Besides honing your reporting, writing and multimedia skills while in the CUNY J-School program, you’ll also want to develop some additional attributes that will set you apart from others.  Here are a few tips that have helped me along the way, especially when it came to securing my new job.

• Smile and introduce yourself: Now that I think about it, all of my professional journalism opportunities, including internships, grew out of a simple introduction following a panel or an event, or after a class with a guest speaker.  Although many won’t believe me, I’m a relatively shy person so I always have to psych myself up to introduce myself to a stranger, especially someone I admire, but it has always proven to be beneficial in one way or another. But the introduction is only the beginning.
• Make a meaningful connection: It’s not enough to introduce yourself and ask for a business card.  Think of an entry point to a conversation and/or something you could offer. For example, if there’s a speaker coming to talk to your class, do your research and find out what you have in common, or discover something you admire about the speaker that you would like to know more about.  Strike up a conversation that doesn’t start and end where it began, but instead, incorporates what you have learned and flows into a comfortable place that ends with their contact information.
• Follow up: A very senior editor at Time Inc. once told me that she admired me because I took her up on her invitation to email her and connect. When people say, “Feel free to contact me,” or “Here’s my email,” always follow up.  You never know where that connection could lead or what you may learn.  Also, when you follow up, be sure to insert some key things about yourself and your experience.  Even go so far as to ask to meet for tea or lunch.
• Get an advocate: It’s always best to have someone else that can speak of your greatness or on your behalf to someone else.  Why not start with your professors?  They have many connections in the journalism field and you should consider having them vouch for you.
• Work hard: Real success doesn’t come to those who sit and wait for things to happen to them (and if it does, it won’t be meaningful and it certainly won’t last).  Success comes to those who work hard.  Working hard means stretching your limits, doing things that you may hate, taking on challenges, and pushing yourself to be the best you that you can be.  For example, during the first semester, I worked 12 hours a week and interned twice a week, something that was highly discouraged.  By the end of the semester, I was awarded a $10,000 Dean’s scholarship.  It was hard to maintain a balance and get things done, but I knew the end result would equal money in my pocket and valuable experience that would benefit me in the end
• Be prepared: When I was growing up, my mother always referred to the “7 P’s”: “Proper Prior Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance.”  I’ve found this to be so true.  Whether you’re preparing for an interview, a meeting, or a story, do the legwork that will prevent you from looking like a fool.  For example, for my job interview, I prepared by doing research, coming up with ideas to offer, and talking to people familiar with the place, position, and/or person I was interviewing with about ways to best prepare myself.
• Get noticed: Whether it’s through your work, your personality, or your can-do attitude, work on getting noticed by your peers, colleagues and industry professionals.  This can be done by doing great work, making meaningful connections, sharing your thoughts, skills and aspirations.  After all, it doesn’t help if no one knows you or what you do.
• Make friends at your level: It’s not enough to just make meaningful connections with people at levels you aspire to.  It’s also extremely important to develop and maintain ties with classmates and other colleagues at your level because these are the people with whome you will rise to the top; maybe even the ones that will give you a job in five years.
• Share: Be diligent in sharing your knowledge, talent, aspirations, and skills with others.  I know for a fact that I couldn’t have made it this far without someone else pulling for me, so make it a point to give back; whether it’s through mentoring, talking to friends/colleagues about your experiences, or sharing your ideas with others.  You’ll find that when you share ideas, you often land on an even better one.
• Be persistent and stay the course: There will be days that look very bleak and others when you want to quit, but you have to keep going.  In every failure there is a lesson, and in every moment of weakness, there is strength to be gained.  Use your best of days to get through the dark days.  Be persistent in meeting your goals.

• Care. There is nothing more important to your success at journalism—at anything—than caring. You don’t need to love every assignment you’re given, but you do need to want the product to reflect positively on you. If you don’t care, figure out why. Maybe you don’t like the topic (so you know not to look for jobs at places that focus on that topic). Maybe you aren’t comfortable with the medium (either find a different one to work in or practice until you are comfortable). Learning what you don’t like or care about is useful information for you.

• Use what you know. You probably consume more media than any other generation in history. If you stop and think about it, you know exactly what works and doesn’t work in journalism. There’s a reason you’ll stick around to read one site’s article lede-to-kicker but click off another site without scrolling down the page. When you’re the one creating, generate the former.
  
• Words like lede and kicker are an annoyance (as demonstrated above). Use them only to get through classes or newsrooms, never in your daily life.

• Execution counts. If you’re building a site, pitching a business idea, editing a video, whatever—how you pull it off matters. Sure, good content always trumps bad content, but good content coupled with style blows away good content with a bland presentation. The fonts you choose for title placards matter. The color scheme of your website matters. The timing of the edits in your video matter. Consider all aspects.

• Push boundaries. It’s good to know the rules. It’s bad to be constricted by them. There’s a reason so many people have read Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra has a Cold” and it’s not because it was more of the same.

• Reach out to the people you look up to. I don’t like calling it networking—that makes it sound like work and a little cheap. If you are interested in something, reaching out to people who are good at that isn’t work as much as a desire to learn (social networks make this easier than ever). And follow up with them often. In my experience, they remember being where you are now.

• Immerse yourself in the best. Before every video shoot I went on, I would go to the site MediaStorm. The work there is visually appealing and powerful, and I wanted that in my mind when I went out. Find whatever you think is best and draw from it often.

• Procrastinate–sometimes. Okay, I’ve never seen anyone prescribe procrastination before.  But I have yet to meet a journalist who doesn’t wait until an hour before deadline to start pushing hard. Some traditions should live on—even in this “shifting journalistic environment.”

• Now stop procrastinating and go create something. Journalism’s shifting I hear. Be the ones that pace the change.

I’ve learned quite a bit since starting Sunset Park Chronicled six months ago. Certain questions that plague the startup entrepreneurial journalist or blogger were easy to answer. It was a “hyperlocal” blog, so I had an audience—the neighborhood. Few news outlets cover this part of Brooklyn, and there is demand for news. And I knew my subject well. It is my “beat” at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

Getting a blog up and running is easy as well. I started with WordPress.com, which is free, and offers good looking, flexible templates.

Then comes the learning curve and the growing pains. As an individual trying to cover a large and complex community, I don’t have the luxury of taking off one hat and putting on another. I wear them all at once–I aggregate news and I write it. I fix funky links and embed video. On occasion, I editorialize.

I do it imperfectly. Nobody really knows what the news landscape will look like in ten years, or even tomorrow. We do know it’s changing. Anyone can make news, and report it. This is what I have learned:

• Be consistent. Whether weekly, twice a week, or every day, make sure to set a blogging schedule and keep to it. Remember that morning paper that once landed on your doorstep? People like to know they can find something new when they go to your site and these days, people are hungry for as many updates as you can serve up. While a flurry of updates is always nice, consistency and quality pay off in the long run.
• Take a picture. Or a video. Or make a map. Try to create an interactive environment. Get people involved, even if only through watching and clicking.
• Use tags and pingbacks. Tag those posts like the A-train in the ‘80s. Tags help direct traffic. People still fish for news erratically, and you want to catch them in your net.
• Learn search engine optimization. Painful as it is, clever headlines are quickly becoming a thing of the past. You have to put key terms in the headline—like the tags, it helps put you on the radar of Google, Bing and the like. Save your quips for the lede.
• Talk to people. Respond to your readers. Ask questions. Engage thoughtfully with critics to create good dialogue, but don’t get defensive. And don’t take things personally. Doing so tends to take everyone off topic.
• Make a comments policy, and stick to it. You need to figure out what you are willing to put up there. My policy was to  write back to commenters asking them to remove offensive language, but I chose not to do it myself. If they’re not willing to reword their comment to get the idea up there, then it was likely a fleeting thing.
• Use the blog for story ideas. I have learned a lot from writing back to commenters asking them for more. Some speak on the record, some off. Some don’t respond at all, but you never know what you will find until you reach out.
• Shameless blog promotion. A news blog provides a service, an articulation of goings-on and issues, but it can’t work properly if no one’s reading it. Use Twitter. Tell people about the blog in person (gasp!). Then let the viral nature of word of mouth do its work.
• Use your analytics, but not too much. As an editor/publisher/marketer, stats are key. You can get a sense of who is looking and when, and what they want to read and like to look at. I originally used the data embedded into wordpress.com. Now I use Google Analytics, which offers a wealth of information, some of it still opaque to me. That said, there are stories, good stories, important stories that will never get the traffic that a cute cat video on YouTube pulls in an hour. That’s okay. Cute cat coverage does not a good reporter make.
• Be transparent. Don’t pretend you are something you are not. You are helping people understand their environment better. Let them see who’s talking.
• Link. For the love of god, link. Show people where you get your information. You are an educator as much as a reporter. Help them see how the job is done. You’ll build trust and credibility, hot commodities in our information age.
• Use your resources. One of my favorites is Google Alerts. It keeps me abreast of news and blogs, and offers story ideas. Twitter works too. And there is, of course, nothing like shoe leather reporting. It’s the best part anyway.
• Do your best. Life is busy. The news is fast. Blogging is a huge responsibility. Learn how to balance it all to keep quality high, readers interested and stay sane. Technical issues can be fixed, typos corrected, but a stain on your journalistic credibility is harder to clean up.