks."

Well, it's still bragging. This is the moment where the marketer becomes a smart marketer and realizes that changing the offer or the product is more important than changing the hype.

"FREE TASTE TEST
Are we better than Starbucks?"

mags on film: funny face

Now hear this. I simply cannot release this issue the way it is. In the 60 years of Quality magazine, this hits rock bottom. If I let this go through, I will have failed the American woman. The great American woman, who stands out there naked, waiting for me to tell her what to wear. It doesn't speak. And if it won't speak to me, it won't speak to anyone.

A magazine must be like a human being. If it comes into the home it must contribute. It just can't lie around. A magazine must have blood and brains and pizzazz. This is just paper. If I send paper to the American woman, I will have let her down. Yes. D for down. D for dreary. D for dull and for depressing, dismal and deadly!

– Maggie Prescott (played by Kay Thompson) in the opening sequence of 1957's Funny Face, with Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire

find something else to do

An amusing, grim guide to journalism careers on Gawker points out that if you're getting into the field, you might as well quit now. From newspapers to trades to online ventures, the prospects are hopeless. This is what Gawker has to say about working for "good" magazines:

Oh, these are the jobs everybody wants. You want to write for the New Yorker. Or Vanity Fair, or GQ, or Vogue, or Wired, or SI, or the 50 or so other big splashy magazines that, you know, everybody wants to write for.

These jobs were always driven by connections. And guess what: they're still driven by connections, but there are even less jobs to go around now! So your chances are even worse than they would have been historically. These good jobs are never advertised, so you have to be well-connected enough to hear about them from an insider. Big magazine companies are cutting budgets and instituting hiring freezes. And every veteran magazine writer has a huge ego, so forget trying to cut in line ahead of them. Plan on getting to one of these places later in your career, as the icing on the cupcake of many years of experience, and you'll save yourself a bunch of heartache. Build up to these magazines from other, nonexistent entry-level writing jobs.

And about journalism in general:

If you're just getting into journalism, the job market is already flooded with people with far more experience than you who've been laid off, and are competing for the same jobs. If you're employed, moving up is treacherous—you never know when the new job you just took could disappear for reasons unrelated to anything you did personally.

laugh of the day: typos

Ok, forget what I said. If you want to give someone a laugh, don't bother proofreading your résumé or cover letter. You may just end up with one of these gems from Resumania.

[Posted by James Doyle on the Toronto Freelance Editors and Writers listserve.]

laugh of the day: unpaid internships

An amusing post on unpaid internships can be found on Christian Lander's What White People Like blog.

In most of the world when a person works long hours without pay, it is referred to as “slavery” or “forced labor.” For white people this process is referred to as an internship and is considered an essential stage in white development.

White people view the internship as their foot into the door to such high-profile low-paying career fields as journalism, film, politics, art, non-profits, and anything associated with a museum.

If all goes according to plan, an internship will end with an offer of a job that pays $24,000 per year and will consist entirely of the same tasks they were recently doing for free.

[Thanks to Marco Ursi for sending the link.]

cubicle-land

Ok, this isn't specifically magazine-related, and it won't do much to help your career, but I find it amusing. Wired has posted the results of its search for the saddest cubicle ever.