“We don’t want to keep people in freelancer limbo for too long,” said national editor Devindra Hardawar. “We like to take care of our writers.”

The site currently syndicates content to Reuters, The Christian Science Monitor and Business Insider, among others. It also gives some pretty generous traffic bonuses. So, if you’re interested in seeing your byline land on the site, check out some more tips from Mediabistro’s How To Pitch: VentureBeat. [AvantGuild subscription required]

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Now, the application process is finally open for the third and final round of the Knight News Challenge, this time focused on mobile. That makes it time to put your talent where the future is, or at least put yourself and your mobile idea out there for a share of the $5 million prize money. That’s free money to make your idea happen.

Remember, the purpose of these challenges — previously this year they focused around the themes of Data and Networks — is to encourage innovation in the news gathering and reporting business. How could your phone or tablet make that happen? How would you make the revenue part of that awesome idea work? Those are a few of the questions to address in the application. But really, the application is easy — just like the best mobile apps should be — and consists of just eight questions about your idea, how much it would cost, what’s already done and who you are/who you know who’ll help you succeed.

The application process opened today, Aug. 29, and runs through Sept. 10. Sounds like a good use of the Labor Day weekend (in the U.S. at least this is a holiday, but the News Challenge is open to anyone, anywhere). For more background, read the FAQ.

You can follow along on the ideas submitted so far on the News Challenge Tumblr. That’s also where the application form is. For more background, read about this challenge here.

Winners will be announced in early 2013. The winners from the second round, on Data, are expected to be named in mid-September.

Good luck!

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Journalists already on the job, both recent grads and lifers, don’t have to feel left out. Here’s a chance to bone up on your data analysis skills, learn more about tracking congress, and learn other skills to make you a better reporter and investigator. Best of all: The training is tailored specifically to journalists, including to their budget — which is to say, it’s free.

The Sunlight Foundation launched a series of online training courses, known collectively as Sunlight Academy, this month to help reporters better master their craft, with a heavy focus on watchdog tools and tips. They also have several politics related modules that can help track the presidential and other election campaigns as we head into the last few months before November.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

In a step away from the traditional topic landing page, The Washington Post is using a layout called “The Grid” to collect the latest coverage around the Republican National Convention.

The Grid features, as you may have guessed, a grid of content that includes a stream of articles, listing of events, tweets, photos and video. When you first land on the grid, you see editor’s picks, but you can filter down by news organization, politician, delegate and content type. There’s a live listing of latest headlines and a chat  component for readers to weigh in. At certain times, they were also streaming live events using a YouTube live player. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

“When a user lands on a page, you have three to five seconds to make your impression and convince them to stay,” explained Rob Weatherhead, head of digital operations of MediaCom. “So make your content easily view-able in length, and sign-post it with sub-headings and bullets, so that readers can understand the key points you are making. Long, wordy paragraphs and a lack of sections can turn people off. Readers need to pick out the key topics and be enticed to read more.”

To read more, check out 4 Lessons for Writing in the Digital Age.

This article is an exclusive feature for Mediabistro 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.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Maybe everyone is more systematic than I am, but my Likes are pretty arbitrary. I’m calculated about a lot of things, but my commenting is pretty arbitrary, too.

Two things to healthily recognize here: “Liking” isn’t unvaluable to a news org, and neither is commenting. We can measure some value with those statistics and participate in a “Like science.” At the same time, measurement of engagement on something like Facebook may be inexact when you’re looking at all kinds of journalistic impact. (See good discussion on better measuring journalism’s impact here.)

Putting some of that conversation aside, if your journalistic meat doesn’t lay in Facebook’s garden, my gut is you want your audience to stay awhile on the content on your site. For whatever reason or combination of reasons—financial or philosophical.

If that’s you, here’s a good question worth considering: How do you share visually on Facebook and additionally draw in website traffic?

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Why #mobile for #newschallenge? There are 6B mobile devices worldwide & they’re much more than just phones kng.ht/QyoJTK

— Knight Foundation (@knightfdn) August 15, 2012

Shortly after recently announcing the theme of  this year’s third News Challenge installment  – “mobile” — the Knight Foundation tweeted an impressive stat backing up reasoning for its choice: there are 6 billion mobile devices worldwide.

Billion. With a “B.”

