Yes, it is a tough time for journalism graduates — or anyone looking for a journalism job — but there are jobs available for people with desirable skills.

Recent journalism graduate Kyle Hansen just accepted a job at the Las Vegas Sun. More noteworthy, is that in this terrible time for journalism companies and the economy, he had interviews in five different states with newspapers. Five different states.

What skills does Hansen have that most recent journalism graduates don’t? Well, for starters, he blogs. It doesn’t have to be the best or most popular blog, but having a blog shows potential employers that Hansen is willing to try out new tools and that he has an understanding of the power of blogging.

Hansen also has multimedia skills, which include some knowledge of video editing, Flash and Web design. No one is saying that Hansen needs to be an expert in any of those areas, but the simple fact that he is inquisitive is a major plus for employers.

Not only can he write (which every journalism graduate should be able to do), but Hansen also has Web and multimedia skills. People like him will find employment.

The average, run-of-the-mill journalism graduate will have a tough time finding employment, especially at a desirable destination like the Sun, which is arguably the most desirable journalism destination in the U.S. right now. But journalists with modern skill sets are still in demand.

And it’s never too late to update your skill set.

Timothy Kennedy, the publisher of The Morning Call in Allentown, Pa., announced 35-40 layoffs yesterday at the 110,000-circulation newspaper.

But that’s not the real lede for me. In the middle of his memo he writes, “More than ever our financial results reflect the broken business model of the past.”

I agree with him that the old business model that newspapers operated under is broken. Many people agree with that. What I don’t see, however, is a new business model in his memo.

All I see are layoffs. Oh, and, a closing of a few bureaus, and some crap about changing the zoning of the print editions.

But how does Kennedy plan on growing revenue? How does Kennedy plan on monetizing the Web better? How does Kennedy plan on making The Morning Call a more relevant news source in the 21st century?

So, what’s the new business model of the future, besides laying off 40 employees? Oh I know, laying off 40 more 6 months from now. Got it.

Layoffs are not a business model.

I want to relate a story from two years ago about a missed opportunity at a 25,000-circulation daily newspaper.

I was talking with the top editors at this newspaper about my Web experience and some of my thoughts on what newspapers needed to do to make themselves more competitive on the Web. The question of money always arises, however.

How do we pay for this? Who funds research and development? How do we convince the publisher and owner to loosen the purse strings?

The editor in chief had an idea how to pay for some innovation at her paper. The problem was the owner. He didn’t see a need to spend money on the Web.

Contrary to popular belief, working for a family-owned newspaper is not always better than working for a corporate one. The owner, an older gentlemen, had decided his paper needed a new printing press — a $20 million facility.

The editor in chief suggested that he make some sacrifices with the printing press and instead divert some of that money to R&D for the Web site. She reasoned that even $500,000 — 1/40th of the money — would make a big difference at their modest newspaper.

She was unable to persuade the owner to spend some money on R&D for new media. That was in 2006, when the industry was in considerably better shape.

I bet the owner really regrets that decision now. And I’m sure the editor in chief realizes what a massive missed opportunity that was.

In 2006, the housing market was booming in the Cleveland area, but since then the housing market has collapsed and the economy has been hit hard. Now that paper — like papers all over the country — are forced with hard decisions on what to cut to bring expenses down.

It’s tough to justify spending money on R&D when many papers have to make drastic cuts, especially in an area like the Web, where newspapers traditionally have not made much money, if any at all. The economy will get better, and ad revenue will climb again.

The best time to invest in the future is when things are going well. Don’t expect the good times to last forever. Many newspapers did nothing until things got really bad.

Things will get better. And when profit margins are their fatest, we should invest the most in the future. Let’s learn from the past to make the future better.

We have to learn from our mistakes, or else we’re doomed to repeat them.

At BeatBlogging.Org I have noticed that many of our most successful beat bloggers have strong communities around their beats.

Community can trump content, but the best sites combine great content with a great community. Community is what makes people want to come back to a Web site over and over again. Ask an active Twitter user how often they are on Twitter each day. They might be embarrassed to tell you.

But it’s all about the community. A strong community, however, takes cultivation. It takes a moderator who is willing to mix it up with the people formally known as the audience.

That can be a scary suggestion for many journalists, but one-way communication will not build a community. And the Web is all about communities.

The SciGuy Eric Berger of the Houston Chronicle sometimes has posts garner more than 100,000 page views. Not bad for a blog dedicated to a less-than-controversial topic like science (unlike political blogs, which are easy to generate traffic to). From the start, Berger has striven to build a community that people wanted to come back to everyday.

