✍️ How I Got My Jobs and Internships ✍️ — April 17
Advice and tips on how I worked at The Guardian, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and FiveThirtyEight; Plus updates to the journalism jobs board
Hello folks and a happy Monday! We’ve got an action-packed edition today, including updates to the job board, as well as my best tips and advice on how I got my jobs and internships at the likes of The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, FiveThirtyEight, Bloomberg and the Texas Tribune.
We’ll start with the job board. After much deliberation, I’ve decided to reduce the number of jobs on our board from approximately 2,000 to 1,500. It was far from a quick and easy decision, but I ultimately decided to do so for several reasons.
When I was in graduate school in 2016 looking for internships and full-time roles, I spent way too much time wading through every job site you could think of, and countless hours wishing there was a service that could save me the time. When I first created the job board four years later it felt amazing to fill a gap that I knew was a problem. When we reached our first 1,000 jobs in September 2020, it was a momentous achievement. When we eclipsed 2,000 a few months later, I couldn’t believe what we had started.
Aside from saving time, I was equally determined to cut out the thousands of AI-generated, months-old and essentially non-active jobs other sites list. Their business models work on mass scale and appeal, with little care spent on the actual listings. I knew there might come a time when my own job board would begin to creep into their territory, and today is the day that we scale back slightly.
Finding jobs that are new and/or active isn’t an exact science. That’s because a percentage of employers recycle openings on their own websites every two to three weeks. The reduction in size will mean we list more jobs that I’m 99.9% certain are new and active — of which the overwhelming majority of the jobs we list already are — and less of the “I’m pretty sure this job is new and active, but I wouldn’t put my life on it” type of openings.
Unlike other job boards, we go through every single job posting every single weekend to make sure it’s still open. Reducing the amount we have to go through by even a few hundred will save multiple hours every week. That extra time will be spent on producing more engaging and interesting content like why Elon Musk and Twitter declared war on Substack, a mini investigation into Big Tech’s privacy policies, and whether we can trust mainstream media.
Another minor change I’ve made is to combine the U.S. and Canada tabs into one ‘North America’ section, and merge the UK and Europe tabs into one ‘Europe’ section. Again, this will save us a number of hours over the course of a month and year.
It certainly feels strange for me to downsize as opposed to grow, hence the excruciating mental gymnastics I’ve performed recently. But as the saying goes, often less is more. I hope you understand.🙏
Okay, some quick housekeeping and then I’ll share my best advice and tips on how I got my past jobs and internships.
If you want to become a paid subscriber and access 1,500 active journalism jobs in North America and Europe, as well as help keep this little boat afloat, you can subscribe below. All options include a free seven-day trial, so you can try before you buy.
If you want to list or promote your opening, you can do so by filling out this quick form or emailing me at daniellevitt32@gmail.com. And if you’re one of our paid subscribers, join our Candidate Board to have employers come to you directly.
Check out our running journalism awards, events and fellowship deadlines calendar, including SPJ’s webinar on ChatGPT: What Could Go Wrong? Or Right?; the Outlier Conference on data visualization; and IRE’s 2023 Board Elections. And also take a look at our featured jobs below from Bellingcat, Politico Europe and RadioFreeEurope.
And lastly, join me on Substack’s new social media platform, Notes, where along with thousands of other talented journalists and writers, I’ll be posting about whatever comes to mind.
Okay let’s do some job and internship advice… If you find what I have to say useful, please consider sharing us with your network!
Job Corner
🚨 Featured Postings 🚨
Bellingcat
Location: Remote, Worldwide
Contract: Full-Time
Requirements: 5+ years’ editing experience; Experience conducting open source research or editing articles with significant open source components; Experience working on major, often legally sensitive and high profile investigations; Strong fact-checking skills, a ruthless eye for detail and impeccable journalistic standards; Experience editing and condensing long, technical texts.
Deadline: May 7
RadioFreeEurope
Location: Prague, Czechia
Contract: Full-Time
Requirements: Ideally 5+ years’ experience in digital journalism and 3+ years in audience development, engagement and measurement; Expertise in best practices, rules, and industry standards in data analytics; Experience with data visualization tools; Familiarity with either conducting user research and market research, or acting on such insights; Strong management, project management, communication, and presentation skills; Proficiency in English (other relevant languages preferred).
Deadline: Rolling
Location: Prague, Czechia
Contract: Full-Time
Requirements: Ideally 7+ years’ experience in digital journalism and 3+ years of product management experience; Familiarity with best practices, rules, and industry standards in agile product management, iterative development processes and design thinking; Proven ability to launch and develop news products, strong knowledge of digital news production and distribution; Strong knowledge of editorial SEO and how to use data to make informed publishing decisions; Proficiency in English (other relevant target region languages preferred).
Deadline: Rolling
Politico Europe
Location: Berlin, Germany
Contract: Full-Time
Requirements: 5+ years’ newsroom experience minimum.Native-level English and full proficiency in German; Experience as an English language editor; Strong knowledge of German politics; Ability to work under pressure and on deadline; Eperience managing journalists.
Deadline: Rolling
Location: Brussels, Belgium
Contract: Full-Time
Requirements: 1+ year of newsroom experience; Excellent command of English (other European languages a strong plus); Experience running branded social media accounts for a news publisher; Experience building a vibrant online community; Confidence in generating new ideas and the initiative to help bring them to life; Experience reading and using analytics to inform decisions; Ability to produce content in line with brand style and tone.
