Protip: Do not play around with hippos. Art by Netlizard.
At 27 years old, Paul Templer was swallowed by a hippo.
In 1996, Templer was giving a tour of the Zambezi river in Africa when his canoe was overturned. As Templer paddled out to rescue a fellow guide, he was swallowed by a rude hippopotamus.
Templer documented the incident in an article written for The Guardian in May 2013. Templer writes:
I reached over to grab his outstretched hand but as our fingers were about to touch, I was engulfed in darkness…I seemed to be trapped in something slimy. There was a terrible, sulphurous smell, like rotten eggs…My arms were trapped but I managed to free one hand and felt around – my palm passed through the wiry bristles of the hippo’s snout. It was only then that I realised I was underwater, trapped up to my waist in his mouth.
…I’ve no idea how long we stayed under – time passes very slowly when you’re in a hippo’s mouth.
After having a book about the experience published in 2012 (ironically titled What’s Left Of Me), he thought that his nightmare with the “rogue hippo”, as he calls it, was over.
In my final semester of school, I juggled four classes, three jobs, and an internship. Did I mention that I also had a social life?
Hi, I am an overachiever and unemployment is crushing my soul. How are you?
Lucky for me, my job search has become a great way to channel my inability to sit still. As it turns out, I am not the only grad in America who needs a job. So, I thought I would share these five tips to overachieving in your job search.
1. Network like a boss.
Unfortunately, I do not come from a “connected” family. I don’t have an Uncle at a marketing firm—in fact, my Uncle thinks SEO is a disease. So, I have to create all of my connections. How does one do that? I tell everyone what I studied in school and what I want to do with my future. I request to connect on LinkedIn and I find professionals on twitter. I attend workshops and then ask the speaker out to lunch. I find people with connections and ask them to introduce us. Then, I offer to take them out to lunch too. If you’re doing it right, you should be going out to lunch several times a week.
2. Practice, every damn day.
While my twitter account may seem like another youngster on the twitter, it is not. I take my tweeting very seriously, because it could land me a job. Every tweet I send, every article I read, and each blog post I write contributes to my professional credibility. I even offer free help to local businesses. That’s right, I actually go into businesses and provide PR and social media advice free of charge. Because, you know what? They might know someone who is hiring.
3. Do like the mob: get organized.
I was a mess when my job search first began. I would open a million job tabs on my browser then become overwhelmed and close my laptop. Now, I have an excel spreadsheet. I repeat, I have an excel spreadsheet to help me keep track of potential job prospects. The spreadsheet also includes what positions are available and the date I applied if qualified. I even have a color-coded system for my favorite companies. This thing is nuts.
4. Revise, Rinse, Repeat.
My resume has gone through more revisions than I can count, and I can only imagine how many more it will endure. I have been revising my resume since my sophomore year in college and it is still changing. No matter how many times I fix it, there is always something that can be done or said better. For the love of God, please reread your resume before you send it! Even after ten people read my resume, I found little mistakes.
5. So I creep, yeah.
This last tip is borderline stalker status, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Okay, so there is this feature on LinkedIn that allows you to see who has looked at your profile. While not all users have this option on their profile, many do. I intentionally look at people’s LinkedIn profiles in hopes that they will get curious and look at mine. It’s like staring at someone; eventually they are going to stare back and ask, “What’s your deal?”
So at this point you are probably saying, “Cool story bro, but aren’t you still unemployed?” Very good work my dear Watson, but that is not entirely true. I have just secured a contracted position. And I swear to you, it took every single step above to land this position. Hopefully, my next post will be “How to go from contract to hire.”
Lauren Palazzo: Write words for the right people. Recent #PR grad (Summa Cum + 4 internships). Public speaking coach and #SocialMedia ballerina. Will work for peanut butter.
It is official: social media now dominates the Series of Tubes.
Every year, these smart people produce a slick video about the interwebs, and this year’s video is especially good and interesting.
Now, having filled your brain with facts and numbers and industrial euro-pop dance music, WHAT DO WE DO?
Simple. We change the world.
