I have some pretty big news: I’m leaving Lee Enterprises to work for the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) Office of Digital and Design Innovation as their Mobile Products Manager in Washington D.C.

I know what you’re thinking, “Did he say the BBC?”

Nope.

So who are they and what do they do? The BBG‘s mission is, “To inform, engage, and connect people around the world in support of freedom and democracy.” It’s an independent agency of the federal government focusing specifically on delivering journalism to countries who don’t have a free press or who have governments that control information access. Some of the properties include: The Voice of America, Radio and TV Martí, Middle East Broadcast Network, Radio Free Asia and Europe. The gig will be executing products and partnerships across mobile and emerging platforms — from the complete spectrum of tools like SMS through the mobile/tablet device array to broadcast and ‘second screen’ social experiences. It’s very tech focused and will offer an amazing array of opportunities to learn, grow and tackle very unique challenges from low bandwidth, low tech countries to places where the leadership is actively jamming your signals and blocking your satellites. It’s going to require a lot of creativity, a lot of learning, experimenting and a whole lot of innovation.

Leaving Lee and the Midwest is going to be tough; we’ve made a lot of progress and had some good times, but this new adventure is going to be amazing. A multi-platform, multi-media, multi-national, multi-talented team and I can’t wait to get started at the beginning of June.

[Insert joke about my Carnival of Journalism fail being missing the deadline]

My time on the RJI fellowship has been amazing, but also really brought to the forefront a big “fail” in my life; similar to Steven Fox’s fail post, I learned that I really need to work on my work-life balance.

One of the great blessings (and burdens) of having an opportunity like this fellowship has been the ability to focus very acutely and deeply on a research topic area. Before in the normal world, there was a very clear 9-7ish ”work day” and then personal time (which I’d still spend a good amount of time doing research, reading, writing and experimenting). With the fellowship though, there isn’t that “work day” barrier, so I perhaps took that too far, and ended up spending way too much time working and not enough time living. This past semester, I spent more time on the road than I actually did at home and while I relished all the opportunities to teach, consult, interview and attend tech and training events — and I wouldn’t do it any different for this year — as I’m wrapping things up, I’ve begun to realize that going forward I need to assess my work-life balance and optimize:

• Focus more on specific areas/skills. There’s no award for being the most well-read person in every area possible (and frankly, there’s basically little to no attribution for being the person that turns others on to innovative ideas and information). There’s no stock bonus for having the most RSS feeds read. It’s just not possible to be an expert in everything and I’m working find a more comfortable balance and deeper specialized focus.
• Prioritize some of my volunteer efforts, be much more careful about over-committing to after-hours/extra projects. I still believe it’s critically important to give back to the industry and craft, but this year I took on a lot and it definitely tested me. I’ve been working on co-leading SND St. Louis conference for most of the year and the NPPA Multimedia Immersion; both are huge undertakings on their own. Especially when you add them to many other commitments including my ONA Board responsibilities, such as helping launch and manage the ONA Issues project, the MJ Bear Fellowships, and the many conference calls, emails, etc. Then toss in all the extra training workshops I do, guest speaking at schools, consulting work, and trying to feed my dog and make sure I have time to brush my teeth.
• Balance / leverage time and money. While I still really enjoy DIY experiences such as spending a sunny afternoon changing my oil or detailing my car but I’ve really started to appreciate the benefit that paying for something I don’t want to do to save significant amounts of time and energy. Beloved Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch has an awesome lecture on time management that everyone should see (actually check out all his lectures, he was a gem and an inspiration).
• Work smarter, use new technology and techniques to help do this. I’ve been seeking out different tools, techniques, ideas and workflows to help boost my productivity and really find the best 80-20 balance to get the most out of my 24 hours each day.

Everyone has to make their own work-life judgement calls and find their own personal balance. I’m blessed to have this experience and grateful for everything I’ve learned, especially the life lesson it taught me. I’d like to share some of my lifehacks / workflow hacks with you, so I’ll be hosting next month’s Carnival of Journalism and it’s going to focus on the the last two items on this list. Stay tuned for more info this week.

First, I must appologize for this taking so long to write this. Most of June and July I was wrapped up with a bunch of training workshops and tying down loose ends before I left for the Reynolds Fellowship and then getting up to speed on the fellowship and three weeks of travel in September sidelined me a lot.

