Managers may think the biggest things employees want from them are pay raises, promotions… and pay raises. And did I mention pay raises?

Sure, raises and promotions make happy workers, but there are other ways you can meet the needs of your direct reports—as well as build morale, loyalty, and productivity—without having to change a budget or a business card. Below, workplace experts weigh in on the four things employees most want and value from their bosses, and the positive ways bosses can respond.

1. Appreciation

When it comes to what employees want from a boss, appreciation is number one. Leadership consultant Roxana Hewertson, CEO of the Highland Consulting Group, says appreciation drives self-esteem, happiness and loyalty.

“The number one difference between people who love their work and people who don’t is the degree of appreciation they receive from their boss and their peers,” says Hewertson.

Such appreciation can take the form of an email or a personal visit—the more public it is, the better. At the lower end of the effort scale, “just pay solid attention to your people, answer their questions, be accessible and say a heartfelt ‘thank you’ as often as possible,” Hewertson says.

Morgan Norman, co-founder and former CEO of a social performance tool called WorkSimple, says employers can also praise workers through social networks, blog posts or company newsletters. “Internally, this helps an employee to feel appreciated by an organization,” says Norman. “Externally, everyone else sees what a great job the worker did, which creates a healthy competition.”

But realize some expressions are more meaningful than others. Anja Schuetz, people management coach and author of Poker Cards for Managers, suggests saying a formal “thank you” instead of a more casual “thanks,” and elaborating on the specific reasons behind the appreciation.

She also recommends managers often ask their staff “what do you think?” even if a decision has already been made. “It really boosts people’s confidence and makes them feel valued and included in the decision-making process,” Schuetz says.

2. Trust

Jennifer Hancock, who’s working on a book about humanism in the business world, says trust is also a key factor in strengthening your relationship with your workers. “Trust your employees. Take their advice seriously. Give them some space to do their job and empower them to bring problems to you,” she says.

“This approach makes a huge difference in whether or not your employees feel valued.”

Halley Bock, CEO and president of Fierce, Inc., a leadership development and training company, says there’s an overall lack of trust in organizations, “and employers need to earn that back.” To do that, Bock suggested “having an open-door policy, welcoming questions and allowing people to have insight into the decision-making process.”

Trust is also developed when managers encourage independent responsibility, but this doesn’t mean letting employees make every decision by themselves.

“People are only truly empowered when they understand which decisions are theirs to make, which decisions need to be jointly made and which decisions should be passed along to others,” says Bock. “Provide clear delegation guidelines, creating roadmaps for professional development and opportunities for employees to request more responsibility.”

3. Honest Communication

Just like in a personal relationship, good communication can enhance the experience, and bad communication can kill it.

“When employees have a voice, they feel as though they are part of a team. And, as a result, they become more engaged,” says Bock, who suggests regularly inviting team members around a table to discuss workplace matters and to highlight those who’ve made a positive difference.

“When employees have opinions, and they are heard and acknowledged, they are more productive, engaged and connected to their organization,” Bock says.

Remember this is about honest communication—don’t think you can play your employees like violins.

Hancock breaks it down: “Be ethical. Be honest. Don’t lie. Be responsible. If you don’t know something, it’s okay to admit it—just make it your responsibility to find out the answer. Don’t say you will do something and then not do it. If you have bad news, share it,” she says. “Your team can’t support you and help you solve problems effectively if you aren’t honest about what’s going on.”

4. Understanding

One of the biggest staff complaints is that a manager just doesn’t understand what’s really going on or how things get done. Joel Gross, founder and CEO of Coalition Technologies, a Web design and marketing firm, says his staff just wants him to understand how complicated it is for them to do their job. “They want me to realize they have to follow a specific process in order to achieve the desired result.”

If feasible, take the time to learn what each member of your staff does, the tools they use, and the keys to their success. It’s okay not to know the details—but ask lots of questions. Make them the “experts.”

Understanding your employees also means taking their whole lives into account. “Everyone who works for you is a real-life human being. They have their own issues and problems, and you need to be compassionate,” says Hancock.

“If you feel compassion for your employees, you will treat them better and come up with better management solutions to help your employees succeed. They aren’t just there to support you. You’re there to support them, as well.”

One good way to show understanding and support is to develop a reasonable work-from-home schedule, or a relaxed seasonal schedule. Even half-day summer Fridays can make a big difference in how staffers feel about their employer—and you.

Melissa Harris-Perry is no journalist. She respects them, she appreciates them, she depends at least partly on their handicraft, but she’s pretty candid about not having a desire to be an on-the-ground reporter or investigative newshound. The role she’s carved in the media pantheon, she clarifies, is offering perspective on the news stories that journalists produce. “I’m an analyst and an academic, and my goal is to take information and understand it, even while I bring data and evidence to bear and engage people who disagree with me in order to test those arguments,” she explains.

That and she hosts an eponymous cable TV show that confronts those little conversational topics like race, gender and politics with aplomb and just a twinge of unapologetic controversy, highlighted in the open letter she wrote to WaPo columnist George Will about his criticism of Americans’ racial empathies for President Obama. Here, the Tulane University professor and author of Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America — who pens a column of the same name for The Nation — talks the upcoming election and the one “presidential” issue she wants thrown off the table for good.

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Name: Melissa Harris-Perry
Position: Author, professor, columnist and host of MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry
Resume: Professor of political science at University of Chicago (1999-2005), politics and African-American studies at Princeton (2006-2010) and, currently, political science at Tulane University, where she serves as founding director of the Anna Julia Cooper Project on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South. Author of Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought (2004) and Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America (2011). Monthly columnist for The Nation and frequent TV and radio commentator. Debuted Melissa Harris-Perry on MSNBC in February 2012.
Birthdate: October 2
Hometown: New Orleans
Education: B.A. in English from Wake Forest and a Ph.D. in political science from Duke; studied theology at Union Theological Seminary in New York
Marital status: Married
Media idols: Bill Moyers, Gwen Ifill and Rachel Maddow
Favorite TV shows: House Hunters and Parks and Recreation
Guilty pleasures: HGTV and baking
Last book read: Assata: An Autobiography of Assata Shakur
Twitter handle: @MHarrisPerry

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There’s been a lot of talk about the independent or undecided voter. Are people really undecided at this point, and how much do you think news and media can change their votes?
That’s funny you ask. That’s my lede for Saturday morning: Are people actually undecided? When there are clear differences and when we’re less than a month out with two very different candidates in a hotly contested election where there’s been a great deal of information over the past year, there aren’t really undecided voters in terms of preferences. There are just voters who haven’t decided whether they’re going to show up or not. Voting is always sort of a two-stage process: Do I care enough to go through the hassle of voting and, once I’ve decided to vote, have I made a decision about which candidate I will support?

One way to think of it is undecided voters are probably mostly going to support an incumbent so, when I say they’re going to support President Obama, it isn’t because he’s President Obama per se. I just mean that incumbents tend to get those voters. But the real question is: Is this election sufficiently interesting, and are barriers too high for them to end up in the electorate? The only undecided voters that the candidates care about are the ones that live in swing states, and there’s no way that those voters don’t have sufficient information to show up for one candidate or the other.

“I have never once had someone from this network come to me and have a conversation about ratings, good or bad.”

Having a show with your name on it makes you a brand. Who decides the direction of the show, and how do you balance the network’s desire for ratings with your own vision?
I have never once had someone from this network come to me and have a conversation about ratings, good or bad. No one. Maybe they’re talking to my executive producer, and that’s completely possible. But none of them have ever walked in here and said, “You know what? You cannot do that because of the ratings” or “Please do that more because of the ratings.” I will say that I have been completely clear, to the point of being fanatical, that my staff is not to share with me ratings information. I don’t ever want to know because, for me, the point of doing this show is not about the ratings. But I can tell when it’s not been a good weekend just by looking at the staff the next week. It’s kind of like after President Obama had that bad showing in the debates, like you just know that nobody was walking around happy in [Obama campaign quarters] OFA 2012. So, I can kind of tell if I had a week that wasn’t great because people are kind of down but, if I had a week that’s great, people are in there bouncing around.