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

So when I say news design, I’m not talking about fonts and colors, though that’s certainly part of it. I’m talking consumer design. I’m talking how it functions and how the various parts connect. The folks at Medium are talking about that, too. From their about page (emphasis added by me):

Still, some things haven’t evolved as much as we would have expected. Lots of services have successfully lowered the bar for sharing information, but there’s been less progress toward raising the quality of what’s produced. While it’s great that you can be a one-person media company, it’d be even better if there were more ways you could work with others. And in many ways, the web is still mimicking print concepts, while not even catching up to it in terms of layout, design, and clarity of experience.

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

This question came up this week when the editor of the Hanford Sentinel posted this on the organization’s Facebook wall:

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“Primarily, it gives you a leg up in terms of the contacts that you make,” the man behind the Maynard Institute’s “Journal-isms” column explained. “That’s how I got that first job in New Jersey. I was at the Society of Professional Journalists, they were having an induction ceremony, and the editor of the Star-Ledger came to the ceremony. We struck up a conversation, and that started me on the path to that first job. In fact, that’s also how my next job at the Post came about. They had a reporter call the journalism department at NYU and sort of say, ‘Who do you have?’”

Read the full interview in So What Do You Do, Richard Prince, Columnist for the Maynard Institute?

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

We all know that we are influenced in many, many ways — many of which we remain blissfully unaware of. Could typefaces be one of them? Could the mere selection of a typeface influence us to believe one thing rather than another? Could typefaces work some unseen magic? Or malefaction?
Don’t get me wrong. The underlying truth of the sentence “Gold has an atomic number of 79” is not dependent on the typeface in which it is written. The sentence is true regardless of whether it is displayed in Helvetica, Georgia or even the much-maligned Comic Sans. But are we more inclined to believe that gold has an atomic number of 79 if we read it in Georgia, the typeface of The New York Times online, rather than in Helvetica?

To test this, he wrote a post in which a script changed the typeface of an identical passage and then asked readers (apparently more than 45,000 of them) to take a quiz asking whether they believed it to be true. The fonts tested were Baskerville, Computer Modern, Georgia, Helvetica, Comic Sans and Trebuchet.
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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Blog posts are “smart with a bit of wit or humor, and they cater to people who are fanatically interested in that particular topic,” said managing editor Adam Pasick. And there’s a lot of dialogue between the print and online versions, so writing for the website just might earn you some brownie points for editors for the print version, as well.

For more info on pitching, read How To Pitch: NYMag.com.

This article is an exclusive feature for Mediabistro 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.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

So you win. Automatically. And can learn more stuff.

Also, if your tweet is the best, you get an entirely free course. In-person or online.

Anyone with a Twitter account who participates with a 140 character or less story about a teacher gets a $50 credit toward any Mediabistro course (they’ll DM you the promo code, which means you need to follow @Mediabistro, too). The top five best tweets get $100 credit toward any Mediabistro course. And again, the winner gets a free Mediabistro course. continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Check out BestVendor's infographic to learn more about the survey and see a few of their respondents' also-rans that didn't make the main list this time. Click the image to see the full size version.

In its survey due to be released Thursday, the New York-based start-up site aimed at connecting users with useful apps and software found not one of the top 25 most popular apps cited by the freelancers was a desktop-only program. Some of them have desktop components, but most were cloud-based apps or sites.

So what were the pack leaders? Well, if this were the Olympics, let’s just say Google would be the medal leader in this event, with seven of the top 25 apps the freelancers cited — more than a quarter of the list, including two of the top three. Yet, it didn’t take the No. 1 spot: File sharing and backup service Dropbox bested the big G for that honor.

Beyond file storage and email, several of the tools were directly related to the business aspects of working as a freelancer, with software to help manage projects, invoices, billing and budgeting.

To be fair, the demographics of the relatively small sample of freelancers surveyed about what software and apps they use to manage their work was skewed a bit: 44 percent worked in technology and digital media according to BestVendor. Also, primarily they were based in the U.S. and Europe. But this is still an interesting list of ideas for freelancers looking to add primarily free tools to their tool box.

In rank order, the 25 most popular freelancer tools are:
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But here’s a different twist on the relationship between the search giant and newspapers: Using a newspaper to drive advertisers to the search giant.

That’s what Google apparently hopes to achieve in its new ad, which Globe and Mail media reporter Steve Ladurantaye discovered in his paper and then tweeted. Or maybe the message to take away is the opposite, as Ladurantaye tweeted about the half-page ad: “An ad for Google ads in today’s Globe demonstrates the value of print ads, yes?”

Mashable follows up noting the ad apparently also ran in the National Post, another Canadian paper and Globe and Mail competitor.

(H/T Romenesko for catching this tweet.)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.