Second, the results are very mixed, so to be honest, I debated even sharing them because I wasn’t comfortable with the number of results. Where as last time we did the survey, we had a lot of feedback from organization leaders and management, this time around the overall submitted survey results were smaller (by 36 %) and generally, the jobs people posted about were not as diverse and not in multiple levels of the organization. In fact, there was very few submissions from management of any sort and many from folks starting out their career.

General trends and thoughts from comparing the results between the two surveys:
Results weren’t as diverse as I’d wished
I’d hoped for more feedback on folks working in specialized areas –SEO optimization, CAR analyists, data divas, news programmers, social media managers, mobile directors — but we didn’t get a lot of that. Which could mean a lot of things, most likely that the folks most interested in the results of this are those in mid-level jobs looking to see how they compare. Folks who’ve specialized perhaps are more comfortable with their careers and don’t care.  Job roles from two years are generally very similar to what this survey produced previously, so I won’t re-write all that here (except for some minor things such as “social media editor” is more popular now than “community editor” as a job title). Having acknowledged the lack of diversity, we did get an interesting range — salaries from the low-$20k for entry level reporters to $170k for upper management in the big apple. There was also some weird (potentially fake) postings — including a incredibly detailed and well-paid job profile from a railroad welder in the Great Plains — that I didn’t include. Note to self: Look up community college classes for railroad welding if this journalism thing doesn’t work out.

More skills, with less depth
Overall though, comparing results between the two surveys, skill sets have grown immensely (many of the specialized technical areas above weren’t mentioned in basic web producer positions), but the depth is very minimal — as one respondent acknowledged “I’m not a programmer by any means, I usually end up Googling things and figuring out how to fix the problem.” In this survey’s results, many of the basic web producer positions were expected to have at least a running start understanding of SEO, social media and some very basic programming.

Programming skills are brought up frequently, but trail off quickly
The top programming skills were CSS and HTML by far (mentioned specifically by about 37 percent of responses). Javascript (and various plugins Jquery, AJAX, Mootools) and PHP was mentioned about 15 percent of the time. Flash, Ruby and Python were each mentioned about 2-4 percent, and generally only by folks with specific full-time programming responsibilities.

Program skills seem to be highly valued
Maybe it’s a sign of how news organizations are built now, with journalists just working as cogs in the content management machine, but specific content management and analytics programs were mentioned more frequently than programming languages/applications — Omniture, Google Analytics, Caspio, several different CMS/blog systems, a bunch of third-party vendor tools for CMS systems. These tools are ment more for a computer operator than a programmer/creator. (This again could be skewed because the bulk of responses were from web producer-type positions.)

Captain Obvious: Wages / benefits are down for most
Salaries from these survey results are down for most part — not quite as bad as this comical Journalism Jobs ad — but they were down comparing the two surveys. Part of that may just be due to the decreased number of management and senior staffers participating. Part of it could be the economy/news industry tanking. Eighty-eight percent of survey responses acknowledged some sort of salary or benefit reduction in the past couple years. The last survey had the mode salary in the $60k range. This one is in the $45k range.

There are people getting pay raises!
The news isn’t all bad — just over 5 percent acknowledged receiving a raise in the past couple years. So there is growth out there! These positions generally tended to be a larger organizations, for specialized positions such as programming or for someone who left a corporate job for a non-profit gig (which surprised me, I thought non-profits were supposed to pay horribly, but maybe newspapers have sunk below them now with all the cuts?).

Big city doesn’t necessarily mean big money
In the last survey, folks who worked in larger, more expensive markets were generally paid significantly more than in mid and smaller markets. This time around, that difference was minimal and in some case non-existent.

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Final lessons learned from this time around
There is a glimmer of hope, some people are getting raises in this rough environment. I think this reinforces my prescription for learning “Peace Out” skills and to never stop learning. It may be a little more challenging to find a job initially if you specialize, at least compared to a “jack of all trades” skill set but your benefits, job security, wages and (most likely) job enjoyment will be higher. You’ll be less likely to be outsourced or easily laid off and hopefully you’ll be able to create excellent things, instead of just feeding the content machine. And if you find you can’t create excellent things at your current gig, you can give them the peace out and move on to something better. I’d also seriously consider non-mainstream / traditional publicly-traded media organizations. There’s a lot of journalism startups out there and some of them appear to be paying nicely (especially their top management) and there’s a lot of new non-profit, NGO, and commercial organizations that value the skills journalists have that pay well also.