The editorial decisions for this show, even with my name on it, are made collectively between me, the senior producer, the executive producer and the segment producers. I have veto power and I have been known to veto whole ideas, but I’ve also given my segment producers a great deal of latitude because I trust them. They’re smart, they’re capable, they have great vision. Sometimes what we’ve done has fallen flat — I don’t know if it’s fallen flat in terms of ratings but I’ll come off like, ‘I don’t want to talk about that topic again’ — and other times I’ll come off the set feeling like ‘this is the whole reason I’m doing this show.’

As MSNBC continues a progressive shift in its programming, do you hear from news viewers who pine for the days of unbiased news? How do you think cable networks’ moving away from the “objective” center has affected the political process?
I not only sometimes hear viewers’ angst about wanting journalistic reporting, I feel it myself as somebody consuming the news. I report and analyze what’s going on in the news, but I also want to know what’s happening in the world. For me, that angst is primarily about newspapers. I live in New Orleans, where we’ve lost our daily newspaper and don’t have reporters on the beat in our neighborhoods. That’s a story repeated over and over again across America. So, when I think about what’s lost, I tend to not think about it in terms of television news, which I never particularly watched, but print journalism. If MSNBC were interested in hiring a journalist to do on-air investigative work, that would be great and I would watch that. But it wouldn’t have anything to do with what I do.

NEXT >> So What Do You Do, Roland Martin, CNN Contributor and Host of TV One’s Washington Watch?

I think the biggest cost is the one that Chris Hayes talks about in his book, Twilight of the Elites, that there’s an absence of one place or person or thing that if it says it, you can believe it, whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, liberal or conservative. That is bad for democracy because there have to be some spaces where we can say, ‘I believe that because it’s reported by that person.’ I talked about this last year at Christmas time. If you remember “Yes Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus,” it was the editor of the paper who wrote that letter. Who could now write that letter? Not me. Not Bill O’Reilly. I mean, who could convince you if you were a little kid that there is a Santa Claus? Nobody, because there’s not any one source that we all trust.

There was a clear difference between the tone and fluidity of the presidential debate under Jim Lehrer and the vice presidential debate under Martha Raddatz. Who do you think was the better of the two?
I really enjoyed the vice presidential debate for a couple of reasons. For one, my best friend had just given birth about 10 minutes beforehand. I’d just been in the delivery room with her, and she and I were watching it together in the recovery room. Beyond that, there were things that I think made this debate better. They were physically sitting at the same table, and I think there’s something about that proximity, when people are sitting right next to one another, that creates a sense of engagement. But the other thing is you had the sense that both Biden and Ryan had come to play. They were prepared to be aggressive; they weren’t concerned with this sort of niceness by which they were going to be judged.

Jim Lehrer offered some willingness to engage, but I think Martha Raddatz’s expertise in foreign policy was as much on display as the vice presidential candidates’. I had a sense as a viewer of trusting her to direct the conversation in a substantive way. Not that Jim Lehrer’s not substantive — obviously, he’s got decades of substance behind him — but in this particular debate, he was far more removed and she was much more engaged.

“Some of our greatest presidents have been absolute dorks, and some of our most horrible presidents have been affable, lovely, engaging human beings.”

If you could take one issue off the table in this election, what would it be and why? What, in your opinion, is just white noise that’s distracting from real issues?
Style. Whether or not President Obama is cool or whether Mitt Romney is likable, I really do not care. I assume that Mitt Romney’s wife loves him and Barack Obama’s wife loves him, and they both can probably tell a funny joke when they want to. I mean, really, who cares about style? Some of our greatest presidents have been absolute dorks, and some of our most horrible presidents have been affable, lovely, engaging human beings. That’s not the business of politics.

The course you teach at Tulane, Black Women’s Political Activism, is surely a catalyst for your students to get involved. What do you think is the most pressing issue facing women today, and what can they do to affect change in that area?
I teach a lot of gender-based classes. This is one of my favorites, though. For women in general, I think there are two critical issues and they are linked to one another: one is the issue of poverty, economic security and economic justice, and the other is about reproductive rights. And of course, those things are linked. You cannot have economic justice unless you have control of your reproductive capacity. It just is not possible for women. At the same time, control of your reproductive destiny doesn’t matter much if you can’t feed yourself or your family.

NEXT >> So What Do You Do, Roland Martin, CNN Contributor and Host of TV One’s Washington Watch?

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Back in 2010, the powers-that-be at The Wall Street Journal herded a small group of tech masterminds into a windowless room in a crash, six-week project to create its iPad app. For David Ho, that time and the months of 16-hour days that followed as first editor was the hardest thing he had ever done professionally. “It was improving and holding the thing together when it was all new and wobbly,” he remembers. “It was more than a news-journalism-tech challenge. It felt like some crazy endurance race.”

Still, that’s not the biggest trial he’s faced. The father of a son with autism, Ho and his wife have navigated the emotional and sometimes exhausting dichotomy of questioning and understanding at the same time. When he weighs the task of shaping and molding readable — even enjoyable — material for WSJ‘s tablet and iPad edition against that kind of challenge, the former seems a lot less daunting.

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Name: David Ho
Position: Editor of mobile, tablets and emerging technology at The Wall Street Journal and lead editor of its iPad and tablet edition
Resume: Went from college editor to producer/programmer on the original WSJ.com production team. Joined national staff at the AP Washington bureau and cited by the Supreme Court in the 2000 presidential election decision. Served as AP’s national consumer affairs and telecom reporter. Returned to New York to cover tech, telecom and terrorism for Cox Newspapers; was laid off. Rejoined WSJ in 2009.
Hometown: Brooklyn, NY
Education: BA in journalism/BFA in creative writing, Brooklyn College, City University of New York
Marital status: Married
Media idol: Benjamin Franklin
Favorite TV shows: “Months ago, it was Game of Thrones. At the moment, my favorite TV time is revisiting Star Blazers with my 8-year-old son.”
Guilty pleasure: Trader Joe’s baked onion rings
Last book read: Moby Dick
Twitter handle: @davidho

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The WSJ was one of the first major newspapers to develop an iPad app, and it was met with both cheers and jeers. What did that process teach you about what people want in a technology?
The best technology is invisible. It doesn’t call attention to itself. It doesn’t get in the way of the experience. It just works. That’s why books and newspapers are great tech. I like to think of a newspaper — the actual paper kind — as a highly refined and still very effective mobile news technology. And that has lessons for mobile today if you think about where and when and how people consume news. People like technology that’s clean, simple and intuitive.

Not everyone agrees with this, but I also think people should have options. One of the reasons people like our app is that there are many ways to navigate and explore the news. There are distinct styles for reading news and a good app allows for that. But my number one rule for mobile and tablets is do not annoy. It’s so easy to piss people off on a mobile device, and the threshold for what people will put up with before they move on is very low. You know all the technology that’s supposed to make our lives easier, but winds up making things more complicated and frustrating? That’s what you have to fight against.

“My number one rule for mobile and tablets is do not annoy.”

Besides photos, which types of stories would you say translate particularly well on a tablet?
You mean other than people with iPads wanting to read news about iPads? Tablets are great for video, like streaming breaking news. They shine when it comes to interactive storytelling. Touch screens allow for a very intimate experience, exploring the news with your fingers and tapping things like 360-degree photos with gyro control. Those can be pretty cool.

A quote from you: “Technology is easy. Journalism is hard.” Explain.
This one gets me in trouble with my developer friends. To be clear, this is not some death match between writing code and writing news. And, to be really clear, the Journal has a kick-ass mobile tech team that works super hard. OK, I should be safe now. That line is something I’ve said to journalists worried what new technology is doing to their jobs and how they can keep up. My take is if you can bang out 200 words in 10 minutes, learning to shoot and share video with your iPhone isn’t going to kill you. All this blogging, Twitter, multimedia reporting with smartphones, none of it is harder than the bread and butter skills reporters already have: interviewing, accuracy, clarity, speed, news judgment. But here’s my tip: Technology is painful when it’s mandatory, when skills are pushed on people. You beat that by getting in front of it, by making it fun, like a part of your life. Edit together video of family and pets first, and post it somewhere. Do it for yourself. Then when you have to do it for work, it’s not all stressful.

Rupert Murdoch’s The Daily seems to be struggling a bit with some of the initial star reporters and editors already leaving. How closely have you been watching what The Daily is doing? What do you think they’ve done correctly and possibly missed the mark on?
I think everyone involved in tablet and mobile news watches The Daily. It’s this bold experiment: a brand new news organization created from scratch. How often do you see that these days? The Daily pioneered a lot of ways to deliver news on tablets. They’ve been brave and pretty aggressive in embracing the technology, especially when it comes to graphics and layout and design. And they’ve done great things with touch control. I’m not sitting in their office, so hard for me to talk about how’re they’re doing or what works or doesn’t work for them.

NEXT >> So What Do You Do, Jessica Bennett, Executive Editor of Tumblr’s Storyboard?

From the outside, I do see one challenge for everyone doing this is knowing tablet audiences well, because they’re changing so fast. We’ve gone from early adopter to mainstream consumer electronics in no time. It does look like The Daily is trying to make their production process easier. They dropped their landscape view not long ago. That I get. Supporting two tablet rotations all the time is a lot of work. It’s tough to put out a tablet issue every day. It’s hard when you’re actually building and editing and curating and designing the thing, and not just regurgitating news feeds into randomized templates. There are so many variables: behavior on WiFi, behavior on 3G, offline, online, making it work in portrait, making it work in landscape, making it fit different size screens.

“The mouse is dead. It just doesn’t know it’s been caught in a better mousetrap.”

What type of training does a journalist need to snag a job like yours? And, because the field is still emerging, how does one even go about finding these job openings?
Not sure what training I need to snag a job like mine. I’m the first one in this job here and it’s kind of evolved around me. But I’ve hired a few mobile editors since this all started, so I can tell you what helps. I can teach someone HTML basics in an hour but a lot of news skills only come with experience. I love it when folks can do Photoshop and the like, but more than any one kind of expertise, it’s important to have a general and deep technology comfort level and interest. This is all moving so fast, you have to adapt daily, hourly. It’s as much about making news decisions as it is troubleshooting tech problems. You need to be able to talk to developers as much as you talk to reporters and editors. You need a foot in each world, editorial and technology. And there’s the business side too, so I guess you need a third foot. A big thing: Gather up a few smartphones and tablets and use them, use them, use them until your fingers hurt.

What do you think will be the next big product or phenomenon to impact the media business?
The mouse is dead. It just doesn’t know it’s been caught in a better mousetrap. I’ve been waiting for a chance to say that. Technology is becoming much more intimate, much more an extension of ourselves. There’s less hardware in between us and what we experience. Touch screens are just the beginning. The seeds are out there now: voice control, motion gesture control, eye tracking. I think there’s a lot of potential in augmented reality. Combine that with the Google glasses project and some other prototypes and you can see this future where interacting with media will be constant, literally in your face.

NEXT >> So What Do You Do, Jessica Bennett, Executive Editor of Tumblr’s Storyboard?

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On October 15, Paperless Post will defy its name and add a print component: Paper by Paperless Post. Users will be able to mix and match digital with hard copy sending, for example, one batch of personally designed holiday cards electronically and ordering another that can then be sent via USPS. Or, they can create and then print the whole lot of wedding or party invitations.

It’s the latest turn for a service that made its first profit in the fall of 2010 and continues to flourish three years after launch. Mediabistro recently spoke with co-founder Alexa Hirschfeld about this fast-moving entrepreneurial journey and the real reason so many of her fellow Harvard alums find big business success.

Your brother James, while still at Harvard, presented you with the idea for Paperless Post. What was your initial reaction? And did you have any major initial concerns?
My initial reaction was I specifically said, ‘I think people will use it, but I’m not sure they’ll pay for it.’ Then we got into it argumentatively, and I was listening to him argue about not just the idea but him as the creative subtext of this potential product.

It became clear that to create this product, he would be the right person to do it. Not everybody could envision what it looks like. And what it looks like is a really important part of why it would be valuable to users. When we were growing up, James was very artistic with painting and sculpture. Friends of my mom would see his work and say, ‘Oh my God, this is so amazing.’ I was thinking it would be like that but on a potentially highly-distributed platform. And I totally got into it. But at first, it was hard for me because I didn’t see it the way he did.

“It’s very, very hard to build something from scratch — even harder when you don’t have users yet.”

The two of you spent Memorial Day weekend in 2007 hashing out a business plan and then the next two years going through what you have described as a “really painful” gestation period. What were some of the reasons for that?
It was painful because we were just going on our own beliefs. The data we had was from the kind of people that you trust 100 percent. But it’s very, very hard to build something from scratch — even harder when you don’t have users yet. We had to implement the product before we had users. After we had users, everything changed. Now, it’s difficult in different ways, but I really love it. That Memorial Day weekend, we were in our parents’ living room in the city. Everybody else was somewhere like the beach, the country. It was really hot, and he had just finished his second year at Harvard.

The beta launch in the fall of 2008 caught on with some high-profile users, like Condoleeza Rice. How did you get her and other recognizable users to jump onto Paperless Post?
We required people to have received an invitation to be able to register. It was a process that was really actively pushing people out of the system. That’s not the reason we acquired a user like her, but she came through another gatekeeper, which is pretty much how all of our users come to us. The invites went through our closed circle of Harvard friends initially, because we were both really paranoid. We had competitors then, and we were trying to smooth out the process of the workflow. We handed out user names and passwords very carefully back then, and Rice was maybe two or three degrees separated from someone we knew at the school.

You personally made the transition in 2009 from working as an assistant for Katie Couric at CBS News to working full-time on the Paperless Post. What did you learn from working with her?
She is very smart and very effective. I worked for her for a year and a half, and I watched the way she does everything to make her job successful. It’s not just journalism, but also her ability to get interviews and ability to charm people. I respect her a lot, and that’s helped me in a lot of different operational capacities.

NEXT >> Hey, How’d You Get Everyone Buzzing About #codeyear, Zach Sims?

After three rounds of funding, Paperless Post became profitable just over a year after launch, which is a remarkable feat really. What were some of the keys to achieving that so quickly?
We started when the market crashed in 2008, and had a really painful experience of trying to raise money without a business model fully in place. So we had one, which is different than the one we have now. And I guess because we really started from a position of not selling ads and actually needing to get users to pay, we were able to hone in really quickly on where the value was. We read a lot of books on pricing and what the value was for our users. By December 2010, we had a year and a half of data on payments, and it became really clear. We stopped charging commissions on ticket sales, then it was stamps for postage, then it was coins that you paid per person, based on how fancy the document was. Like if you added an envelope liner or a colored envelope or stuff like that. And that kind of model grows geometrically. And just to be really clear, we were cash flow positive in that quarter, but we went back and re-invested that money in the company to make it grow faster.

“Everything changes once the race is on, once the product is launched.”

Much has been written about Harvard and how it prepares people for the business world. What advantages did attending that school provide you and James?
I think it’s really simple: It’s the people that you’re surrounded by when you go there. A good friend of mine started a company called Vostu, which for a while was the biggest gaming company in Brazil. He started it in 2006, and to see your friends, a person who is like you, start something like that. It’s inspiring, it makes you think, ‘Oh, we could do that too, probably, if we had a good idea.’ I was also in Mark Zuckerberg’s class. I hadn’t met him until recently, but he’s obviously a very smart, impressive person. Several people who work at Paperless Post are also people I knew at Harvard. I think it’s about whatever makes people driven. Those people are everywhere, but Harvard provided a model for that type of person that I’ve now met more in spades outside of school and in New York. Everybody who works at Paperless Post has that quality, and it’s really fun to work with those sorts of driven, passionate people.

You had a great quote in Fast Company: “Even if your product isn’t as perfect as you’d like, perfection in your hands isn’t relevant. You need to know what your consumer thinks.” Can you talk a bit about your own beta phase and how the product was shaped by initial users?
It’s sort of like a gun shooting off at the beginning of a race. Everything changes once the race is on, once the product is launched. You start getting all this info and data. And the weird thing is that the info and data is never what you expect. Although it’s rarely out of left field, it’s always much more honest and almost brutal in that way than what you’d think.

For example, our first product version did not include envelope liners. We had this one maroon option, and one of our first user emails was from someone who loved the service but felt the colors of her invitation did not match the color of the envelope liner. Sure enough, other people mentioned the same thing. That led to our first product customization and it doubled our revenue after we added it.

Hirschfeld’s tips for start-up success:
1. Believe in the product. “You have to keep believing and keep reassuring each other that what you’re building is not crazy, that it is something that other people are going to want, to help get you through this inevitably long process.”

2. Don’t focus on PR. “The more you try to pitch your story, the less you seem to get covered. But, when you do something that someone wants to track you down for, that’s when you get genuine coverage.”

3. Take awards and citations with a grain of salt. “I’ve never taken that stuff seriously. Often, those things don’t matter; what matters more is getting things done. Also, what scares me is that awards and positive write-ups seem like the kind of thing that make you think you’ve made it, which I would never think.”

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Richard Horgan is co-editor of FishbowlLA.

There are two standout qualities about the media whirlwind that is Tanika Ray: physically, it’s her signature — and covetable — mass of curly reddish hair. Professionally, it’s her dynamic, built-for-red-carpets personality, wielded at this year’s MTV Video Music Awards and Essence Music Festival. She’s in talks to cover similar events for Yahoo!, too. Interviewing, she says, is her thing, one of those naturally cultivated talents that have made her sought after for celebrity dirt-digging on Extra and snazzy interior design on HGTV shows.

Bypassing the typical J-school-to-journalism career route, the self-proclaimed Renaissance woman was a dancer and an actress before she just kind of pirouetted into hosting. “I’m not one of those people that has a five-year plan. I’m very go with the flow, very free-spirited,” Ray admits. “I was watching an interview on the red carpet and I said, ‘I can do that.’ It was the same way with interior design.” And, this Thanksgiving, she’s launching mindbodycasa.com, a lifestyle website she describes as “the diary of a global chica and a love letter to all of the favorite things that inspire success.” Touché.

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Name: Tanika Ray
Position: Freelance TV host
Resume: Started as a professional dancer before transitioning to acting on shows, including NYPD Blue, Living Single and Wayans Brothers. Landed a hosting gig on Nickelodeon’s The Big Help and went on to host shows on Lifetime, CBS, TLC and SOAPnet. Joined Extra as correspondent and host in 2004 and spent five years there covering entertainment news. Became contributor for HGTV’s Design Star and HGTV’d. Now starring on CW’s Oh Sit! and freelancing for red carpet events.
Birthdate: January 25
Hometown: Los Angeles
Education: BA in theater arts from Spelman College; also studied theater at NYU
Marital status: Single
Media idol: “I hate to be cliché, but it has to be Oprah. She’s really shaped me as a person indirectly.”
Favorite TV shows: Sex and the City, Scandal, So You Think You Can Dance and The Cosby Show
Guilty pleasure: Good conversation over good cocktails
Last book read: Fear of Flying by Erica Jong
Twitter handle: @tanikaray

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You started your career as an actress and dancer. Why become a reporter, and how has your background influenced what you do now?
It’s not about why for me. It’s more about why not. When it comes down to it, I’m an artist. That’s the common denominator for all of the things I’ve done in my career. It’s not about being still in a place and holding on to it for dear life. I don’t think we live in a society where we celebrate ‘oh, for 35 years I’ve had the same job.’ That’s just not how we’re wired anymore and there’s no security in that anyway. So, why not be free to check off everything on your life before your days come to an end?

I made a pact with myself when I was little that I was going to be a professional dancer before I was 30, because I guess 30 was the oldest thing in the world I could think of, and I ultimately got the experience of dancing with Will Smith and doing the Grammys with [singer] Brandy. It was amazing. But after a couple of years, I was like, ‘OK I did it. Check.’ And I organically moved into acting. But once I was in the profession, there was something nagging like, I’m not there yet. Like, this is part of it but I’m not there yet. So, it’s always been about fulfilling my dreams one at a time.

“I don’t think we live in a society where we celebrate ‘oh, for 35 years I’ve had the same job.'”

You’ve worked for Nickelodeon, TBS and HGTV. How do you decide which gigs are right for your career?
I dream big and go with the flow. I’ve been in this career long enough that I can wait for people to put me in their box and understand what I can offer or I can do it myself. Now that I’ve had a myriad of experiences, I want to siphon them into what I see as interesting television or an interesting place on the Web. I started doing freelance because I still love the red carpet. That’s something I get a beautiful high from, connecting with person after person after person. It’s like a party for me, and I love touching base with these figures and where they are in their lives and sharing that with the audience. It’s one of my gifts. I love sharing that with not just myself and that person, it’s myself, that person and you at home watching. It’s a three-person conversation. I’ve been freelancing for Essence magazine. I was the host for their Women in Hollywood event, their pre-Oscar event. I did a two-hour special on TV One. I am now doing a show that’s been airing since July for the CW called Oh Sit!. I appreciate these moments when I’m sort of cherry-plucking the times when I want to work for other people.

Did you feel burnt out when you were doing Extra?
Oh, absolutely. I was a victim of my own success. They had other people that they could go to, but I had such great rapport with some celebrities and their PR that they would request me. So even when I had booked days, I then extended them from 8 in the morning until 10 at night every single day, because they started throwing more pieces under my name. I did that for five years straight, seven days a week, 24/7. It was wonderful, it was the most blessed job I’ve had, but I’m definitely not a lifer in that way. I have so much respect for Shaun Robinson, because she’s been doing it for almost 20 years and I love that that’s who she is. I, however, need to be free. So, when I say I’m a pop culture specialist, it crosses all mediums from television to websites to writing. I’m always expanding my brand.

NEXT >> So What Do You Do, Nina Parker, Producer and Correspondent for The Insider?

How did you parlay your passion for design into a gig on HGTV?
Along the way as I was working really hard for Extra, I found that I was at home asleep and I was at the studio working, and it became this robotic, exhausting cycle. When I was home, I could be myself, I could breathe, I could have a little space, and I wanted to make my space as comfortable as possible, because that was where I went to rejuvenate. I’d rip pages out of magazines like Domino and Elle Décor and started to do little DIY projects. I would go to the thrift store and get little vintage couches, recover them and love the ownership of “I created that.” Creation is such a beautiful place for me to be. An old friend of mine was an executive at HGTV and was like, ‘I know you always liked design and we’d love to have you on board.’

I think what I bring to the table is excitement and energy for whatever I’m talking about, whatever I’m hosting, and that speaks volumes more than what the genre is. I think that’s hard for people to wrap their brains around, but it all makes sense in my head because it’s all communication. I sort of stumbled into interior design and HGTV legitimized my love for it. It went from being a passion and hobby to realizing I knew what I was talking about. I never felt so at home with other talent as I did at HGTV. That was a really beautiful experience.

“I actually witnessed somebody in the office cheering when something unfortunate happened to a celebrity.”

