If our recent Cubes episode giving you an insider’s look at Dow Jones and The Wall Street Journal made you think about working there, here’s your chance to find out how to make that happen.

Vicki Salemi, mediabistro’s very own career expert, author and editor sits down with Meredith Lubitz, vice president of Talent Acquisition at Dow Jones to hear what it takes to go from candidate to employee.

A couple of hints? Who you are outside the office is just as important as who you are inside. So tighten up that social media presence. They want to know what you’re saying to the world.

You can view our other MediabistroTV productions on our YouTube Channel.

Unlike most divorces, Dow Jones, the home of the Wall Street Journal, got to keep its space in the Midtown Manhattan News Corporation building after the parent company split into separate print and broadcasting units. The publishing arm, housing WSJ, kept the News Corporation name while the broadcast and entertainment part now calls itself 21st Century Fox.

Hosted by Wendy Bounds,Wall Street Journal Editor and host of WSJ’s video offering “Lunch Break,” the kids at mediabistroTV got to see the legendary standing receptionists, drew inspiration in the hallway of Pulitzer Prizes and tried not to end up as gossip fodder on the twitter page of the lobby’s chandelier.

You can view our other MediabistroTV productions on our YouTube Channel.

By now you’ve probably heard the unfortunate news that the entire photography staff was laid off by the Chicago Sun-Times last week. Well, one of the photojournalists has decided to share his life through his iPhone, as mentioned on JimRomenesko.

Rob Hart writes in his Tumblr account, “Rob Hart was replaced with a reporter with an iPhone, so he is documenting his new life with an iPhone, but with the eye of a photojournalist trained in storytelling.”

The freelance photojournalist and adjunct faculty member of photojournalism at the Medill School of Journalism posted his first photo of a zig zag carpet design. The caption read: “Zero hour. Carpet on the 14th floor of the Holiday Inn where 28 Sun-Times photographers lost their jobs.”

Throughout the past several days, in true storytelling form, he was able to witness his daughter taking some of her first steps, return to class at Medill, and reminisce good times at the Billy Goat Tavern during “hour 1″ of this new chapter.

How did an 18-year-old college student in Maryland gain the trust of and get access to TV executives and anchors in New York? “By posting 10 or 15 posts a day meant that the industry knew it was a reliable consistent source,” says Brian Stelter, creator of TVNewser and now a media reporter for the New York Times and author of the just released book “Top of the Morning.”

As he neared graduation, Stelter had to make a choice: work in TV news, or cover it.

• Part I: Stelter on Being Matt Lauer’s “nemesis”

Ok, so it was announced a year ago, but details about the centralized copy desk that McClatchy is setting up at the Sacramento Bee are finally emerging.

A bargaining update from the Bee Guild says that McClatchy will begin assembling the center mid-year and hopes to be up and running by the end of 2013.

The new center may handle more than just McClatchy’s California papers, the Guild reports. “The new copy center is being conceived to handle additional products beyond the Sacramento and Modesto Bee newspapers. This could include contract work for third-party publications (outside McClatchy) as well as other McClatchy papers.”

The Guild also discussed a company proposal to cut the hours of an unlimited number of full-time staffers, and the company’s policies on part-timers freelancing for other publications. “The company said this allows more ‘flexibility’ to manage cost cutting by being able to save some money short of laying people off,” the Guild wrote.

The newsroom at the Strib in Minneapolis began contract negotiations this week in preparation for their current contract expiring Jan 31, 2013.

The union presented its first proposal Wednesday, which includes a proposed 5% extra pay for night shifts, holidays separate from paid time off, a limit to the number of temps the company can use, and a few other requests. The proposal doesn’t ask for a raise, which is interesting since the guild notes that covered workers haven’t received a raise in 4.5 years.

Guild co-chair Janet Moore read this statement at the negotiating table Wednesday:

We don’t expect to live like kings, we simply want to earn a decent standard of living to support our families.

Four previous go-arounds in the past six years at tables such as this, and nearly 30 years in this profession, have taught me a few truths. Among them:

If you do not offer a competitive match on your 401k plan, you will not recruit the talent necessary to lift this organization above and beyond its brethren.

If you do not treat your employees with respect and dignity, both financially and culturally, a contagion will eat away at the underpinnings of your organization. Good people will continue to leave. Friends, you are at a critical stage.

If you do not engage in a progressive, positive, relationship with your employees in the Guild, all the best-laid plans for the future will likely founder.

You have the opportunity in the weeks to start anew and craft such a relationship — where we join together to challenge an uncertain, but potentially invigorating, future.

Negotiations continue Jan. 8.

The New York Times is hoping to negotiate separate contracts for employees depending on which division of the newspaper they work for, according to a memo obtained by Jim Romenesko.

The union says that Times management has “inexplicably dropped a bomb” on the negotiation process after months of “incremental progress” toward one contract.

“By demanding to negotiate two separate contracts, management may have invalidated all the work previously done in subcommittee over nearly 17 months, including tentative agreements on job descriptions, the workweek, casual and temporary workers – in total, 21 contractual issues that had seemingly been settled,” the memo said. “It also means that the Guild may have to set up a separate negotiating committee for a new digital-only contract. This wrench in the proceedings came after the company negotiators blamed the Guild for lack of progress earlier in the talks.”

New York guild president Bill O’Meara said that he believes the Times is pushing to declare impasse, after which it can impose any contract it wants (which would currently include a pension freeze, a longer workweek, and other conditions).

