If you’re not only an expert at using Tumblr, Twitter and Facebook but can edit video with the best of them, you should take a look at The Atlantic‘s 2012-2013 social media/multimedia fellowship.

The ad was posted on The Atlantic‘s Tumblr on Friday. Unfortunately, it doesn’t include details on whether the gig is paid or not The post has been updated to say it’s a paid, year-long job based in Washington, D.C. This is a great opportunity to get some hands-on social media and video experience at a great publication.

In addition to emailing over a resume, the editors would also “love to see the following”:

• Your Twitter / Tumblr / Vimeo / YouTube / etc. pages
• Anything cool you’ve made recently
• A video someone else made that you think is great
• A blog that you think is awesome
• A meme that you think is awesome
• A GIF that you think is awesome

To apply, send your resume and a cover letter to video@theatlantic.com.

If you’re a regular 10,000 Words reader, you know that multimedia skills can do wonders for your journalism career. Not only can you use your Twitter savvy to land a social media job, but if you can hip your bosses to the benefits of infographics or prove that page views increase with slideshows, you could get bumped up the masthead.

Marie Claire features director Lea Goldman didn’t go to J-school or take any workshops to learn how to create content for the iPad, for example. She hit the ground running.

“I am a big believer in just getting out there and doing. It’s thinking, ‘Oh, instead of an article, maybe we should do an interactive graphic or maybe a video would be great here.’ You really have to be willing to do more than just write and edit. If that’s all you’re interested in,” she added, “you’re probably in the wrong business.”

To find out how other magazine veterans got promoted, read How To Become an Editor-in-Chief.

This article is one of several mediabistro.com features exclusively available to AvantGuild subscribers. If you’re not a member yet, you can register for as little as $55 a year and get access to these articles, discounts on seminars and workshops, and more.

In case you missed the news, being a reporter is the fifth worst job of 2012, according to a CareerCast.com survey.

That’s right. Being a taxi driver, a maid, a dishwasher, or a janitor all ranked higher than being a newspaper reporter. (Here’s the full list, as published on The Wall Street Journal website.)

Now, over on The New York Times‘ Media Decoder blog, David Carr is fighting back. Well, sort of. He’s at least giving reporters a chance to voice their opinion.  Read more

When I started blogging about journalism, I did so at the urging of a hiring editor (who didn’t, ultimately, hire me but did inspire me). I had all these great digital skills, she told me, but she asked why had I presented her with carbon-based clips (i.e. paper) instead of a URL. I left the job fair and put the years of web design experience I’d been amassing to good work, and by the end of the weekend had built myself a website with clips, a resume, a bio and a blog about, what else, journalism and my place in the evolving industry.

That was a few months before my college graduation. And after putting so much work into the blog, I proudly stamped the URL on my resume and included it in my cover letters to prospective employers. To be honest, the blog’s inclusion wasn’t so much a way to show off my work as to cover my ass. When I interviewed for jobs, I discussed it. When I was hired, I searched the employee handbook and intranet for information about personal blogs. Soon after I arrived, I sat down with the executive editor and we discussed it. See, what kept me up late at night wasn’t the prospect of graduating without a job, but rather I did not want one of those editors to plug my name in Google and come across my blog, assuming I had hid or was hiding it.

I had flashbacks to that period and those decisions when I heard the story of Khristopher Brooks, who was fired this week from the job he hadn’t yet started because of the way he announced his new job on his tumblr blog. Brooks did a silly thing, but in my opinion, the folks he thought would soon be his new bosses did an even sillier one. (In my honest opinion, I think they come off looking out-of-touch and overly cautious for a news organization currently force-feeding its employees the “digital first!” company line, and he comes off probably having dodged a bullet.)

Here’s what got Brooks fired, and then, here’s my been-there-done-that advice on how to not get fired for your personal journalism blog.
Read more

In my last two posts here, I drew from experiences I had as a guest speaker to journalism, mass media and public relations classes at Central Michigan University.

This post will touch again on those experiences, but will look at a common question I was asked by students in many of the classes I spoke to.

In every class I spoke to, there was one student who always asked the same question: How can I get a job in social media?

Read more