I strongly recommend you listen to my audio interview with Berger about building a community and forward it around your newsroom. There is no shame in stealing someone’s successful ideas, and you’ll find many successful ideas over at BeatBlogging.Org on how to innovate on the Web.

Some tips for building community:

1. Read and respond to comments on blog posts — At first, Berger tried to respond to every one he could. The more he responded, the more other people responded. He was the catalyst for two-way communication taking off on his blog. A nice side effect is that his presence in the comments section helps keep the comments more on topic and civil. People are less willing to say outrageous things if they know the author is reading — and judging — their posts.
2. Think outside of the box — When Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth came out, Berger took six readers to go see it. He took three skeptics and three people who believed in global warming or who were neutral. After they all viewed the film, they had a discussion about what they saw and if the film had changed their views. Berger then transcribed the interview and put it on his blog, and some of it ended up in the print edition. It was a smashing success.
3. Ask for user input — If you’re serious about two-way communication, you should actively court user opinion. This can be as simple as ending blog posts with questions. Or it can be more in-depth like making online surveys for your users to take on big topics.
4. Some of your users know more than you — This is one reason why some beat blogs allow guest bloggers. Kent Fischer covers the Dallas Independent School District, and many of his readers work for the district. Some of those people probably more about the ins and outs of the district than he does. So during the slow summer months, he is asking some of them to guest blog. Allowing users to hold the conch every now and then can be very empowering for them. It’s a great way to let them know that you value their opinions.

I am strongly disappointed by the out-right negativity permeating through journalism right now.

The anger, the negativity, the we-can’t attitude hit a flash point on an intern’s post about job cuts and a newsroom reorganization. Yes, grown-up journalists were using an intern as a punching bag.

If you don’t believe journalism can be turned around, leave now. Find a new career. A prerequisite for success is believing in yourself.

Enthusiastic, bright-eyed, thoughtful and energetic interns and journalism students — the kinds of people we’ll need to turn this industry around — are being told to find a new career by angry journalists. Jessica DaSilva has encountered this in several internships:

Another problem I (and my peers) have encountered in internships is an eagerness to turn us away from journalism or jade us in some way. We all wonder why. I mean, if we all followed the popular mantra of “go to law school and make your mother proud,” then what would be the future of journalism?

Discouraging people who want to save journalism is not going to help us save journalism. And trust me, journalism needs to be saved. But it can only be saved by people who believe that journalism can and will thrive.

Do you believe?

I believe in journalism. In fact, I think the Internet is the greatest thing to ever happen to journalism. Now people can interact with news.

People can have a voice. And reporters can embrace interacting with the community. That’s a powerful thing.

The Internet and the Web are fundamentally better at disseminating news and information than either print or broadcast. People have been voting with their eyeballs and dollars. As journalists, we need to be where people are.

Now, I’m not going to sit here and say every newsroom reorganization is going to be successful. Many — perhaps most — will not be. But I would rather try something new and risk the potential for failure — or success — than continue doing something that I know will fail.

And if most news organizations continue down the path they are on right now, they will fail. Change isn’t easy, but it’s the only way to turn things around. It’s important for news organizations to realize that innovation often requires a reallocation of resources.

It’s easier to believe that there is no solution, rather than come up with one. That’s an idea that is killing journalism. It’s an idea that sustains the curmudgeon tribe of journalists.

There are solutions and there have been Web success stories. CNET has become a powerful and successful force in tech news on the Web. CBS recently bought CNET for $1.8 billion.

Blog network and advocacy journalism innovator The Huffington Post is worth upwards of $100 million. TechCrunch has 3.2 million unique visitors and is ranked in the top 1,000 most visited sites in the world by Alexa. Not bad for tech blog staffed by a handful of employees.

All of these examples have one thing in common: They don’t look and operate like legacy media companies. They exploit the strengths of the medium they are working on. How many newspapers and legacy news organizations can say they have really exploited the Web as a medium?

Companies make money off the Web all the time. If journalism companies want to succeed on the Web they can. But that means making tough decisions.

It means cutting some legacy staff. It means reallocating resources. It means taking risks — sometimes huge risks.

All this talk about how journalism is a public service and how it protects democracy will mean nothing if we don’t believe in ourselves and take risks. The future of journalism depends on it.

I believe. Do you?

Asking if blogging is journalism is like asking if desktop publishing is journalism.

The answer is sometimes. Both are just publishing platforms.

Nothing more. Nothing less.

At BeatBlogging.Org you’ll find many examples of journalists using blogging and other online tools to take their beat reporting to the next level. But most blogs are much truer to the original “Web log” concept than actual platforms for journalism.