The declaration by Times management that the union would have to negotiate two separate contracts also means that the Guild is firing back: it plans to file grievances over digital employees doing the work of print, something it had overlooked in the past “because of its belief that both sides were working toward one contract.”

The next few months of negotiations will certainly be interesting ones…

The New Orleans Times-Picayune is losing a large chunk of its staff and may cease daily publication, the New York Times reported late last night.

Owner Advance Publications/Newhouse Newspapers may be following the Ann Arbor model, in which it transformed the Ann Arbor News from a print to a primarily web-focused publication, cutting staff in the process.

Editor Jim Amoss is said to be leaving after assisting with the transition. Also departing will be managing editors Peter Kovacs and Dan Shea.

Gambit, a local NOLA weekly, has more from shocked employees: “All employees with whom Gambit spoke — even longtime senior writers and editors — said they learned of their fates from The New York Times report….’I had to find this out by Twitter,’ said [a reporter]. ‘Do I go in to the office tomorrow? Do I even have a job to go in to tomorrow? I don’t know. No one has called me. No one has said anything.’”

Also according to Gambit, the layoffs are likely to target at least 50 reporters, bringing the newsroom staff down by one third. The remainder will likely take salary cuts and become bloggers.

If the Times-Picayune owners are truly emulating the Ann Arbor model, the cuts are likely to be deeper than just those 50. When the Ann Arbor News closed, about 10 percent of the 274 employees got jobs at the new AnnArbor.com.

Name a reporter at USA Today with a powerful brand–a columnist or blogger you follow.

You probably can’t, says Jay Rosen. “USA Today has always been an editor’s paper—very digestible news is the big idea—not a home for writers or a school for sensibility.” But new president and publisher Larry Kramer says that that time is over.

“We really can’t survive if all we do is commodity journalism. We have to do things that… we say things differently, we help people understand things,” he told Howard Kurtz on CNN. “I’d like us to be more complete and more outspoken in several areas, including stories about the impact of actions by government and business,” he told Politico’s Dylan Byers. ” “What we need here is what we haven’t had before — a lot of strong voices…Here, it was just the USA Today brand by definition…” he told Marketwatch’s Jon Friedman.

He also said that he plans to hire “unique voices”–Kramer’s way of adding value in a supersaturated media landscape. Rosen says the thought is good, but: “Overthrowing that approach isn’t as simple as hiring a few bloggers or loosening the rules for writers. We’re talking about ideological change within an occupation that sees itself as having no ideology. That’s… tricky. And there’s no guarantee that people who excelled at the old way will be any good at the new.”

USA Today announced another round of furloughs last month, the fourth in four years. Parent company Gannett Co. is still profitable, but its profits have fallen far and its revenue has declined for five straight years.

Earlier this week, sister blog 10,000 Words wrote about a brand-new site that allows journalists to easily gather their clips in one place without any fuss, without having to know the first thing about coding, and without any design knowledge.

I got an invite code to check Pressfolios out (it’s currently in closed beta, but co-founder Marc Samson tells me that people aren’t having to wait too long to get their invite codes).

Here’s how it works (with help from Pressfolios’ own Tumblr).

After signing up, you can add stories simply by pasting their URLs into the site.

The site automatically determines the headline, news outlet, and image associated with the story. Ok, sometimes it gets the news outlet wrong. But it takes about five seconds to manually edit it. It also seemed to get the wrong photo or no photo for most of the stories I uploaded. But changing the photo is surprisingly easy–I did it in about three clicks without leaving the site. (I imagined I’d have to click on the article, download the image to my hard drive, and re-upload it to Pressfolios. Luckily, this isn’t the case.)

The site doesn’t yet get the date from the story, which is unfortunate, because it has to be manually entered each time. I assume this is on Pressfolio’s punch list of things to fix before the site goes into open beta.

Once you’ve added a few stories you can arrange them:

And you can tag them, which will create separate tabs on your main Portfolio page. You can also create an About page (which is also showing its beta-ness in that some of the fields that you can fill in on your profile don’t actually display anywhere on the public-facing site).

Here’s what it looks like when you’re done:

Neat, yeah?

If you’re logged in, you can also download a PDF of each clip from your Dashboard, a handy option.

So here’s what the site can’t do yet. It can’t batch-import clips. Freelance marketplace Contently, believe it or not, will find what it thinks are all of your clips from a given site in one go. (Contently’s mission is not to provide journalist portfolios–that’s just a side benefit of membership there–so it may not be surprising that for now, the visual appeal of Contently’s portfolios is a bit lacking.)

You also can’t change the layout of the portfolio. Everyone’s looks the same: square images, white background, etc. It doesn’t hurt that this is an attractive look, but design is one of the improvements Samson notes his company is working on. I’d like to see an array of pre-designed templates for users to choose from, as well as the option to change the colors of said templates. Best might be something that presented more text–though humans are a visual species, I suspect editors really do want to read a prospective journalist’s clips, not just look at how pretty they are.

So, okay, Pressfolios is clearly still a beta product.

BUT. With all that said. The old way of making a portfolio site sucked. Either you just pasted text links, as do most of my freelance colleagues, or you had to manually cut and paste headlines, blurbs, links, and possibly images. I’m not gonna lie. It didn’t take forever, even if you knew no HTML. But it wasn’t fun either.

If Pressfolios rockets out of beta with these minor issues fixed, it might not change the world. But it will make a lot of journalists’ lives easier. And isn’t that good enough?

Pressfolios is currently free; once out of beta, the core features will remain free, Samson says. Go sign up for an invite code and try it out for yourself.