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Social Media Promotions Editor
Exempt, full time, reports to Interactive Director Will Sullivan

We are looking for someone to reach out to the St. Louis audience and let them know about our work. Specifically … we want an intelligent, curious go-getter who will get the most out of social media in launching new products, building audiences and communities.

Responsibilities:
This person will manage social media promotional projects and supervise interactions around those projects. He/she will help develop strategic plans, budgets and perform other managerial duties concerning social media involving the following departments: newsroom, online, marketing and advertising at our portfolio of content and advertising properties, including the Post-Dispatch, Suburban Journals, Feast, Stltoday and more. This person’s time will be spent between the launch of new products, the support of existing products, including a dotted-line responsibility for supervision of newsroom employees concerning social media. Within the newsroom this person will specifically be responsible for developing and supervising newsroom employees in their development of social media skills. They will also help to develop news content from social media sources.

Experience Requirements:

• A powerful and persuasive editor and a concise, error-free writer
• An understanding and expertise in Social Media Optimization and Search Engine Optimization
• The candidate must have demonstrated a track record in using social media tools to promote the work of their company including innovative approaches to launching new products, managing and growing mass-audience brands and experience teaching technology to those unfamiliar with it
• They must be an entrepreneurial and collaborative self-starter. They must have a thirst for learning about new ways to build communities
• They must be an active participant in many online communities already. If this person is a current employee, they should already have demonstrated innovation in promotion of our products
• The candidate would have demonstrated proficiency in working with multiple tools (text, video, audio, photo and other multimedia), promoting across multiple platforms (print, mobile, web, bus shelters and more)
• A passionate understanding of the St. Louis community and a sense of humor

Application requirements:

• A resume
• Brief cover letter
• A social media portfolio, detailing:
  + Social media and news networks which you’re currently active in (as well as the username, alias or direct URL to your profile)
  + 5-7 examples of social media campaigns, initiatives or projects you lead, specifically describing your role, the strategy, implementation, results and parties involved

Application procedure:
Send your application digitally to Will Sullivan at stltodayrules [at] gmail.com. Application deadline:  Sunday, July 18th (We’re looking to move quickly on this.) No phone calls or paper applications accepted.

Got 2 minutes and don’t feel like reading all this mumbo jumbo?  Please take our totally anonymous, 10-question job title, responsibility and salary survey to help us define job standards for our industry.

A couple years ago, I pulled together an online survey from folks working in the journalism and tech fields to try and figure out what all the different job titles peppered with buzzwords really mean: Interactive reporters. Web editors. Multimedia journalists. Website directors. Content strategists. Assistant deputy managing producers. It’s not like we’re plumbers where we can go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupation Outlook Handbook and look up any of these modern online media jobs to get real, accurate information that applies to our industry and skill sets.  Job titles, responsibilities and pay rates are really not uniform in the industry and through the original survey we received a little clarity. Feedback was fantastic and the results were very popular for some time and including getting referenced by several professors and career service departments as a general (non-scientific) guide for understanding.

It’s been a while since that original survey and over the past couple months I’ve had several people each independently ask me to do the survey again, so I’m kicking it off to get another glimpse of what job titles really mean in the online media and technology industries.

Juxtaposing the previous results to this survey should provide for some enlightening perspective on the profession. There’s still a huge need for more clarity, as most job responsibilities still vary vastly from organization to organization — especially in our layoff-filled industry where jobs are constantly juggling more and more. There’s also new specialties in the profession that didn’t really exist in the previous survey — “social media” wasn’t really a full time job, multimedia was just cracking out of the egg and mobile hadn’t blossomed at all. Beyond that, many of those who were once in the industry at traditional media organizations have scattered and taken their unique skill sets to new positions, in new non-traditional media organizations that value them. We’re looking for all types in this survey — from folks working at traditional mainstream organizations to independent bloggers, media startups, database managers, SEO experts, usability experts, multimedia producers at commercial agencies — anyone related to the increasingly blurred field of online media/content production.

So please take two minutes to fill out this completely anonymous 10-question survey. Also if you could share this with your colleagues in/out/around the media industry (especially if they work in the media, but at non-traditional organizations), that would be excellent. It will help us all get a better grip on how our jobs are structured collectively, what technologies and responsibilities are really needed for various positions (and not just the laundry list of every program and programming language known to the recruiter) and (perhaps most importantly) what we all are/should/could be making for our skills.

I’ll keep the survey open for about two weeks or until we get comparable responses to the previous survey and then post some analysis on the results afterwards.

To fill out the survey, please follow this link or just fill it out below: