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.

Want to increase the visibility of your press release? Once you hit “publish,” your news release is searchable on the Web. Boosting your Google search ranking and getting journalists to write about your news is a crucial skill for PR professionals.

Join Jason Chupick, VP of editorial news operations at MWW and founding editor of our very own PR Newser, for a one-hour webcast discussion on how to optimize your press releases. He’ll discuss simple hacks and strategies that will ensure that your news gets read. Learn how to choose the right keywords to bring your release to the top of search results, how to get the best quotes and how to use social media to amplify your voice. You’ll also have the opportunity to get answers to all your PR questions with Jason in this interactive webcast.

This session is scheduled for Wednesday, July 24 from 4-5pm ET. Sign up now to reserve your spot!

Hack to Flack is a monthly column by Lindsay Goldwert, a senior program executive at Hotwire, a global tech PR firm. Before she leapt to the dark side, Lindsay worked at the New York Daily News, ABCNews.com, CBSNews.com, CourtTV, Glamour and Redbook.

If there’s any profession that deserves a little TLC this month, it’s the print and online news business. Pink slips flew at the New York Daily News, buyouts reigned at the Post and the Village Voice imploded. The DOJ is breathing down the AP’s neck. Rumors are flying about layoffs at ESPN. I doubt there’s more than handful of newsrooms in the country where reporters and editors feel confident that their jobs, as they know them, will be there in 2014.

There’s been more than a few things written about how the PR industry needs to change in the face of the shrinking newsroom. But in a field that’s supposed to be built on “relationships,” I haven’t seen much empathy for the laid-off journalists. Strange, since we rely on their news judgment, good moods and spare moments to consider our stories and ideas for publication.

Consider what journalists do: They make it known that they’re interested in hearing about, say, new fitness apps. Then they get a deluge of emails from PR people who pitch them everything from fitness water, to fitness DVDs, to fitness instructors. “Maybe for a future story,” we say. That’s like you emailing your friends seeking a good housepainter and getting hundreds of responses for floor guys, electricians, roofers and custom closet makers “just in case.” That’s not good work — that’s telemarketing.

We all talk about “cutting through the noise.” Hail Mary pitches that only push your client’s agenda and don’t propose any real value to a reporter or editor are noise.

Here are some ways to make lives easier for journalists that can only benefit you and your clients in the end:

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PR industry experts are inundated with columns and advice about how clients should manage their personal brands. Much of that input is common sense: don’t get coked up and crash your Porsche, don’t beat your girlfriend and land in jail, don’t get drunk and start tweeting. Most of the public is able to avoid these situations. (Thanks, moms.)

Nevertheless, brands love spokespeople. Brands need spokespeople to provide that human element that connects with the complex psychology that is consumer behavior. From Donald Trump to Eva Longoria, personal branding is big business, and a dangerous one, because all humans are fallible. But if there were ever a control in the experiment of personal branding, it would be Tim Tebow. The guy is as clean as a bag of cotton balls.

In fact, Tim Tebow’s personal brand is so sterling that even without a job—he has yet to be picked up by an NFL team after being dropped by the New York Jets—his sponsors aren’t worried at all. ESPN, Nike, TiVo, FRS, Fox Sports and Jockey are all on board with whatever happens next in his career, even if it doesn’t include football. Those brands are even lining up to retain his services after he hangs up his cleats. That’s personal branding done well. But there is more to successful personal branding than avoiding mug shots and visiting children in the hospital.

There is authenticity. Tim Tebow lives according to the values he espouses regardless of what his handlers, agents and PR people do. Tim Tebow runs the Tim Tebow show (which is his life), and his fans adore him for it. In a parallel universe, Charlie Sheen fans feel the same way about his personal brand. For some reason, many PR experts struggle with this idea of authenticity. So do young celebrities like Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus; it’s hard to be authentic when you are still wrestling with who you are and the trappings of becoming an adult. Read more

Looking for a new job but getting frustrated? Are you trying to figure out who you need to talk to? What does a company really mean when they say they “work hard and play hard?”

In this episode of “Score That Job,” career expert, author and mediabistro editor Vicki Salemi sat down with Lori Rubinson of Lippe Taylor, a New York agency with clients like IKEA and Elizabeth Arden that focuses on women through public relations, advertising and social marketing.