Change # 1: One Contact Thing to rule them all
So you’ve got contacts in your gmail at home and Outlook at work, Twitter lists of followers and all kinds of Facebook friends, Tumblr buddies and Pinterest pals and a dozen other things.
It is an unholy mess.
Blessed be the app that gives us One Contact Thing, a single shebang with the magical powers to organize all your contacts, from all those stupid platforms, in one tidy place. The power will be unthinkable.
This means ending the nonsense about Instagram not talking to Twitter because she saw him flirting with Google or whatever. And yes, we need it to be easy and quick and on our phones. Because I’m not firing up the PC every time I need to look up a phone number or Twitter handle.
Whoever does this first — Apple, Google, Microsoft, some dude in his basement coding the app in his pajamas — will rule the interwebs forever and ever.
Change # 2: Obliterate voice mail and switch to texting
Am I saying we should take voice mail behind the barn and shoot it? No. I’m saying take it behind the barn, hang it, set it on fire, THEN shoot it.
Nobody likes voice mail. Nobody.
Don’t call my cell phone and make me dial up voice mail, punch in a password I keep forgetting, then listen for two minutes. Especially when 99.99 percent of all voice mail messages are things you can sum up in a short text like, “Phone tag, you’re it” or “Pick up some milk, yo” or “I’m a reclusive billionaire with $400 million sitting around, and instead of handing it to Karl Rove, who I wouldn’t trust at this point to run a successful race for student body president at Willapa Valley Junior High, I’d like some return on my investment.”
Send a text, people. College kids these days don’t even use email anymore. They think email is so 1994.
If it’s too complicated for a text, send an email.
If you really hate me, send a voice mail. Make it long. Don’t leave your number or email — assume that I’ve memorized it. And then when I call back, make sure you don’t answer your phone so I can start the whole thing rolling with a voice mail of my own.
Therefore, we will nuke voice mail from orbit, and the world will rejoice.
Change # 3: Real photos, good bios and no anonymous trolls
Twitter, Facebook and every other social media shebang is full of photos and bios of people that may be human, and might be young or old, male or female, con artist or genius.
You can’t tell, though, because (a) their profile photo is a shot of a cat, Yoda holding a lightsaber or a pile of leaves, (b) their Twittter handle is @jkringer392 and (c) their bio is a train wreck of obscure references to Star Trek fan fiction and such. I have seen all of these things and more. Who will pay for my therapy?
There are plenty of places for anonymous folks to say whatever they like. Sites like reddit will always be around. Have at it.
HOWEVER: papers of news, TV stations and serious blogs need to stop feeding the trolls by letting TrailerParkNinja and TexasMustSecede2016! dominate the comment sections with anonymous spam and hateful, nonsense. So let’s cut back on that by requiring commenters to use real photos and bios. Want to spew? Go spew in Anonymous Land.
If you’re going to be on the Series of Tubes, and want to be taken Seriously, you need a Serious photo — of you, not your cat — and a real bio. Period.
Long ago, only famous people needed public relations folks, who made sure actors, authors and other celebrities had good mug shots and nice bios. Today, everybody is online. Your photo, bio and name are what people see first. But average people don’t have a publicist. They’re flying in the dark with a blindfold, and yeah, it shows.
Wonder why you aren’t getting many followers on Twitter or hits to your blog? Take a look at your photo and bio.
Trying to get a job / book deal / punk rock music contract? Take a hard look at what people see, in the first five seconds, when they check you out on Twitter and the Book of Face and such.
People don’t make a decision about you after reading your short stories or listening to three mp3s of sample songs on your blog. They glance at your photo and decide, in half a second, whether to interact with you or never give you a second thought. They do this all the time, in a hurry. Ten people just followed you on Twitter, and you follow back or not, clicking away with your mousity mouse, no-no-yes-no-yes-yes-no. You don’t ponder these decisions, right? Bam. So make it easy on people by taking it seriously. I’m talking to you, Miss Duckface, who shot your profile photo in the bathroom mirror using an iPhone.
A duckface collage or montage or whatever.
People need a place –a Profile Doctor–to get easy and quick help with this sort of thing, without putting a public relations firm on retainer.