Entertainment news is often criticized for being gossipy and kitschy. Were you ever caught up in that world or asked to do an assignment or story you felt uncomfortable with?
A hundred times. But that’s the nucleus of that job. It’s not the [Entertainment Tonight] we all loved in the 80s. It’s gotten a little uglier and it’s another part of the reason why it was time for me to go. It wasn’t just me being “burnt out,” but it was also being disappointed in the agenda of entertainment news. My naiveté got me, because I realized no one ultimately cares about the artistry. Nobody cares if Halle Berry stretched farther than she ever did before while playing a character. They care about who she’s dating, who she’s breaking up with, who she’s in a lawsuit with. I actually witnessed somebody in the office cheering when something unfortunate happened to a celebrity. You lose sight of what is real when you live everyday like ‘gotta get the big story, gotta get the big story.’ That becomes everything and people act like they are curing cancer, but they’re not. They are passing along frivolous, unimportant details of somebody’s private life. It just made me feel gross.

A lot of people want a career like yours for the fun or perceived glamour of it. What’s the one difficult thing about the job that aspiring TV hosts may not expect?
The glamour quotient is all an illusion. It’s very glamorous to the outsider, never to the person who has to trek around Los Angeles in their own car, make sure their makeup’s OK, go from one shoot to the other and manage everyone’s expectations. As long as the glamour quotient lasts on television, that’s how glamorous it really is. But it doesn’t matter what I tell people. They’re going to do it anyway. People are so enamored with this career choice. I can give them the ugliest story ever, and they think their experience is going to be different. At the fore, the most important thing is to be happy and content with yourself, so do it until you can’t do it anymore and then get out.

NEXT >> So What Do You Do, Nina Parker, Producer and Correspondent for The Insider?

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Lisa Ling took home a pair of signature awards this summer: The L.A. chapter of the Asian American Journalists Association presented her with the V3 Visibility Award, while non-profit Shelter Partnership honored her Our America episode “The Lost American Dream” for tackling the topics of poverty and homelessness.

Ling’s willingness and expert ability to let interview subjects guide the story is what has made the OWN investigative reporting series so compelling. In just two seasons, Our America has put a human face on a wide variety of subjects — faith healing, swingers, gay Christians, heroin addiction, modern polygamy and more — that in lesser hands would have quickly devolved into sensationalism. The program has also managed to generate real-world impact: During the August 21 special two-hour season finale, Exodus International leader Alan Chambers admitted that her earlier report about the organization forced him to change his attempts to “de-gay” men and women.

Yet, for a 24-year veteran like Ling, sparking such change is more than just a career coup — it’s a personal mission. “People are feeling very challenged in this downward spiraling economy, and so many feel their voices are not being heard,” she explained. “Our program is trying to give a voice to people who would otherwise not have one.”

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Position: Executive producer and host of OWN’s Our America
Resume: Began her career as a correspondent for nationally syndicated teen show Scratch when she was 15. Became senior war correspondent for Channel One News, where she did extensive international reporting. Named co-host for The View in 1999 and helped the show win its first Emmy. Left in 2002 to return to international reporting. Host of National Geographic‘s Explorer and correspondent for ABC’s Nightline and The Oprah Winfrey Show. Co-authored the bestselling book Somewhere Inside, about her efforts to free her sister Laura from the clutches of the 2009 Pyongyang incarceration. Debuted Our America on OWN in 2011.
Birthday: August 30
Hometown: Sacramento, CA
Education: University of Southern California
Marital status: Married
Favorite TV shows: The Daily Show, Game of Thrones
Guilty pleasure: Online shopping
Media idol: “Oprah… of course”
Last book read: “Fifty Shades of Grey… JUST KIDDING! Lulu in the Sky by Leong Eng”
Twitter handle: @lisaling

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Our America continues your long association with Oprah Winfrey. What is an example of an interviewing or research technique you have learned from her?
There is perhaps no better listener than Oprah Winfrey; that’s why she’s such a terrific interviewer. Even when she’s not on television, she looks you right in the eyes and waits to hear your opinion or thoughts on whatever the issue may be. Both Oprah and one of my previous bosses, Barbara Walters, are truly exceptional listeners and that makes all the difference.

A recent episode of Our America focused on the lives of men who did prison time for crimes they did not commit, as well as one man on death row whose daughter is trying to clear him. How do you determine which topics you’ll focus on?
The beautiful thing about Our America is that there is never a shortage of topics. We attempt to explore the diversity and the complexity that comes with being an American.

“OWN is hands down the best place I’ve ever worked.”

Together with the production company that produces Our America with me, Part 2 Pictures, we are constantly pitching stories. Our process is a very collaborative one, but ultimately the green light comes from OWN. The network is also constantly suggesting topics for us to tackle. While many of our stories have been quite hard-hitting, we try to balance each season with a combination of topics that are challenging, and some that are a bit lighter. My prerequisite, however, is that, whatever the topic, it will inspire conversation and thought. I think that we are more evolved as people, the more we know about one another.

You have a great ability to gain the trust of your interview subjects and make them feel comfortable on camera. What are some key elements that all on-camera hard news interviewers should respect?
I think the reason we’ve been successful with getting people to give us interviews is because they know that Our America is a show that will not exploit or sensationalize their stories. It takes a lot of courage to share some of the things that people share with us. At times, people will tell us things they’ve never even told their closest friends or family members. We take very seriously the need to responsibly tell people’s stories. Knowing that our objective is to treat everyone we encounter with dignity has made people feel a lot more comfortable than they might feel doing other shows. We believe in being respectful and, in turn, that respect is always reciprocated.

NEXT >> So What Do You Do, Lola Ogunnaike, Freelance Journalist and TV Personality?

Throughout your career and now for Our America, you travel a great deal. How has technology affected your job? Does the fact that everyone, whether they’re in the media or not, is “reporting” on issues through Twitter and other social media platforms changed what you do?
Instant access to information via technology has made my job a lot easier. I am not a breaking news reporter, so I generally don’t have to act immediately if breaking news happens. But, when I am in the field and need info, it helps tremendously to be able to access any amount of information necessary. I admit that I am a bit of a Twitter junkie. I really love being able to be connected with the people who watch Our America. Instant feedback and being able to interact with viewers is an extraordinary thing. This past season, I live-tweeted during almost every episode and I had so much fun doing it. Twitter is truly revolutionary.

It seems like cable channels such as OWN and HD Net have really provided a fertile, new home for investigative journalism. Do you have complete freedom as to what to cover? And how different is your OWN environment from when you were doing reports for Nightline or National Geographic?
I am so lucky to work for OWN. It is the most creative freedom I’ve ever had in a job and I am so incredibly grateful for that. I also have a great deal of respect for the OWN executives who oversee our show. We really operate in such a collaborative way, and I love it. I’ve never felt pressure to do anything about which I have felt uncomfortable. OWN is hands down the best place I’ve ever worked.

“I had a great time as co-host [of The View], but I don’t regret for a second where I went from there.”

I had an incredible experience when I first started working for National Geographic in 2005. I worked with producers and executives who were passionate and collaborative. Years later, however, I’ll just say that male ego interfered with the process. So, I went to OWN and couldn’t be happier. I still contribute to Nightline when I can, and I’m thrilled that it’s performing so well in the ratings. I think the fact that Nightline is doing so well is a testament to the fact that people are hungry for good, strong storytelling.

What is an example of a topic you ultimately rejected for Our America, and why?
Neither Oprah nor I will cover hate groups. Giving people who express hatred toward people a platform of any kind, even if it’s critical, is not something that we will do.

What are your thoughts on all the changes in hosts The View has gone through, and do you ever miss being on the show?
Given how long the show has been on air, there hasn’t been that much change. I had a great time as co-host, but I don’t regret for a second where I went from there. The only time I really miss being on The View is during election seasons. It really is a terrific forum in which to discuss politics in a serious but entertaining way.

