How To: Land a Job in the News Business

Are you tired of filling out applications for jobs and internships again and again without results?

According to Mashable's Jennifer Van Grove, clever applicants have now been applying and landing jobs via social networking sites.

Van Grove's first tip on how to interest potential employers through social media is to take a risk.

"Put yourself out there," she said. Employers will never know you are interested if you don't let them know.

Van Grove's second tip is a little trickier. She suggests tailoring your online application style to meet the needs of the business, according to their networking profile.

If a company is looking to hire an employee responsible for its Twitter updates, Van Grove suggests being creative and sending in an application 'Twitter style.'

Her third tip involves a little luck. Van Grove suggests keeping your eyes open for additional opportunities to come up even directly after others have failed. Sometimes you may not land the job you were hoping for. However, networks met through failed attempts can lead to an even better job.

Van Grove's last tip is on how to be the best candidate for a position. The trick is to really show a company what you can offer. This may mean intensely following potential employers on social network sites to determine their values and needs in an employee.

Then, with your new knowledge about the company, you can tailor your application to appeal to the employer's wants, needs, and even general interests learned from their social profiles.

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Youtube Worth $1.1 Billion

Because Google discloses almost no information about YouTube's financial performance, the best anyone can guess is to make just that, an educated guess. Youtube, the world's biggest video site, will generate over $1.1 billion in revenue by 2011. Google will keep about $700 million of that.

According to Mark Mahaney from Citigroup's, who estimated the revenue of Youtube noted that the site is continually growing and that it is rapidly placing more ads on more videos.

To explain the outrageous figures that YouTube is supposedly taking in Mahaney explains the logic. He takes Myspace's revenue-to-page view ratio and applies it to YouTube, shown in the table to the right.

If you want to play analyst, you can tweak Mahaney's math based on your own assumptions. If you think Google (GOOG) is doing a better or worse job at selling ads than News Corp.'s (NWS) site, you might want to adjust the estimates accordingly.

If you believe YouTube generates much more traffic than comScore (SCOR) counts- which Youtube's people like to hint at even though they will never come out and say it- you could tweak it again.

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Do we need another news forum site?

Does the web need another site dedicated to the mass media? A site where the news comes from everywhere else excet those who actually run the site? Well the answer should be no but it apparently is going to be yes. Mediagazer, the newest of these sites to launch will be dedicated solely to the purpose of posting media from outside sources.

So what does this mean for the news industry? Well, because people get thier news from places like this they no longer need to subscribe to traditional forms of media such as newspapers. As the newspapers begin to lose subscribers they lose money. The news is a business and websites such as this steal money from people who are trying to make living for themselves.

So what would some options be for the news industry? First they need to get websites such as these shut down. The creators of these sites are using materials that are not thiers. Even if they give credit for an article to the proper author they are still stealing any monetary gain that author may have made from the article. Until there is a way to regulate and keep these types of websites out of business the news industry will lose money.

On the other side of this argument people would say that websites where news is gathered from all different sources and put in one place is just an evolutionary aspect of the news industry. In order for the media remain they need to embrace websites such as these.

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Conan O'Brien Will Change Your World... Whoever You Are

Conan O'Brien, the ousted host of the Tonight Show, made waves on March 5 when he began following one person on Twitter.

Until that moment, O'Brien was not following anyone on the popular social networking site. He announced his decision to change one woman's life in a tweet to his 579,338 followers.

This woman, Sarah Killen, lives in Michigan and likes gummy dinosaurs and cantaloupe. Initially, she only had three followers, but just hours after O'Brien's post, they increased to 3,750. That was only two days ago, and now Killen's follower count is 16,419.

Killen is taking advantage of her newfound fame. Her tweets have increased exponentially, and she is endorsing people and products that she likes. Killen posted a link to a 3-day for the cure website, and between 9:46 p.m. and 11:58 p.m. on March 5, $970 was donated by her followers. At press time, Killen has raised $2,580 for breast cancer research.

In our age of social media and instant access to information, fame is available to everyone.
One person with a modicum amount of fame is able to bequeath a small portion of his fame to another. This person, previously unknown, suddenly has power and influence. Climbing the social ladder is amazingly simple in the digital age.

We used to discuss a person's "fifteen minutes of fame," but with the availability of information, fame can last infinitely longer.

A YouTube video called Shoes was released in 2007. It became a pop culture staple at our college, referenced by everyone and recognized by everyone. A few weeks ago, my 15 year old little sister told me that there was a new YouTube video I just HAD to see. She and her friends were circulating the exact same video I'd seen years before, but to them, it was new and exciting.

Killen's time in the limelight may fade and never be unearthed again, but there is another possibility. What Killen does with her fifteen minutes now will influence whether she impacts the future. O'Brien changed her world; now, let's see if she changes ours.

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