Nothing says more about your ability as a journalist than the content of your clips. The  published articles you submit to prospective employers can make or break your chances, and simply deciding which material to include can be a daunting challenge in itself. Fortunately, there are certain techniques that will help your writing portfolio stand out from the crowd.

Christy Karras, a veteran freelancer who has written for Time, Forbes Asia, and The New York Times told Mediabistro that she tends to choose stories she believes show off her writing and editing skills.

“That could be a deeply analytic magazine feature on the finances of a major city-state that shows my ability to digest complex information and write about it in an engaging way, it could be a news story on a crackdown in the Gulf that shows an editor how well sourced I am in an environment that might not be very friendly to journalists, or it could be a feature profile that I think displays some narrative chops,” she said. “It just depends on the message I’d like to get to the individual editor.”

For more, read 6 Tips for Submitting Freelance Writing Clips [Mediabistro AvantGuild subscription required]

– Nicholas Braun

The full version of this article is exclusively available to Mediabistro AvantGuild subscribers. If you’re not a member yet, register now for as little as $55 a year for access to hundreds of articles like this one, discounts on Mediabistro seminars and workshops, and all sorts of other bonuses.

The saga of WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning presents many questions for digital journalists. We Steal Secrets, a documentary directed by Alex Gibney and set for release  this May, deals with them all. You can watch a trailer here.

You should see the film — even if you think you’ve already heard all you need to know about Wikileaks, even if you’ve already made up your mind. It not only covers the creation of Wikileaks, the fall of Julian Assange as a hacker-god, but includes new interviews with Michael Hayden, former CIA director, and the woman who accused Assange of rape, among many other inside players. However, the most compelling part of the documentary is that it finally puts Bradley Manning in center stage and presents new questions about digital security, sources, and how we protect them.

I used to champion WikiLeaks, and I cringe to admit it, its founder. In a far off graduate school classroom, I even considered the idea that it was a sort of ‘journalistic’ enterprise. But now that Manning has been serving time as an enemy of the state and his trial approaches, I’m finding it hard to focus on anything but him, and the responsibilities publishers assume online, with information and with their sources. Read more

The New York Post is one of those papers that you should only read with a grain of salt. It’s pretty much a place where frat boys with a communications degree go to make ridiculous puns and silly headlines. It’s the kind of pick me up, like a GIF ridden Tumblr blog, you can turn to when you want to have a chuckle and get a lesson in how not to report the news.

That’s why it’s no surprise that they made a Photoshop composite on their cover this week. You should just assume that they all are. It’s the News Corp way.

But doesn’t it sort of make you feel good about what you do?

Show and Tell

Unless you’re job is to be funny, like the Post or Gawker, making composites for your homepage photo is not a practice you should partake in. The only thing you should be doing with photo editing software is adjusting levels or image sizes. Even the most innocent offenses, like getting rid of a fly away hair or removing something distracting from the background, can lead you down a dark and uneasy road. If the picture needs work, you need to go out and retake it. Or find another one to use.

The same rule applies when it comes to video. The FOX CT debacle of too much cleavage  in a Women’s History Month segment could easily happen online, too. We’re all busy, but take the time to edit and review content. What’s ‘funny’ to bored overnight editors amongst themselves will hardly be as well received in the real world. Just because we live in an onslaught of media doesn’t mean things can slip through the cracks.

Clicks and Engagement

Some have said that the new layout for the New York Times isn’t any good. Too much focus on making it readable, when other newspapers like The Daily Mail have been surviving with their completely unreadable homepage.

That’s because the Mail is a tabloid. Their strategy is to get clicks, and the more you have to click to get to the photos of someone doing something bad, the more “money” they make. Clicks and SEO are important. It’s all ingrained in our consciousness when we publish, but it should be left out of the planning and writing phase. The new layout for the Times is simply good strategy. As mobile and news pubs evolve, a focus on being readable should be at the heart of any good strategy, because that’s the business of news. Don’t get caught up in the hype. If the content is good, and accessible, they will come. You don’t need bad puns to get them. A good pun? That’s an entirely different story.

Have you spotted any other good fails on the web this week?

A group of 100 journalists, academics, software developers, business leaders, designers, non-profits and government representatives are gathered at a hotel in Tennessee this morning to talk about weaving stories and data in the first-ever Tapestry Conference.

NASHVILLE — ‘The Invention of Hugo Cabret’ is a children’s book by Brian Selznick that combines black and white charcoal photos and text to tell a story. And he doesn’t use your normal set of accompanying images like you’d see in most children’s books. Selznick’s images tell much of the story without words. The experience of reading it is integrated and undisrupted.

Hannah Fairfield, who does graphics at The Times, said this was part of the inspiration in creating Snow Fall, a narrative multimedia project that recently won two gold medals in the Society of News Design’s digital competition.

Many of the graphics in Snow Fall animate as a user scrolls down the page, meaning they only change the pace the reader chooses. The graphics don’t get in the way, they don’t distract, they’re not only supplemental to the story — they’re part of the story. They tell the story in a way that text alone couldn’t tell the story.  They’re “immersers” rather than interrupters.

Read more

There’s a new survey out that paints an interesting picture about how digital news consumers are getting their news. The survey, which was backed by The New York Times, gathered responses from 3,022 U.S. adults between the ages of 18 and 65 to understand the news sources users are accessing.

Of those adults surveyed, 85 percent were categorized as “news consumers” who access news multiple times per week.

According to a Poynter article on the survey, 53 percent of “digital news consumers” noted that they turn to Web-native sources, such as The Huffington Post, Yahoo News, or Drudge Report. Compare this to 43 percent of news consumers who said that they access “established news” organizations, such as The New York Times or CNN, to get their news.

Read more