How did your sister Laura’s 2009 experiences in North Korea change your outlook on investigative reporting in dangerous areas?
Actually, what happened with Laura has made me more defiant than ever about the need for solid journalism. The fact that Laura was illegally apprehended and held for so long for wanting to report about the horrific things that are happening to North Korean refugees was just tragic. We need journalists to uncover truths. It’s never more important than now.

NEXT >> So What Do You Do, Lola Ogunnaike, Freelance Journalist and TV Personality?

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Richard Horgan is co-editor of FishbowlLA.

Sometimes, a job you took with even the highest of expectations can morph into a completely untenable situation. Leaving that job might be the best idea for both your career and your health. But how can you tell a bad situation from just a really bad day? Below, workplace experts share five signs that it might finally be time to quit your day job.

1. You take the stress home.

Long work hours are one thing, but constant stress is another. If you’re living with work stress at night and during the weekends, it might be time to give yourself a break.

“When you feel depressed or like your stomach is in knots on Sunday night as you prepare for the work week, this is a sure sign you need a new direction,” says Tiffani Murray, an HR consultant and author of Stuck on Stupid: A Guide for Today’s Professional Stuck in a Rut. “Any job that’s a detriment to your health is not a job to hold on to.”

Temporary fix: Keep work at the office by turning off the iPhone when at home, and not working weekends unless it’s a requirement. While you’re at it, use your vacation, personal days and lunch breaks, too. Sometimes, just giving your brain a break will do the trick.

2. You’ve hit a professional ceiling.

Not having opportunities for future advancement should make you think twice about the job you have now. “It’s time to move on whenever you find you’re doing the same thing in your role as you were doing two years ago, with no opportunity to challenge yourself,” says Mary Lee Gannon, president of StartingOverNow.com.

Lauren Still, founder of the consulting firm Careerevolution, agrees. “It’s time to quit when you’ve outgrown your role and there’s no opportunity for additional professional learning and development.”

Temporary fix: If you’re stuck in neutral at a small company, consider the growth path at a larger company, or ask yourself why you feel so stuck. Have you asked for more challenging duties or just expected them to be given to you? If it’s the latter, it might be time to schedule that performance review with your boss. Having realistic professional aspirations is key to staying motivated.

3. You’re in a toxic work environment.

How do you know when a work situation is truly toxic? “I would define a toxic environment as one that is highly political, where deception, back stabbing and un-merited favoritism become the norm rather than the exception,” says Caroline McClure, a veteran recruiter and principal at ScoutRock. “This can become the culture of an entire company, or simply within your own department.”

Bottom line: This is a job, not Survivor: Office Space. If you’re being abused or unfairly disregarded, it may be time to hit the high road.

Temporary fix: If the problem is just with a single co-worker and not the entire corporate culture, keep a good record of what the offensive colleague did and when. Then, bring it up to your direct supervisor or human resources department, offering specific examples. If you’re wondering about your legal options, know that a “hostile work environment” only occurs in very specific cases to very specific kinds of people. But, if you’ve got nowhere to turn, it may be best to at least start looking at opportunities in other departments or companies.

4. The company’s in trouble.

In short: Don’t be the last sailor on a sinking ship. Mary Hladio, a veteran HR consultant and president of Ember Carriers, says, “If you’re worried about layoffs, it’s a good idea to begin on an exit strategy.” Hladio’s warning signs of corporate failure include hiring freezes, budget cuts, missed financial projections and multiple restructures.

Basically, the moment you start seeing leaks, begin looking at other boats.

Temporary fix: If your industry is known for its ups and downs (ahem, media pros), it could just be that the company is struggling through a transition. So, keep things in perspective before you bolt.

5. You think you might get fired.

Whether it’s your fault or out of your control, a tarnished reputation means you should be looking for clean slates elsewhere. There are usually hints your job’s in jeopardy—recognize them to get out first.

For example, be on alert if your boss asks you to train a back-up person. “This is frequently code for, ‘I need to make sure someone can do your job before I fire you,'” says Roberta Chinsky Matuson, author of Suddenly in Charge: Managing Up, Managing Down, Succeeding All Around.

Other signs things are not looking so swell for you: bad performance reviews, being relieved of responsibilities, a sharp decrease in interactions with your boss and new job postings that sound suspiciously familiar.

Temporary fix: Unfortunately, there isn’t one for this situation. Once the boss has warned you multiple times or you spot the above signs of a pink slip, it’s best to just start heading for the door. Whether you leave a bad situation immediately or wait to have another job in hand, always keep your eyes open, your hopes high and your resume fresh. You deserve a job that’s right for you.

Once upon a time, anyone worth his word count knew that to be a journalist — a really credible, respected journalist — he would have to score a byline on the pages of an actual newspaper or magazine. Jessica Bennett is part of the vanguard eagerly changing that dynamic, and the executive editor position she’s settling into at Tumblr is a keystone in the new media movement.

Recruited from her spot as writer and editor for Newsweek, she says that her new position as a Tumblr griot of sorts is a natural fit for her and a logical transition for the company considering its explosive growth.

“I think there was so much interesting stuff happening within Tumblr and almost a culture rising out of it that they wanted to somehow capture that in a journalistic sense,” Bennett explained. “So, my job is essentially being a correspondent and editor for the Tumblr community. It’s hard to explain and it sounds very journalism-from-the-future, but it’s finding ways to pull out the really fascinating narratives and trends and issues that are coming out of Tumblr.”

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Name: Jessica Bennett
Position: Executive editor, Tumblr
Resume: Spent seven years as a writer and editor at Newsweek, covering social issues, gender and sex and appearing frequently on-air. Has written cover stories on teen bullying and sexism in the media, and has been honored by the Newswomen’s Club of New York, the New York Press Club and the Society for Professional Journalists. Left in March 2011 to launch Storyboard, Tumblr’s editorial arm. Remains a contributor to Newsweek/Daily Beast.
Birthday: September 3
Hometown: Seattle
Education: B.S., journalism, Boston University
Marital status: Single
Media idol: Nellie Bly and Nora Ephron
Guilty pleasure: Clothes, “which is hard when you have a tiny NYC closet.”
Favorite TV shows: Girls, Mad Men and Homeland
Twitter handle: @jess7bennett

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What are your specific duties? Were your tasks and goals set in advance, or are you adding things that need to be done along the way?
It varies from day to day. The position has evolved a bit, and a lot of it is kind of figuring it out as we go, but it’s not that dissimilar to what I did when I was at Newsweek. I am constantly looking for good story ideas, I’m doing a lot of editing, I’m assigning features, I’m writing, I’m producing video and just overseeing all of the stuff that goes out on Storyboard, which is our editorial site.

So, all of your creative ideas come from the Tumblr community?
They’re loosely related. For example, we did this big piece about how fandom has changed in the Internet Age based around One Direction, the UK boy band, who is huge on Tumblr. It was the kind of feature story you’d read in a newsmagazine, but not so Tumblr-specific that it couldn’t be digestible to a mainstream audience. So, a lot of the ideas I come up with I’m getting from being on Tumblr and monitoring what’s happening on there. If Tumblr were a digital city, then we’re covering the ideas and themes coming out of that city like a reporter from The New York Times would be covering New York City.

“If Tumblr were a digital city, then we’re covering the ideas and themes coming out of that city like a reporter from the New York Times would be covering New York City.”

At traditional media outlets, layoffs abound and positions are being eliminated at an alarming pace. Yet, many new media companies are still unproven. Did you have reservations about leaving the stability of an established company for one that is still finding its footing?
Well, “stability” is not a word I would generally use to describe Newsweek or any print magazine in this age. So, no, I didn’t have any hesitation. It’s a new thing and it’s exciting to be part of something that doesn’t exist yet in the journalism world. We’re literally creating this as we go along. It enables me to do things like travel or take on big stories, because budgeting is less of a concern. It’s kind of liberating in a way. It’s a start-up, so you never know what could happen but, honestly, I feel a lot more secure. It’s exciting to be part of something that’s new and growing instead of something that’s shrinking, which is happening at every major media outlet now in the print world.