As an experiment, I just did a bit of profile doctoring for Lauren the Palazzo, recent public relations grad. Did she get a job? Yes, she did.
Yet I can’t doctor the profiles of all 3 billion people with profile photos of their cat, Spock or Darth Vader paired with a train-wreck bios, not unless I quit my job and hire a crack legion of minions with red pens and Photoshop skills. Though if such a crack legion of secret editing agents existed, it’s a good bet that the underground headquarters would include tiger sharks (lasers optional) swimming in the moat and komodo dragons next to the BBQ pit.
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Guy – Photo by Suhyoon Cho
Reformed journalist. Scribbler of speeches and whatnot. Wrote a thriller that was a finalist for some award.
Every day, you see stories wailing about the death of journalism, about newspapers shedding jobs or closing their doors.
So is journalism dead? Or is it a phoenix, dwindling close to the end of its life points only to come back bigger, faster and stronger?
The rise of citizen-journalists
A big part of the revival of journalism will involve citizen-journalists. Billions of people around the world are now portable news production studios, with every iPhone and Droid giving them the power to shoot photos or video and share breaking news with the world.
The negative side of this trend is quality control. Journalists have editors. There’s no editing involved with hitting the share button on your phone, leading to the very possibility of words, photos and video that simply stink up the joint, and wouldn’t have seen the light of day at a newspaper or TV station.
There’s also the problem of sorting through a sea of random stories, blog posts, Tumblr pages and YouTube videos about breaking news, all with similar taglines and descriptions.
Yet those negatives are outweighed by the positives. Giving any citizen the power to document events and break news can only be good news for transparency and fairness and bad news for censorship and oppression.
Quality control
As far as journalism’s overall quality, the milk’s gone bad–a little bit. The carton says it expired yesterday but you might still be able to drink it.
There used to be a 24-hour news cycle, back when newspapers got printed once a day. Blogs, Twitter and the Series of Tubes have made the old 24-hour news cycle as relevant as your dad’s collection of eight-track Meatloaf tapes.
Now there’s pressure to break news all day and all night, even when there’s not really any news to break. Added pressure for sports reporters covering the NFL to search for a scoop of raisins in the Raisin Bran when there aren’t any raisins to be found because it’s the off season.
With more pro athletes, actors, politicians and celebrities using Twitter and other means to break their own news, the pressure to produce has never been greater.
That pressure eventually reduces quality. It’s hard to do a big investigative story when you’re trying to crank out three blog posts a day while tweeting and replying to Facebook comments. The pressure to produce can lead journalists to begin poking and prodding when there is nothing to be poked and prodded, or to focus on the newest shiny object or controversy, whether that controversy has merit or not. Conflict is news.
White noise
Don Delillo’s nightmare from White Noise could be coming true. Soon enough, we will be speaking TV-glish instead of English and having difficulty distinguishing theWalking Dead on AMC from theWalking Dead on TMZ, the people who are famous for being famous — the Snookies, Paris Hiltons and Kim Kardashians of world.
Snooki and other passing media obsessions will fade away. Journalism, though, will rise like the Phoenix.
Despite Jersey Shore still being on TV for one last season, there is still lingering hope for journalism and civilization.
There’s a misconception that people aren’t reading as much these days. Not true. People may not be subscribing to newspapers, but that’s because they’re reading those same stories online. And it’s wrong to think content needs to be dumbed down to attract readers. Not to start a conspiracy thread but it is partially the marketing ploys of the media which perpetuate this kind of thinking. For example, you never see Neil deGrasse Tyson on Dancing with the Stars or plastered on a bottle of soda pop, but that doesn’t mean we don’t, as consumers, want to see that. What we see commercialized in everyday life can be misleading.
People want substance, and they’re getting it wherever they can. The Economist could not be denser and meatier, yet circulation of it is skyrocketing while fluffier magazines like Newsweek are going online-only.
While the way we get our news is shifting from paper and broadcast to the Series of Tubes, there’s a growing demand — not less demand — for good content.
Journalism will adapt, evolve and eventually thrive because it’s the only way to feed that demand, that hunger in every person to find out what’s going on in their neighborhood, their state, their country and the world.
