Help chart the future of local news and community. Apply for a Representative Journalism Fellowship. Leonard Witt, holder of the Robert D. Fowler Distinguished Chair in Communication at Kennesaw State University, is leading a one-year trial in the college town of Northfield, Minn., 35 miles south of Minneapolis.

The representative journalist will spend a year working with the LocallyGrownNorthfield.org citizen blogger site to report one in-depth story per week on a critical civic or social issue. The reporting will be an open, transparent process where citizens can offer facts, comments, and perspective as the story develops. The final form of the story will be published in digital and print formats. Often, citizens will convene to discuss the findings of the reporting and participate in public meet-ups to discuss the results and next actions. This is not an assignment for an order taker. You must be an enterprising, self starter. You must have a willingness to engage with citizens day in and day out. When needed, you will produce work in multiple formats, including print, web, radio, access-TV and other formats. This will increase civic dialog in a highly educated community of 17,000 people and inspire the community to support and sustain your work. Bringing to this job a magazine-writing sensibility with in-depth reporting experience would be helpful. In the end, we want to talk about Northfield’s strengths and weaknesses, its joys and tribulations, its people and its governmental, civic, educational and economic institutions. Part of our inspiration is the Public Journalism Network’s Charter Declaration, which says in part:

• We believe the diversity and fragmentation of society call for new techniques for storytelling and information-sharing to help individual communities define themselves singularly and as part of the whole set of communities;
• We believe in the value of studying the dynamics of communities and the complexity of public life;
• We believe the best journalism helps people see the world as a whole and helps them take responsibility for what they see.

http://pjnet.org/charter/

Your day-to-day guidance will come from the community and the principals of Locally Grown. As a journalist, however, you will report to one of the nation’s most respected daily newspaper editors. You will receive regular guidance from participants in the Journalism That Matters collaborative and when requested from our highly respected national advisory board. The goal will be to provide high quality, ethically sound news and information, which will enrich the daily and civic lives of the people of Northfield. Email a letter of interest, resume, clips and references to Leonard Witt, lwitt@kennesaw.edu. A personal interview will be required at a mutually convenient location. To start immediately.

Here is one opinion from  Prescott Shibles:

I would even venture to say that having even mediocre Web/multimedia skills makes you far more employable and valuable. Those skills will dramatically impact salary and the number of job offers…telling students to be a specialist in a world that values versatility is doing them a disservice.

  What are your thoughts? Join the discussion.

Here is another update, from Paul Conley, who works with folks who hire young graduates:

…what I hear every day from my clients and other professionals — a college kid with a resume that could have been written in the 1970s is not worth hiring. I don’t care how well he writes. Writing well is not enough.

Join the discussion.

About ten days ago, I started writing a blog post about my updated thoughts on recent J-School grads and what skills I think aspiring journalists should be acquiring.

I promise I’ll finish that badboy soon (mostly because I’ve already got a ton of work in it), but I wanted to comment on a somewhat related post that I saw this morning on PJNet. I encourage you all to read that post.

A lot of what I’m blogging about today I also sent in an e-mail to Leonard Witt at PJNet.

Here goes:

+++My message to young journalists hasn’t changed in years:Be able to write and report your ass off, and have a great mindset when it comes to how we might need to tell those stories — regardless of the current technology or methods of distribution. I believe in my heart that the key to being a successful journalist now (and in 25 years) will rest in a reporter’s ability to write well.I would encourage you to read this old post I wrote earlier this year, which is basically an answer to an e-mail question Bryan Murley sent requesting thoughts for collegiate journalists for a piece on Murley’s great “Innovation in College Media” siteI think you’ll see my message is quite strong about being very good at the core journalism skills:

Know how to write. Know how to tell a story. Know how to conduct an interview. Know how to research your ass off.

When you combine strong traditional journalism skills with a great mindset, you’ve got a journalist who’s going to be fine regardless of what new things or technologies come our way.

When a J-School that I worked very closely with a few years ago changed its curriculum to be more “converged,” the most distressing thing I noticed in the school’s students was a deficiency in basic writing and editing skills … and I wasn’t quiet about it.

My biggest problem with a lot of young journalists is that so many of them have the crappiest attitudes on the planet. So many of them are so close-minded that it’s shocking, especially if these folks represent the future of our industry.

To be honest, I’d love to give them all the writing test that all members of our new-media team have to take just to show them that they’re not nearly as hot as they think they are.

But let’s get back to the post on PJNet that started this ramble: I’m not really sure today’s journalists have to pitch and catch. I honestly don’t know.

My best guess is that it’s about them knowing how to do one of those things extremely well, and then understanding how important the other positions on the field are.

And that’s where most of them seem to fall flat.

My biggest question to J-Schools now is why are your students so dang close-minded? Where was that instilled, and what are you going to do to help them graduate with a degree and a mindset that will keep them employed as long as they want to be members of the Fourth Estate?

+++Well, I gotta go now. I’ll try to come back later today to look over this post again to make sure that I haven’t embarrassed myself too much.Besides, the Jayhawks are on TV right now. Priorities.