Journalism experience is vital for working your way up through the ranks in editorial, and landing that dream job on the News Desk or as Features Editor for your favourite magazine. Like many creative roles, many within journalism usually are highly competitive, so standing out for your great work is often not enough, so we’re going to talk about journalism experience, and how to get it!
Get Journalism Experience – LinkedIn
Before we get into the actual work-side of things, we recommend if you haven’t already done so, create a LinkedIn profile. Make it look as professional as possible and clear as to why you are using it. You could use the “open for work” profile tag, to let industry contacts know you are available, but if your account is new, you won’t have many connections, so get connecting! Search the roles that interest you add connect with professionals, follow the businesses you aspire to work for and simply start to engage on social media and start to build opportunities.
Get Journalism Experience – Keep Writing in your Free Time
It’s always a great idea to keep writing when you can. Evolve your skills, broaden your knowledge and generally keep within the fast-paced industry! Keep up-to-speed with the news in the sector you wish to specialise in. Keep writing, writing and writing!
Get Journalism Experience – Start your own Blog
If you stay true to the point above, you will naturally be building your own portfolio of work. Whilst not technically journalism experience within the industry working for an organisation, it’s still experience! You will possibly be improving your writing speed, researching skills and honing in on points of interest. Now you have this, why not start your very own blog? We recommend using a WordPress platform as these make excellent platforms for online blogs. At this stage you are well on your way to standing out from a huge number of aspiring journalists.
Get Journalism Experience – Market your Work!
So now, see how far you’ve come!? You are regularly writing, uploading content (and hopefully engaging on social media). This is where we direct you back to LinkedIn (and other popular social sites such as Facebook and Twitter). Post your written blogs on social media, use appropriate hash tags, get noticed! By following this process, you give yourself a much better chance of building your own following. When applying for journalism roles, this really is the experience some companies will look at for assistant roles. Even more so if they can see you have a large following!
Get Journalism Experience – Contribute
Get your foot in the door by contributing to various magazines online. Many (including ourselves) offer such opportunities and by contributing to reputable publications you are gaining journalism experience whilst getting your name noticed by the editorial teams. Aim high, why not!? If you’d like to learn more about contributing with our Student Pocket Guide or Travel Pocket Guide publications, the links are below:
Contribute for Student Pocket Guide
Contribute for Travel Pocket Guide
Get Journalism Experience – Update your CV & Start Applying!
By now you should have plenty of excellent and stand-out achievements to mention on your CV. From articles you have posted on your own blog, to the one you shared on Facebook which reached thousands of people, to the fact you are a well-rounded, fast writer with a honed-in focus on what you love to write about. Now translate what you have learnt, compress that nicely into your CV (max 2 pages), and include a cover letter with every application you make.
Hopefully these tips on how to get journalism experience lead you some way, if not all the way to landing your dream job in journalism. Good luck!