>You may remember Lippe Taylor from an episode of “Cubes”: Cubes: Office Tour of PR Agency Lippe Taylor

Find out why they’re looking for someone who is creative, not “boring” nice and how you can “Score That Job.”

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

Current PR students and recent college grads: are you stressed about turning your great internships into a full-time entry-level gig? Do you embody the phrase “shameless self-promotion”? Are you an expert in all things social media? (Come on, you know you are.) If you answered “yes” to any of those three questions, then you may be an ideal candidate for Affect PR‘s “New York Job Project“–a program designed to simultaneously encourage talented applicants and promote the firm itself by “crowdsourcing” the hiring process.

This all started more than two years ago when Affect, a small-ish Manhattan firm, started the “New York Intern Project” because, according to president and founder Sandra Fathi, they were “having trouble attracting interns in one of the country’s most competitive markets.”

Applicants’ resumes often boasted of college gigs with brands like MTV, Def Jam and Glamour, but Affect wanted to find dedicated public relations professionals. Affect’s b2b (that’s “business to business”) services are crucial to the industry at large, but they’re also not quite as flashy as those big names–so Fathi created the intern project in order to “make [the internship] more attractive to people around the country.”

A quick look at 2011′s entries will tell you that the project worked better than expected.

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In what seems to be a combination PR stunt/staffing experiment, Pizza Hut announced that it will be choosing someone to fill its currently empty Social Media Manager of Greatness role (what, no ninjas?) at the upcoming South by Southwest Festival in a very…unconventional way.

In honor of the 140-character Twitter feed that the lucky winner will run, company reps will give applicants 140 seconds to perform what amounts to a personal “elevator pitch”, explaining exactly why they’re qualified to manage a brand with 166,000 followers and more than 10 million Facebook fans.

The chain’s PR director hopes to meet “the best and the brightest” among the thousands of media fanatics attending the festival. In explaining his team’s thinking, he says: “The time you have to tell a story, engage a customer or leave a lasting impression on someone socially has shrunk to seconds”–so he wants someone who can make his or her case in just over two minutes with nothing more than a smartphone and an acceptable ID.

Of course, hopefuls can apply for the position in more traditional ways as well, but who’d want to do that? Here’s the job description, redirected from the URL “BecauseImGreat” in case you missed the point.

So is anyone up for the challenge this Sunday at the Austin Hilton? And will there be perfume?

We’ve recently noticed a good deal of dialogue about the future of the press release. Some seem to feel that the press release–with its self-lauding and company-specific spin–is, for all intents and purposes, irrelevant in a media world that runs on in-the-minute social media. Others, however, feel that PR professionals may simply need to tweak the way they approach both the releases themselves and the journalists they pitch. We tend to find ourselves in the second camp.

Lisa Gerber of Big Leap makes some good points in her recent blog post on the subject. While she concedes that journalists are wary of PR-generated press releases because of potential bias, she still feels that writing them and putting them out there is worth it–assuming you have your finger on the pulse of the audience you want to reach and an understanding of what writers do and do not find newsworthy.

“…please, stop asking your PR agency to crank out another news release on the upgrade of your manufacturing equipment; something in which only your mother and your CEO will take interest…”

Amen! The more spammy/niche/look-what-we-can-do information you send, the less likely writers and editors are to pay attention when you send them something that’s actually relevant to their audience.

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Looking for a new job in PR? Are you feeling bruised and battered from pounding the pavement without results?

“Score That Job” is a new show from mediabistroTV that will guide you through the never ending maze of online resumes, emails to nowhere and phone calls that go unanswered. Join career expert, author and mediabistro editor Vicki Salemi as she gives you the inside scoop on how to “Score That Job.”

In this episode, Vicki finds out what it takes to get hired at New York PR shop, Rubenstein.

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

You know that saying about the cobbler’s children — they have no shoes. PRs spend so much time promoting their clients sometimes they forget about their personal brands.

Sure, you’re on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook. Your info is up-to-date. Your resumé is filled with error-free copy. But these days, there’s more to personal branding than that.

We asked Jaunique Sealey to share a few tips to help you take your personal brand to the next level. Sealey is an independent consultant who works with brands around the world, and is the author of Piece of the Fame: Rockstar Social Media Marketing for Everyone.

Remember: You don’t need to be actively looking for a job to put your best foot forward. Click through for more.

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