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.

Reading List, Aug. 15

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

• "Today’s Publishing Career: We Are All Vulnerable" by Robert Sacks on Publishing Executive. It's highly unlikely you will hold your current position for the rest of your career. Even if you're happy with your job, it's important to have your next step in mind.

• "A Rogue Tweeter Titillates, Then Vanishes" by Jeremy W. Peters on The New York Times' Media Decoder. Ok, so you may be sick of hearing about the faux Twitter account that received a lot of media attention last week, but if you haven't read the @CondeElevator feed yet, do. It's terribly amusing.

• "Interns Should Get What They Want or Else Walk Out" on Interns Anonymous. If you're not learning anything at your internship and are just doing busywork, you don't have to stick around. I wouldn't recommend following the author's lead in how s/he left, though; be polite and professional in your departure.

• "Modifying Resume Job Titles Risky… Unless You’re Honest" by Dawn Rasmussen on YouTern's The Savvy Intern blog. Even if you want to change a job title on your resumé to more accurately represent the actual work you did, there are good reasons not to.

• "Are Your Co-Workers Killing You?" by Jonah Lehrer on Wired.com. Yet another reason to leave that toxic workplace sooner rather than later: the stress of being surrounded by nasty co-workers could shorten your life.

Editor Profile: Peter Carter, Today's Trucking

THE BIO

WHO: Peter Carter, editor, Today's Trucking

WENT TO SCHOOL FOR: Journalism, Carleton University

FIRST MAGAZINE JOB: Editorial assistant, Chimo Media, “which published Sound&Vision, for stereo fanatics; Influence (a cross between GQ and National Review, edited by Peter Worthington – one of the best editors ever); and ProSound, for music engineers. The late army brat and headline wiz Jim Cormier was the guy who hired me; I owe him big time.”

Reading List

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


• "The Over-45 Job Search Guide" by Katherine O'Brien on Possibilities. How to play up your strengths and combat ageist stereotypes in your job hunt.


• "The Best Boss I Ever Had" by Shelley White in The Globe and Mail. Want to be a great boss? (You should!) Take a page from the bosses in this collection of true stories.


• "Incivility a Growing Problem at Work, Psychologists Say" by Sharon Jayson in USA Today. It's not your imagination: your coworkers are becoming more rude. We're all busy, but let's remember our manners and be kind to one another.

Reading List

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

• "How to Write a Great Accomplishment Statement" by Tim Tyrell-Smith on Tim's Strategy. Next time you update your resumé, really sell yourself by explaining what you accomplished in each position; don't just list your job duties.

• "The 5 Most Common Interview Questions – and How to Answer Them" by Katie Amey on Ed2010.com. Customized for magaziners.

• "Too Much Information:Why I Don't Trust Employment Interviews" by Maria Gottschalk on YouTern's The Savvy Intern blog. A few tips on how to fairly evaluate all applicants when conducting job interviews.

Editor Profile: Penny Caldwell

THE BIO

WHO: Penny Caldwell, editor, Cottage Life; director of content development, Quarto Communications

ALSO TEACHES: Magazine and Web Editing, Magazine and Web Publishing certificate program, Ryerson University’s G. Raymond Chang School of Continuing Education

WENT TO SCHOOL AT: The University of Toronto, where she received her Bachelor of Arts

FIRST MAGAZINE JOB: Assistant editor, Canadian Yachting

AWARDS: Named Editor of the Year by the Canadian Society of Magazine Editors, 2006 and 2010. Has steered Cottage Life magazine to numerous national and international awards.

Reading List

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


• "Unpaid Interns: Working for Free" by Dakshana Bascaramurty in The Globe and Mail (hat tip to the Toronto Freelance Editors and Writers listserve). Companies that don't pay their interns may be breaking the law. Is it too much to hope that the climate might be ripe for a crackdown on unpaid internships?


• Canadian Living's Colleen Tully on being a Web Food Editor (video) on Good Food Revolution, via Magazines Online. Want to know what it's like to be an online food editor? Watch this.