Is syndicating content the wave of the editorial future? What does that say about journalism as a whole, if what you see on Storyboard is also picked up on MTV News and New York magazine, for example?
I think that that kind of goes with our model at Tumblr and most of the models in the media age, which is about collaboration and sharing content that is good and creative and worthy and not so much about hoarding things. I remember in the print days, we used to hoard the best content for the magazine. It took years to break out of that, even at Newsweek, so we could be posting things online and understanding that there was as much value there as there was in the print publication. At Tumblr, we want to share as much content as we possibly can. We’re not touchy about it as long as people are crediting it. For us, it’s really about getting the stories out, not so much about taking credit for anything.

NEXT >> So What Do You Do, Richard Lawson, Senior Writer for The Atlantic Wire?

Do you think that makes it challenging for each outlet to develop its own voice?
No. I feel like as long as you’re staying true to the brand, collaboration can only be beneficial. We’re still developing our voice, very much, so a lot time has been spent bringing a new magazine voice to it. But, for a lot of the publications we’re been partnering with, our voice still works. I think that’s part of being a good journalist: being able to adapt your voice for different publications and making it work for many outlets.

Many writers are being taken to task for “lazy journalism” that involves half-hearted fact-checking, plagiarism and flat out making up sources. In your opinion, what’s a root cause for this issue, and what types of checks and balances are in place at Storyboard to avoid those kinds of instances?
We have a staff of three, so we’re not pretending to be The New Yorker by any means. But we’re trained journalists and we treat Storyboard with the same journalistic rigor and ethics that we would any other publication. I mean, based on [Newsweek‘s August 27 cover story], we now know that Newsweek does not have fact checkers. We never had fact checkers when I was working there. It was really up to the reporter to be thorough in their reporting, so we do the same thing at Tumblr. The editorial department can’t monitor everything on Tumblr itself. That would be insane. But we certainly edit everything on Storyboard and make sure it’s up to our standards.

“It took me years to realize that the invisible, objective, non-brand I was taught to be in journalism school is a thing of the past.”

Tumblr has gone from pledging no advertising on its site to embracing it. How does the new business model affect what you do?
It doesn’t right now. There are no ads on Storyboard, so we’re not catering to a certain advertising audience. The advertising model is so new [that] we’re still tweaking it and seeing how it’s going to evolve. But as far as advertising models go, I think it’s really creative and interesting to see the way Tumblr has approached theirs. It’s the one place where you’re not being bombarded by teeth-whitening ads. To be an advertiser on Tumblr, you also have to be a creator on Tumblr, even if it’s a brand. I’m like the last person to say I enjoy advertising — I do not — but some of the advertising that’s been featured on Tumblr has been really good and thoughtful.

How, specifically, can someone get these cool, new positions when many have not been created yet? Should people just pitch themselves as editors to social media sites, turn themselves into social media “gurus,” or look for open positions?
First, understand that journalism is changing and embrace it. A lot of companies are creating positions like this. I saw one on Kickstarter, and Facebook is starting Facebook Stories, which is essentially a version of what we’re doing. So, I think we’re going to see more social media and tech companies telling the stories of their users. Second, brand yourself. It took me years to realize that the invisible, objective, non-brand I was taught to be in journalism school is a thing of the past. And, lastly, I guess I’d say just know how to tell a good story. High-quality writing, compelling narratives — they’re harder than you’d think to find, especially in an age where the Web is saturated. Also: pitch me stories!

NEXT >> So What Do You Do, Richard Lawson, Senior Writer for The Atlantic Wire?

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Ten years ago, I was just another fresh-off-the-bus kid from the Midwest looking to make it big in New York publishing. Today, I’m still gainfully employed, I’ve transitioned from print media to online media and I’ve even managed to escape New York, which is as close to a success story as you’re going to find in this heartbreaker of an industry.

Looking back on my resume, it strikes me that every job I’ve held over the last decade has left me with an important lesson, most of which I learned the hard way. So, for the benefit of those who are starting out in their writing careers, I figured I’d share my accumulated wisdom and save you all some trouble. Let’s begin___

1. Great Internet writing is both an art and a science.

Editorial Assistant, MaximNet (August 2002 ___ February 2004)

My first gig out of college primarily consisted of HTML coding, mixed with some low-impact entertainment writing. One day, I was assigned to interview System of a Down vocalist Serj Tankian, who let me fire questions at him for nearly an hour before his publicist threw in the towel. I spent the next two days transcribing our entire conversation, before submitting it as my article, virtually unchanged.

Shortly after I turned in the piece, my boss called me over and explained the principal irony of writing for websites: Although there’s a nearly infinite amount of space at your disposal, attention spans are lower online. Most Internet users will simply click a headline that grabs their eye, scan the first two paragraphs for the important points, and then click away to the next shiny object. And, according to Rob Weatherhead, head of digital operations of MediaCom, endless blocks of text are the biggest eBuzzkill of all.

“When a user lands on a page, you have three to five seconds to make your impression and convince them to stay,” Weatherhead explained. “So make your content easily viewable 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.”

“Even if you’re happy at your current position, building relationships outside of your bubble could lead to job offers that will give you leverage if you’re overdue for a raise.”

In other words, your writing needs to be as concise online as it does when you’re dealing with physical limitations like magazine page-counts and newspaper column inches. In fact, it needs to be even sharper nowadays, since you’re competing with 140-character tweets and two-word memes. The Internet may allow writers unlimited freedom, but if you want to hold your audience’s attention, you__?ll have to earn it.

2. If you’re not fending off job offers, you’re doing something wrong.

Assistant Editor, Associate Editor, Giant (February 2004 ___ September 2006)

When I joined the launch staff of Giant, it was a witty and affectionate entertainment bimonthly aimed at young, culturally obsessed males (nerds, basically). Two years later, it was an “urban,” “aspirational,” “luxury” title run by entirely different management. One by one, my original crew successfully jumped ship until I was the last man standing, spending my days at a magazine that would otherwise never find its way into my bathroom. I had no exit strategy. I hadn’t bothered to network at media events, create a personal website to showcase my past work or reach out to other writers and editors who I admired to start a dialogue. I was stuck.

“The best way to not only advance in your career but also create new relationships is to pursue professional-development opportunities,” said Charles Purdy, senior editor of career site Monster. “Classes and workshops related to your profession are great places to meet people. The teachers are often experts who are still working in the field, and the other students and attendees will be professionals like you. And, of course, there’s the side benefit of learning something new.”

Even if you’re happy at your current position, building relationships outside of your bubble could lead to job offers that will give you leverage if you’re overdue for a raise. Just don’t be shady about it; publishing is a small world, after all.

“Always be positive and enthusiastic about your current employer,” Purdy recommended. “And talk to your boss about your networking activities: ‘I met so-and-so from Company XYZ, and we talked a bit about how our companies are similar. Here’s what I learned.'”

NEXT >> The Biggest Mistakes Journalists Make in Social Media

3. It could all go away tomorrow, so plan ahead.

Senior Associate Editor, Stuff (October 2006 ___ August 2007)

Just when I was beginning to despair, I was hired by a men’s magazine editor who I’d interned for in college. I came into the job with long-term plans for the kinds of features I’d be writing after I got my feet wet and of how I could steadily progress up the editorial ladder. Ten months later, I was laid off. It was business, not personal. But I wasn’t ready for it.

Luckily, I found my next job before my severance pay and unemployment benefits ran out, but it could have been a disaster — like, a moving-back-in-with-your-parents kind of disaster. The lesson I learned here was a practical one: Don’t live paycheck to paycheck. Unemployment can strike at any time, so if you don’t have enough cash in the bank to cover a few months’ worth of expenses, do whatever it takes to adjust your lifestyle so that you can create a financial cushion for yourself.

“All other things being equal, the job will go to the person who brings the most to the table.”