Give us the who, what, when, where and why. Show us men landing on the moon and women becoming presidents. And yes, tell us about celebrities, but only if you’re breaking the news that Snooki is going away forever.
Alex Corey
Alex Corey is a writer studying journalism at California State University-Northridge and a staff reporter for the bilingual El Nuevo Sol. He can be reached on Twitter @ptyjournalist and on the Series of Tubes at ptyjournalist.wordpress.com
Lydia Callis has been the star of NYC MayorMichael Bloomberg‘s pressers. (That’s journalism slang for a press conference, which is PR slang for “Hey, reporters, bring your cameras and notebooks and we’ll talk about stuff.”)
Do I know sign language? No. But when I watch her, hey, even I get the gist of things. She is seven separate flavors of awesomesauce and deserves her own show, teaching kids across America sign language.
There is no guaranteed method, no secret way, to make a blog post that causes the Series of Tubes to explode.
Anybody who says otherwise is a lying liar full of lying liaosity.
Because this is an art, not a science.
HOWEVER: There are things that are smart, and give you a chance.
If your magical blog post causes the Series of Tubes to blow up like a Death Star orbiting the second moon of Yavin, then Yoda will celebrate by dropping it like it’s hot.
5) Swing for the fences
If all your blog posts are kinda the same — the same topic, the same length, the same tone — it’s a good bet none of them will ever magically shock the world.
Learn from PETA, which gets gobs and gobs of free ink and airtime by trying bold, crazy PR stunts.
Most of them fail. Sometimes, they get a little bad press for a stunt gone wrong.
But they keep swinging for the fences, because there is no real penalty for swinging and missing. Continue reading →
Hunter S. Thompson did it right with Conan O’Brien, because he didn’t sit on Conan’s couch and blab about his latest book / movie / art project. No. That is standard and typical and such. You can’t get atypical results by doing typical things.
Here’s the interview segment.
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Guy – Photo by Suhyoon Cho
Reformed journalist. Scribbler of speeches and whatnot. Wrote a thriller that was a finalist for some award.
Oh, if I could go back in time, and whisper in the ear of my younger self during journalism school.
Not that I was busy screwing it up. Editor-in-chief of my college newspaper, graduated No. 1 in my class, won a bunch of awards, blah-blah-blah. (Related: Who is this Guy?)
But the traditional things that most journalism students think they SHOULD be doing — well, often those are seven separate kinds of wrong.
And there are other things Serious Journalism Majors scoff at, things that you actually should not only embrace, but hug tightly to your bosom.
So here we go with the Top 10 Myths of Journalism School.
Myth No. 10: Hard news is the only true love of a Serious Journalism Major
Sure, unfiltered Marlboros and Jim Beam come close. But nothing beats a scoop about an amazing scandal. You laugh at people trying to make the words flow for their feature story on dumpster divers, a story packed with all these photos, which are for nancypants who don’t have the stones to write more words.
Here’s the truth: hard news is all about news gathering and using the inverted pyramid, which is a horrible structure for any sort of writing and needs to be taken behind the barn and shot.
Hard news is worthy, and does the public a great service. Yet if all you do is hard news, you won’t truly learn journalism — or how to write.
Myth No. 9: Journalism school will teach you how to write
Once you get that pigskin from j-school, and land your first journalism gig — at The Willapa Valley Shopper or The New York Times – you’ll go home after 12 hours of banging on the keyboard to stay up past midnight, banging on the keyboard some more while smoking Gallouise Blondes and drinking cheap whiskey sours as you write (a) the next Great American Novel, (b) a Broadway play involving a debutant who falls in love with a struggling young reporter or (c) a Hollywood screenplay about a vast government conspiracy unraveled by an intrepid young intern at CBS.
This will be a lot of fun, and you’ll remember this as being the Best Thing Ever until you’ve been doing it for seven months and turning every draft of your extra-curricular writerly fun into three-point attempts. Also, you will miss this thing we call “sleep” and these other things we call “money in the checking account” and “a social life that does not involve typing on a keyboard chatting with a person who may, or may not, actually exist.”