• "Are You Trapped in a Bad Relationship…With Your Job?" by Sherrie Bourg Carter in Psychology Today. If your relationship with your boss or your job has gone sour, maybe it's time to leave.


• "The Unemployed Worker's New Friend: Outsourcers" by Joe Light in The Wall Street Journal (hat tip to @susan_peters). Paying someone to job hunt for you – I would recommend not doing this.

Why the Tyee's David Beers Thinks Aspiring Journalists Should Get Away From Their Computers

The Internet can be deceiving. You can have a relationship with the computer screen and feel that you can do this on your own. Or you can network with people on Twitter and Facebook and feel that you’re plugged into a community. If you’re starting out, I’d advise a real-life network of people who you see face to face, compare notes, get together to work constructively, take your work seriously, and work together to help each other get better. That was really instrumental to me when I got started.

– David Beers, founding editor of The Tyee and adjunct professor of the University of British Columbia's School of Journalism, giving advice to aspiring journalists in an interview with ArtsWire.

Reading List

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

• "Bored People Quit" on Rands in Repose. Required reading for editors in charge of a team. If you don't want to lose your best editors, that is.

• "99 Tips That Will Help You Land a Job" by James Clear on Passive Panda (via Alltop). From having the right mindset to interview tips to how to negotiate a salary, some great gems.

• "Help! I Can't Land a Job Interview" by Rosa E. Vargas on YouTern's The Savvy Intern blog (via @ginidietrich). I strongly urge everyone to heed Vargas' advice about resumés: Yours must "outdistance" others – it is a marketing tool, not a list of everything you've ever done.

• "Orgasm Guaranteed: What I learned While Freelancing at Cosmopolitan by Katherine Goldstein on Slate. An amusing account of life in the fact-checking trenches.

Editor Profile: Chantel Simmons

THE BIO

WHO: Chantel Simmons, hair editor, The Kit.

OTHER JOBS INCLUDE: Instructor (magazine writing, editing, online magazines), post-grad Book and Magazine Publishing Program, Centennial College; beauty expert, The Marilyn Denis Show; freelance writer ("I mostly focus on beauty, relationships, travel and home decor") for Elle Canada, HGTV, Food Network and a few other mags; author of two bestselling novels.

Bill Keller on the People Part of Being an Editor

"There's a lot of stuff they don't teach you in the mythical editors' school. ... [T]here's other stuff that I sometimes think of as an in loco parentis role. You have these people who work for you, but they're also people. They have families and people in their family get cancer and die, and there's a lot of being there for people. That was not something I had anticipated."

– Soon-to-be former executive editor of the New York Times Bill Keller in an interview with Scott Raab for Esquire's August 2011 issue. Read the full interview with Keller in two parts – pre and post the announcement that he was stepping down.

Editor Profile: Patrick Walsh

There are many things that make magazines an amazing industry, but it's the people who make it a community I am proud to belong to. In celebration of the hardworking editors who put together the pages of our favourite publications, I am launching this Editor Profile series. Every other Thursday on Dream Job TK, a top editor will share a little bit about him/herself along with a few thoughts on editing. It is my hope that this series helps us all get to know each other a little better, and perhaps even present new editors with a few role models. I hope you enjoy it, and please let me know what you think and if there's an editor whom you would like to see featured.

PS – A special thank you to my first subject, Patrick Walsh, who has provided me with a fabulous kick-off to the series.

THE BIO
WHO: Patrick Walsh, editor-in-chief and brand manager, Outdoor Canada

WENT TO SCHOOL FOR: Print Journalism, Centennial College

FIRST MAGAZINE JOB: Assistant Editor, Muskoka Life magazine, in his hometown of Bracebridge, Ont. "It was 1983, and it was a paying job for my final term work placement."

SUBSCRIBES TO: Esquire, Field & Stream, Ontario Out of Doors, Outdoor Life. "I wish I had time for more. I'm now resigned to picking up the odd copy of other titles at the newsstand."

WHAT ELSE SHOULD WE KNOW ABOUT YOU, PATRICK?
I'm married to another magazine editor, Jackie Kovacs, who is deputy editor of Today's Parent. Our three children (ages 9, 13 and 15) accordingly share our penchant for editing poor grammar and punctuation in roadside signs.

What Wired.com's Evan Hansen Looks for in a Web Editor

"On the web, you want people who are very flexible, who can wear a lot of hats. It's a very flat organization (at least ours is). Everybody does everything. So you don't want to have prima donnas who won't put a photo into a blog post because it's 'not their job.' You have to have people who are good at moving quickly, who can get the copy out."

– Evan Hansen, Editor-in-Chief, Wired.com, on what qualities he looks for in a web editor, responding to a question from the audience at MagNet 2011's marquee session, "Welcome to the (Digital) Jungle"

Can You Hire Someone Without Doing an Interview?

I'm not a big fan of job interviews – from either side of the desk. They're a false construct because everyone is on their best behaviour. As an applicant, how do you know if you'll like the work environment and the people? If you're interviewing candidates, how can you tell who will work best with the team and do a good job? You don't and you can't.

Until someone is doing the job, there's no true way to know if they're a fit. Which is why FlightCaster cofounder Jason Freedman doesn't interview potential employees. He hires them instead.

He doesn't hire them full-time, but as contract workers so he can see how well they, well, work. He pays them a contractor's fee to complete a defined project over the course of a few weeks, and if he's happy, they have a job.

I love this idea, and think that magazines are particularly well-suited to the practice. Hire an editor to handle some stories and work through production, and you'll know by the end of it if they're worth bringing on full time. And it gives them a chance to determine if they want to work for you.

What do you think? Would you try it? Would you do away with interviews?

Why I Object to Objective Statements

Do you have an objective statement on your resumé? I don't. Here's why:

1. They already know what I want.
I want the job I'm applying to. There's no reason to write an objective statement that says, "Looking for a challenging editorial position at a leading consumer magazine" or some other nonsense. It's stating the obvious.

2. Your cover letter should say it all.
If there's anything overarching that you need to say about yourself and your goals, it should go in your cover letter, not on your resumé.

Do you hate objective statements as much as I do? Why or why not?

2 Quick Resumé Tips

When an editor is hiring for a position, she will have to wade through dozens, if not hundreds of resumés. It's a tiring and tedious job, and the editor is likely to have a low tolerance level for small annoyances. Anything you can do to make it easier for her to find and read your resumé and cover letter will work to your advantage. Follow these two simple rules and you'll already stand out among the applicants, even before the editor reads your application.

1. Send PDF files. Word documents can have font problems. All that tidy formatting you worked on can get messed up, making your resumé harder to read.
2. Name the document with your name. For example, "vangerwen-cover.pdf" and "vangerwen-resume.pdf" will be easier to find in a folder filled with documents labelled just "coverletter.doc" and "resume-final.doc."

How to Manage Event Invitations

Here's an idea for all you editors who get invited to so many press events, you feel as if you never spend time in the office: divvy up your invitations between editors.

I've heard of two places that do this: They gather all the event invites the editors have received in the previous week and at a weekly meeting (it could be during your usual update meeting), they divide them between the staff. This ensures no important event is missed, and reduces chances that the entire staff is unnecessarily out of the office.

This time of year, invitations to press events really start to flood in. What do you do to manage your time away from the office so you can still get your work done?

6 Value-Added Skills For Every Editor

Being an editor these days is no longer just about editing and writing print copy. Now you have to blog, make presentations and appear in videos, among other "additional duties as required." In order to rocket to the top of the industry and stay ahead of your class, honing your skills in these areas will help make you stand out.

1. SOCIAL MEDIA, CMS, HTML, CSS & ALL THINGS DIGITAL
As an editor, you are responsible for the content for your brand, not just the ink-on-paper version of it. You will be asked to blog, tweet and write for the web. If you don't know how (or if you do it badly), you will get left behind. Bonus: advanced knowledge in the digital arena makes you a candidate for web editing jobs – practically the only area of magazines that is growing right now.

2. PHOTOGRAPHY
That blog you're writing? If you can do the photography for it, you're worth more. More photos make for better blogs, especially when there's variety other than just product shots supplied by PR people and the quality is better than a basic snapshot. (Yes, I acknowledge the fact that I rarely post photos on this blog.)

3. GRAPHIC DESIGN

Know photoshop? Now you can resize and edit those photos for your blog without bugging the art department. Understanding the basics of design will also help you better communicate with the art department (just remember: they still know more than you – respect their expertise). Plus, being able to think visually and explain it will help you develop and execute editorial packaging concepts, which depend on a successful marriage of text and images/layout.

4. COMPUTERS & ELECTRONICS
If you can troubleshoot email problems and get the AV equipment running at a meeting, you portray an overall air of capability. Plus, you don't have to bug IT as often. (But again, respect their expertise.)

5. PUBLIC SPEAKING
Editors are brand ambassadors and one of the more powerful tools in a magazine's marketing arsenal. Excel at making presentations (at a consumer show, for example) or doing demonstrations (for that web video, say) and you may find yourself one of the public faces for your magazine.

6. SPECIALIZATION
You do risk pigeonholing yourself, but being an expert in a particular area, for example beauty or environment, will make you a top candidate for positions requiring knowledge of that subject.

Any other skills you would add to this list?

What Every Intern Needs to Know

Interns, pay close attention, as this one is for you:

I recently had a lively conversation with several senior-level magaziners about interns.

Yes, interns, you are noticed, and your editor is going to talk about you with his friends (aka other editors).

What you want him to say about you is how amazing you are, that you are a godsend, that you do your job exceptionally well. If you are a good intern, your editor will do everything he can to help you along in your career.

What you don't want, is to have your editor speaking badly about you, because we do name names.

To help all you interns out there start off on the right foot in the biz, here are some Dos and Don'ts:

DON'T quit after the first day, saying, "It wasn't what I was expecting." Newsflash: first days of any job almost always suck. I know people – full-time hired staff – who have had no desk and no computer on their first day. If you are stuck at the receptionist's desk and given a bunch of back issues to read through, take the opportunity to read the magazine and get to know the brand. Preparing for an intern's arrival is usually near the bottom of a very busy editor's to-do list. We do our best to have things ready, but sometimes we just don't have any work for you to do on your first day. Quit your first day and you've already established a reputation as someone with an entitlement complex who doesn't see things through.

DON'T stop showing up. Life happens. Sometimes you find a full-time job or have family issues to deal with. If something unexpected comes up, call your editor, explain the situation and offer profuse apologies. Don't just not show up – it makes us anxious because we think you may have been in an accident. And when we find out that's not the case, we get pissed off.

DO say yes to every job, unless illegal or dangerous. This is not a pick-and-choose situation. Do what you are asked of, and with a smile. A good attitude will get you very far.

DO be professional. You may not be getting paid much, if at all, but you must treat your internship as a job. Have a courteous phone manner, be respectful of all staff and other interns, be helpful, and have a positive attitude. This is your audition for the industry.

DO learn Twitter, Facebook and RSS feeds, and it's better if you have a blog. These are everyday tools of journalism now. We expect you to know them.

Interns, it is not hard to be a good intern. Judging from the many conversations I've had on this topic, bad interns are everywhere. Show up on time and do your job professionally, and you will stand out as a star.

Editors, anything else you would add to this list? Any advice or intern horror stories to share?

Archiving Your Career

I'm going through the dual process right now of building a portfolio website for myself, as well as rearranging my office – both of which require me to go through my archives. It seems to be an apt time of year to engage in self-reflective activities, you know, as everyone is in the mood to look back at the year that was.

I have rediscovered that I tend to keep multiple copies (as much as seven!) of each issue that I've worked on. And I'm inclined to think that I'm not the only one.

I'm curious: how do you track and archive your past work? Do you keep every issue? Do you tear out or scan just the stories that you've written? Do you keep a list of everything you've ever worked on? Do you keep only the work of which you are most proud? Do you organize it by subject, year or publication? What about those of you with 20+ years in the biz? Have you changed what you choose to keep?

I'm interested in the nitty-gritty details. Please share!