January 2009 was a bad month to be a graduating journalism student. The skills were the ones news organisations said they needed; the open question was whether anyone would hire for them.
Azeem Ahmad, who had won Birmingham University’s Student Journalist of the Year award, sponsored by Trinity Mirror, described the position from inside it. The problem was not a shortage of jobs but competition for the interesting ones, and the award had not set him apart from other applicants in the way he had expected. His own advice was about visibility rather than credentials: blog as often as possible; read the key figures in a chosen field and comment on what they write; let authors know their piece has been read and agreed with or argued against; join the discussions and build a community around the work; get on Twitter and operate as a networked journalist.
Dan Schawbel, writing at Mashable, added the mechanics of using social media to job-hunt — a video résumé, a properly worked LinkedIn profile, and Twitter for making connections.
Both sets of advice describe the same shift, from applying to being found. Posting in public, in the places editors read, had replaced posting a CV and a cover letter to a human resources department.