For photographers and page designers, there are quite a few Web sites on the Internet where you can build your own online portfolio.

Doing this will help your internship hunt tremendously. It's a low-cost way to organize and present your work. When you get an editor's attention, they can quickly see your work online instead of waiting for the mail, and losing focus of you in the meantime.

It's also an easy way to show off your work to family and friends who don't get to regularly see the print versions.

The most popular page design site is News Page Designer, this is where all the professional designers have their portfolios.
One very nice up-and-comer is College Front Page. There both photographers and designers can build their own CFP Personals Page, which shows off your work in a very nice revolving slideshow, complete with detailed captions you can type explaining your thoughts for each piece.
CFP Personals also is a bit more fun, it's sort of like the Facebook of journalism portfolio sites.
Photobucket is one of the more popular free sites for amateur photographers.

Regardless of where you build an online portfolio, you'll need to make your pages into much smaller jpg or pdf images. News Page Designer has a tip sheet on how to do this.

Labels: applications, applying, career_advise, clips, college_media, editors, flash, internships, job hunt, media, multimedia, newspapers, online, portfolio, resumes, skills, snd

I've been on a calendar update binge, inputting events that other people have mailed to us (and also going out and grabbing a few on my own). The results are in the updated list at right.

Incidentally, it's one of the non-updated items that has me most excited. I'd meant to blog earlier about the great attraction of having APME and SND slated for a giant group hug in Las Vegas come 2008. I procrastinated on the blog entry for way too long, but the event has been sitting in the back of my mind like a song by the Supremes.

This event will literally be one of the places where the future of newspapers is really decided. While academics love to debate journalistic ideals (as they should), it's the actual managing editors (APME) and designers (SND) who determine whether those ideals get put into action, and whether anyone with a short attention span reads them, respectively.

Which brings me to my final bit of this entry: The Two Pleas.

Plea 1 - Find a way to go to this event (it's waaaay down there at the bottom of the calendar). Since most readers of this blog aren't AP managing editors, that probably means joining SND.

Plea 2 - Submit newspaper advertising industry events! We've got a wonderful slate of calendar items for the newsroom side of things, thanks to reader submissions, but newspapers survive on a symbiotic blend of ads and articles. So get to it!

That's all for today from down here.

Labels: advertising, apme, calendar, snd