Deadline: Rolling
Location: London, UK
Contract: Full-Time
Requirements: 3+ years’ experience working in an audio team producing podcasts or some other broadcast equivalent; Skilled audio editor (Adobe audition or equivalent); Experience recording and setting up technical equipment; Strong communication written and oral; Ability to work under pressure and on deadline; A keen interest and knowledge in politics — UK but also Europe and the US
Deadline: Rolling
Preview of New Jobs On The Board
How I Got My Jobs and Internships
I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work for some of the most prestigious newsrooms with some of the best people. My life and career hasn’t always been in journalism though. I studied business as an undergraduate and worked in digital dictation software sales for two years. Ugh.
Regardless of my own personal journey, much of what I’ve done to progress can be applied to any industry or career path. This is of course not the only way to do things. It’s how I did it. Take what you need and leave the rest.🤘
Don’t Wait Until You Need a Job
Start the process of getting a job way in advance of when you actually want or need a new job. If you’re a student graduating in six months time, start reaching out today. If you’re already in a permanent role, start the process even earlier. Time and due diligence is needed, both for the employer and you. Too often the focus is on the candidate to prove they’re right for the role, but figuring out whether an organization’s culture and values are right for you is as important.
When I was interning for S&P Global in New York in the summer of 2016, I took advantage of being in one of the largest media markets in the world. I asked dozens of editors and reporters from dozens of newsrooms for coffee to pick their brain about a range of topics. A year later, I landed internships at Bloomberg and then FiveThirtyEight, and was offered at the Wall Street Journal. In two of those examples, a $3 coffee turned out to be the best investment I’ve ever made.
Starting the process so far in advance might seem excessive and overly theoretical, but the dividends pay off in the end. Outreach — emails, phone calls, virtual coffees — is often free, and at a bare minimum you’ll expand your network with connections for the future.
Outreach
Now that we have a timeline, how do we actually reach out to future employers? Simple: start emailing and don’t be scared. Often the fear of someone’s response stops us from doing something — the worst response you can receive is “Sorry, I don’t have time. Best of luck.” Once we accept that rejection, or no response at all, isn’t personal nor a referendum on our careers, outreach becomes a lot easier.
If you need somewhere to start, here’s what I used…
“Hi Xxxx,
My name’s Daniel Levitt and I’m a journalism student at the University of Missouri. I came across your article on xxxx and [insert comment on how you feel about the topic]. Anyway, as I navigate the industry, I’d love to grab a coffee/video chat with you some time to learn about your career and how you got to where you are.
If you have some time in the next couple of weeks, I’d greatly appreciate it!
All the best,
Daniel”
Of course, don’t abuse this method. If you email someone saying you’re interested in their career, make sure that you’re actually interested. Journalists are some of the smartest and most skeptical humans on the planet, so they’ll sniff you out in a second. If you reach out to five people a week, it won’t be long before you’re speaking with some awesome people that can even become your mentor, colleague and friend.
I started this technique in the summer of 2015. I was living in Washington, D.C. for three months before I enrolled at Mizzou. One of the folks I reached out to was Brent Jones, who was at the time USA Today’s Head of Standards & Ethics. Brent invited me to his office at Gannett’s HQ in McLean, VA, and what I thought was going to be a quick coffee in the staff cafeteria, turned out to be a full newsroom tour and complete decimation of my boilerplate résumé and cover letter.
I checked back in with Brent periodically over the next couple of years, picking his brain about everything from what newsrooms look for in new hires, to the importance of newsroom diversity. And fate had it that we became colleagues at the WSJ — Brent now serves as WSJ’s Editor of Culture, Training & Outreach; President of the Dow Jones News Fund; and Senior VP of Training, Culture & Community at Dow Jones — five years after I sent that first email.
Remember: start emailing and dont be scared.
Time To Apply
Now comes arguably the most daunting and exhausting stage in the process. But like your outreach, it doesn’t need to be an anxiety-ridden journey that lets all of your demons out. Before I even look for an open application, I remind myself of these things:
Perfection is an illusion. It is literally impossible.
YOU ARE GOOD ENOUGH DANIEL and you will show them how much you can offer.
Rejection is not a referendum on your life. If it was, you would have been killed off years ago.
No doesn’t mean forever, it just means not yet.
Okay, therapy session over, here’s how I believe I made myself stand out.
Each and every single job or internship is different. I know how tempting it can be to create a central résumé and cover letter from which you tweak according to the application. Do not do this.
Editors and recruiters take their jobs seriously and know when someone has spent a couple of hours recrafting their résumé and cover letter versus someone who spent 20 minutes. If you add up all the applications you spent 20 minutes on only for them to be quickly discarded, that’s a whole lot of minutes.
If you need help with your résumé or cover letter, we provide feedback and suggestions for paid subscribers.
Perhaps the biggest enemy of the application process is being in a rush. That’s where we return to the first section and to start the process way in advance.
I can’t tell you how many applications I’ve screwed up by being in a hurry. One time I applied to a national newsroom and addressed the recruiter, Benjamin, as Marjorie. Perfection is an illusion, perfection is an illusion…
Instead, create a new document for each application and comb through it line by line. Applications can often appear repetitive and burdensome, but they are literally giving you the answers to the test. Without lying — this will almost certainly come back to bite you eventually — show them how you fit each of the job responsibilities and personal requirements. Many organizations will painstakingly tick a box for every line of the job criteria that you meet.
And finally, rejection is inevitable and a key part of the process. It deserves its own newsletter, so stay tuned for that and, of course, the best of luck now or in the future.
Questions, comments or other job tips? Drop them below…👍
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