According to Claire David, manager of member services for Freelancers Union, you should also become very familiar with your employment agreement at the start of any new writing gig, so that there are no nasty surprises when the axe comes down.

“If you’re on a contract, it matters whether you’re being paid as an independent worker, or if you’re being paid on a W-2,” David said. “If you’re a W-2 employee, you likely qualify for unemployment. If you’re not, there really isn’t a safety net. And misclassification — being classified as an employee when you’re a freelancer, or vice versa — can impact everything from taxation, to access to company benefits, to specific employment protections, like the right to file a wage claim if you don’t get paid.”

4. Do more than just write and edit.

Managing Editor, CagePotato.com (October 2007 ___ present)

Starting a blog is easy, which is why so many people start blogs. But rising above the noise and finding an audience that shows up every day? Well, that’s a bit harder. When I was hired to launch a mixed martial arts news site in 2007, I quickly learned that creating great content is just one part of the equation. To make sure that your words aren’t swallowed up in the vast sea of the Internet, you also need to be a social media director, an SEO expert, a traffic analytics wonk and a marketing guru. (Coming up with million-dollar advertising and product ideas once in a while doesn’t hurt, either.)

Being multi-talented — and having a working understanding of all the factors that go into building a successful entertainment brand — means that there’s more than one reason for people to hire you. All other things being equal, the job will go to the person who brings the most to the table. But keep in mind that “skill sets” and “added value” are no substitute for actual writing ability.

“There will always be a demand for people who can think straight and then put those thoughts in writing in a way that makes sense,” said Mark Remy, editor-at-large for RunnersWorld.com. “Being SEO-savvy, or a social media expert — those are all good skills — but, if you can’t write or edit, I’m not going to hire you, period. Any time I see young people who actually can write and edit, I tell them not to worry. They have a future in publishing, whether it’s in print or digital or some technology not yet invented.”

Encouraging words — but just to be safe, you might as well learn Photoshop.

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Ben Goldstein has written for the New York Post, Time Out New York, MensFitness.com, Maxim, Fight! Magazine, and BloodSweatandCheers.com. He can be reached at bjgoldst@gmail.com.

When Dana Wolfe left Nightline in 2001, she was in a pretty good place professionally. During her 12-year tenure as a producer under Ted Koppel, she’d already racked up five Emmys and interviewed everyone from Henry Kissinger to Salman Rushdie.

“After Nightline, I took literally two months off, thinking I was going to take a year off,” she recalled. “I had two young children; I thought I should drive in the carpool, plant my own garden and put photos in albums.”

But after a stint as an independent media consultant, Wolfe unknowingly got recommended to run the stateside version of The Rosenkranz Foundation’s popular Intelligence Squared live debate program, and found herself thrown right back into the fiery newsroom environment, albeit in a different setting.

How did your experience as a producer for Nightline prepare you for producing debates?
I was highly influenced by Ted Koppel, who always tried to make Nightline a forum for civil discourse. I remember working, way back when at the Madrid Summit, where I used to see the Israelis and the Palestinians talking to one another, and that was never done publicly until then. At Nightline, I was always involved with all of the big town meetings around the world — that usually involves bringing two sides of a topic together to try to come away with some common balance. This idea of distinctive division and a passion for story telling is something that seems to be a thread throughout my career.

“If somebody cannot articulate their views in a way that you understand them, the rest of the public is not going to be able to either.”

When you work for the best, you strive for the best. Ted was such a good listener. I’ve learned that the better the listener you are, the better the product you’ll end up with. My first day on the job at Nightline I interviewed someone and I got off the phone, wrote up my notes and I didn’t understand what the person had said to me. I spoke to the senior producer at the time and he said, ‘If you don’t understand them, and you want to put them on the air, how is the audience going to understand them?’ That was a big takeaway for me. It sounds kind of small, but if somebody cannot articulate their views in a way that you understand them, the rest of the public is not going to be able to either.

Let’s play devil’s advocate for a minute. The Web is full of debaters (or what many might call haters) who like nothing more than adding snark or picking apart someone else‘s article. How are the Intelligence Squared debates different and why are they necessary?
Today’s media are full of one-sided debates and partisan rants and name calling and punditry. We try to avoid all of that, both with our format and by bringing intelligence to both sides of these issues so the audience can make up their own minds. We have a vote at the top of our evening asking, for example, ‘How do you feel about this proposition?’ Then the audience sits for a live, hour-and-45-minute debate and they hear both sides of the discussion. They hear one side pick apart the other’s side, but in a very thoughtful way that isn’t sound bites. After the debate, when people vote again, there’s proof that Intelligence Squared brings a compelling argument to change people’s minds. We ask them to put their feelings aside and tell us how they think these debaters did with their content and their presentation. Many times, people vote against their instincts just by being able to listen and say, ‘I may not agree with it, but the other side did a better job of presenting their argument.’ That’s where we can add something to all the different media platforms.

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How do you generate the questions the moderator will ask, and what can writers take away from that in terms of the interviews they conduct?
I’ve been fortunate to work with very smart people, and two of those very smart people in journalism, who don’t need questions written for them, are Ted Koppel and [Intelligence Squared moderator] John Donvan. They do their homework. Our director of research pulls together all of the current research on any topic and what the specific debaters have to say about their topic — we look at YouTube videos, we read their books, their articles, we see where they’ve been quoted — and we provide all of that to our moderator. We arm Donvan with the best research, but it’s up to him to be able to take that research and make it understandable on stage. If the debaters get caught up in technicalities, he’s there to bring it back to help [the audience] understand. If they say something factually incorrect, it’s up to him to say, ‘Well, that wasn’t really the case and let me tell you why.’ Having a strong moderator, someone who can digest the information, someone who does their homework and listens is key.

What makes for a successful debate?
We deal with power players who may be resistant to talking about important issues. It takes a lot on my part to get some of these people on stage, but it takes a lot of guts on their part to agree to it. People debate with us, because they recognize that there is an opposing view and they want to explain to their opponent why their point of view may be right, but the best debaters have always been the ones that listen to the other side. They don’t have to agree in the end, and the audience can take away what they would like, but if they’re listening to one another, then I’ve done my job.

I would also add that when Donvan realizes that somebody, a former politician for example, is resorting to their three talking points over and over again, that’s when he’s at his best. He pulls them out of that and pushes them to go beyond the barrier they’re used to. That always makes for great moments in an evening. That’s also what differentiates Intelligence Squared from some of the banter program one-on-one discussions that are in the public domain.

“Today’s media are full of one-sided debates and partisan rants and name calling and punditry. We try to avoid all of that.”

The New York Times has called Intelligence Squared “a salon for movers and shakers, writers and thinkers.” What can writers take away from these debates?
I think the point that Robert Rosenkranz wanted to make with bringing Intelligence Squared to the U.S. was to show that, in this day and age of a very divisive media, each side has a respectable point of view, and they can be on a stage together in a public domain without shouting at each other. Intelligent discussion can lead people to thinking differently on critical issues of the day. Our debates are not going to make news every time, but they show that there’s a level of discussion on hot-button issues of the day that individuals are willing to have on a stage even if they personally dislike one another. If a writer can pick up on some of those nuances, then they can take away something. It may not be for an immediate story but for a future story, and they can relate back to it when the hard news part of it comes.

Wolfe’s Tips for Crafting Stories with a Compelling Argument:
1. Make it interesting. “We do this in our debates at the top of the show. Our moderator, John Donvan, describes something unusual or interesting that isn’t common knowledge about each of the debaters, that ties into the topic we’re debating.”

2. Research your topic in foreign outlets. “Reading articles from other countries in other languages helps you understand both sides of an issue. That’s the way people come to new ideas or change the way they think.”

3. Give the back story. “Don’t assume your reader knows everything about the topic you’re writing about. Give them as much info as you think they’d need to understand the full story, warts and all.”

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Maria Carter is a freelance writer in Atlanta.