I spoke on a panel this morning at the Guardian's Student Media conference this morning, trying to help students get started in this crazy industry.
I was with Caitlin Moran, Anna Pickard and Roy Greenslade, so the balance of the panel was very much tipped in favour of women with unusual routes into journalism.
I had to ask how many of the 150ish audience are writing their own blogs, and a staggeringly small number of people put their hands up - perhaps 10, at most.
I'm, quite jealous, I said, of the opportunities that these guys have now and all the great tools they can play with - to use an obvious example, blogs are an incredibly powerful platform for developing your ideas, your style and your voice, as well a fascinating way of communicating all those ideas with other people in your field. I only wish I was a bit younger (sob) so that I could have had such a great toybox "when I was their age".
"Get technical!" I wanted to cry. I sensed that most of the audience had some kind of romantic notion about Fleet Street and inky journalism, but I'm afraid that all has to be left at the door. These students should be looking at new production and editorial jobs that demand more technical skills, and I don't mean doing a couple of pages in Dreamweaver. The growth areas are community management, crowd-sourced journalism, editing, filtering and aggregating, mobile content and those valuable multi-skillers we hear so much about.
Pick a specialism. Write about it every day. Talk to new people, constantly. Be extremely persistent. And if none of this sounds like fun, then give up now. After all, there are far easier ways to make a living.
A big up to Sam Parker from Nottingham, who had the nouse to put some samples of work on a CD and dish them out. Could I recommend a blog?