Most bloggers just want to share their thoughts, feelings and lives with the world. Some, however, use blogging to take their beat reporting to the next level.

Are institutional memory and inertia killing the newspaper industry?

After reading the comments on a myriad of posts from journalists stuck in the past, I can’t help but think that there is no future for newspapers as long as the majority of their staffs (editorial and business) — and their collective institutional memories — are still around. Every change that is proposed, every new idea that is thought of, every staff cut that is made, is always compared to the old way of doing things.

The problem is that the old way of doing things for newspapers shares nothing in common with what 21st-century journalism is shaping up to be. What we are seeing is not a major change for the newspaper industry. It is a monumental rethinking of everything that newspapers have ever done.

This isn’t going from gas-powered cars to fuel cells. This is more akin to colonizing space.

And if you’re not prepared to colonize space, get the hell out of the way.

Can you imagine tailoring your reporting to fit a space dictated by a medium and not by the actual story?

Unreal. Imagine a world in which you write as much or as little as needed. Have one photo to go with a story? Have 500? Want to link to other sites, documents, databases and content?

That’s the power of the Web. That’s the power of blogging your beat.

The beat blog killed the news hole.

But I’m saving more links to my delicious feed in the right column, and I’m conversing more than ever on Twitter.

And, of course, I’m blogging at BeatBlogging.Org. If you’re looking for beat reporters pushing the practice using online tools and social networking, that’s the place to be. Want to modernize your beat reporting? Go to BeatBlogging.Org immediately.

I encourage you to check out my delicious links. They are almost entirely journalism focused (often online journalism related), and I always save a blurb (either a quote or my thoughts) about each link. They are updating constantly throughout the day, and now that I looking into the journalism industry as my full-time job, I have a lot more links to share.

If there is sufficient demand, I would consider doing a daily link post like many blogs do. I put the the delicious feed in the right column so that you could get new links all day long, instead of once a day.

Time to go write a real post.

A lot of journalists got into this business because they like to tell stories.

I think that’s one fundamental reason why so many journalists have a hard time adapting to the changing news landscape. For me, it was never about the story — it was always about the information and news.

So, if the format changes, it doesn’t really bother me. I’m not married to the format or the medium. I’m not here to weave intricate narratives and tell stories.

In fact, I’m not very good at telling oral stories. But I can tell you a lot of facts, figures and information.

This post was brought on by two things. First, the other night I was getting some drinks with some journalists and one said, “I’m not a journalist. I’m a storyteller.” He talked about how he had trouble keeping his stories short and didn’t like taking out quotes and information for brevity.

Obviously, his work was more for himself than for his readers. That’s does not serve our readers well, and it certainly doesn’t help journalism.

The second part of this post was inspired by a post by Howard Owens, “Not all information needs to be crafted into a story:”

Storytelling, whether written or visual, then becomes something that is more about serving your own ego than serving your readers.

So check your ego, whether writing or shooting, and give people useful or entertaining information in an accessible package.  Save the storytelling for when you really have a story to tell.

A lot of journalism seems to be ego driven. Some journalists report on what they want to cover, in the mediums they want to report in. It has very little to do with what people actually want.

But we’re in a business. We have to produce a product that people want. And most people just don’t read the whole story (thanks to Owens for the link):

But here’s the thing: journalists have always been far more entranced by ‘the story’ than audiences. Less than a quarter of newspaper readers claim to read to the end of a story, even one they’re interested in … and of those, over two thirds don’t read every word.

Yes, sometimes journalism is storytelling, but as Owens notes, we should save the storytelling for when we have really good stories to tell. I see so many feature, anecdotal and other non-news ledes on stories that are really just news stories.

Let me tell you something: I have stopped reading a lot of news stories because I didn’t want to put up with another boring feature lede on a news story. I wanted the news, and I wasn’t willing to wait for some journalist’s ego to go by. And I’ve read some great non-news ledes and they were usually on great feature stories.

If you’re a storyteller, it’s no fun to have to truncate your stories. Is it really a good story then? Is blogging a good storytelling medium? Probably not.

But if you’re in the business of providing facts, figures, information — news — you’ll find blogging and Web journalism to be amazing. The Web (and its mobile cousin) provide a great deal of immediacy and depth that print never could. The Internet is an awesome vehicle for information.

Too many journalists think of themselves as storytellers and not as journalists. People ultimately want journalism so they can be informed. I think if we concentrate on making journalism that people want, we’ll find ourselves and our industry in much better shape.

And sometimes people want great stories, but let’s not force every news item into the storytelling format.