As a reformed journalist, I can tell you secret things.
Number One: Coffee.
If you want to make a reporter smile, or an editor not growl at you, feed them industrial amounts of coffee.
Number Two: Stress requires unstressing.
Journalists do a stressful job for tiny amounts of monies, and they’re under the Most Insane Deadline Pressure Known to Man, which makes them look for ways to unwind.
Here are my favorite journalists finding ways to unstress.
Bob’s a TV reporter from Local 12 in Cincinatti who took the thankless job of “Traffic Reporter, A Job We Sometimes Have Interns Do” and turned it onto a “Dancing King of the Glowing Tube.”
Then we’ve got WGN anchors Robert Jordan and Jackie Bange, who look quite Serious and Somber while delivering the news.
Once they hit the commercial break, they transform into silly nutballs and do a special shebang, which they’ve honed over the years to take up exactly two minutes.
Women are about 65 percent of college students now and the men who decided this new policy wanted to drop women below 50 percent. How? By making those degrees — including dangerous stuff like English literature — “single gender.”
Here are three reasons why that’s not wicked smart.
3) You need MORE smart women with degrees, not less
The days where a nation could shut its borders and do whatever is over.
Way back when, women in America couldn’t vote, get the same education as men or enter the same professions. We figured out those were all mistakes.
This is a global marketplace, and if you want to compete for the best jobs, you need all the brainpower you can get. All of it.
Telling women — half your population — they’re second-class and can’t get the same education as men, well, that sorta kinda guarantees that your national economy is going to stink like ten pounds of trout left out in the Texas sun for six days.
2) “The consent of the governed” actually means something
Even if you’re not a democracy, you can’t run a place for long without the consent of the governed.
Any 18-year-old college kid can tell you this after 30 minutes of rigorously paying attention to his first Poli Sci 101 lecture while furiously texting on his iPhone about the possibility of a kegger on Friday.
When you start oppressing half your population — whether it’s based on gender, race or class — you’re soliciting all kinds of trouble. Dictatorship or democracy, it won’t last. Two more words to look up before doing this sort of stinker: “Arab Spring.”
1) Three thousand angry Iranian women who happen to be deadly ninjas
Actually, that isn’t a joke.
I wrote about this in a post a long time ago on a blog post far, far away: there are a bazillion Iranian women who make Chuck Norris look like a nancypants.
This is ironic because it happens when the government said women in Iran aren’t allowed to do most sports — you can’t run marathons, because you’d have to wear SHORTS and such. So the women channeled a lot of their athletic talent and energy into learning to be ninjas. I kid you not.
Check out the video:
“See? We’re fully covered up. Also, we’re training hard to learn 173 ways to kill a man in less than two seconds.”
What are the chances some of these women wanted to major in English lit (or one of the other 76 degrees) and no longer can pursue that dream? Hmm.
ALSO: Hillary Clinton. I would not mess with her right now. She’s kinda good at this “fly around the world and dismantle oppression” thing.
ALSO-ALSO: We men need a different word for “men who aren’t idiots and think women should have equal rights.”
Except in indie romantic comedies and UC-Berkeley seminars, men don’t say, “I’m a feminist.” Let’s get a new thing, something like, “Men think women are wicked smart, and should run things as a benevolent dictatorship as long as they promise that Sarah Jessica Parker won’t make another movie ever again, so help us God.”
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Guy – Photo by Suhyoon Cho
Reformed journalist. Scribbler of speeches and whatnot. Wrote a thriller that was a finalist for some award.
"In my insomniacal Twitter meanderings I find the miracle of @speechwriterguy. Follow him. He makes energetic sense about words. And life."
@CharlesCrawford / Oxford area, England / Former British Ambassador turned speechwriter, writer, mediator, trainer, blogger. Founder member of ADRg Ambassadors LLP
"Informative, funny, blunt & quirky, @speechwriterguy 's blog is a must if you really give a damn about language & communication."
@DavidWeedmark / Ottawa, Canada / Acclaimed poet & novelist with a penchant for dark roast coffee; passionately curious.
