If you think your job is tough, try laying off “tens of thousands of people.” That was what Laurie Ruettimann had to do during the course of her career in global human resources at companies like Monsanto and Pfizer.

Now, Ruettimann preaches a new philosophy to professionals through her blogs, Punk Rock HR and The Cynical Girl, and speaking engagements, such as her appearance at next month’s Career Circus, where she’s presenting her ideas in a speech entitled ‘Do What You’re Good At’ instead of ‘Do What You Love.’

“Working in a field that you are passionate about and making a lot of money is awesome, but it’s not the reality for so many of us,” Ruiettmann said. “One of the things I would like to do is deconstruct this myth that you have to do something that you’re passionate about, otherwise your life is meaningless… There are other things that can make you happy beyond work.”

Name: Laurie Ruettimann
Position: Head of social media and human resources strategy for Starr Tin Cup
Birthdate: January 8, 1975
Hometown: Chicago, Illinois
Education: Bachelor’s degree in English from Webster University in St. Louis, Mo.
Resume: Worked in global human resources for Monsanto and Pfizer before leaving the corporate HR world behind in 2007 when she moved to North Carolina and started blogging about HR. Last year, she went to work for marketing and advertising agency Starr Tin Cup where she’s working to build their social media practice.
Marital status: Married
Media idol: Kathy Griffin. “I like the fact that she has a bit of a portfolio career and that she took some advice from Joan Rivers very early in her career, and she treated her career like a business. I think a lot of women, especially in entertainment or media, make the mistake of forgetting that this is a business and every dollar matters.”
Favorite TV show: 30 Rock and Tosh.0
Guilty pleasure: “I eat ice cream every single day.”
Last book read: The Financial Lives of Poets
Twitter handle: @lruettimann

So many people are often depressed by their jobs. Having been there yourself, what advice would you give to someone in that position?
I think a lot of people are melodramatic about the crappiness of their job. I think most jobs suck, because if they didn’t suck we wouldn’t get paid to do them. We get paid for a suck-y differential so there’s embedded pain in every job. Most people tend to project a certain reality onto their job that more accurately reflects their personal lives. So, when their marriages aren’t going well, or their kids are doing poorly in school, they bring a lot of that tension and that angst to work…

So, I often tell people to really explore what they’re doing and to decouple their personal identity from their job. If your job is dragging you down, are there other things you could be working on? Volunteer work, repairing relationships with your family or counseling? Are you drinking too much? Those are oftentimes the problems I see when people are truly depressed. And if your job sucks that much, don’t worry about your job — you’re probably going to lose it or get fired and start to work on other things and spend less time obsessing about work.

Although it seems like you sort of fell into human resources as a career path, what advice would you give someone who is considering it as a career?
I’m always surprised when I tell people this: Human resources is one of a very few number of professions in America that is adding jobs. And it’s adding jobs because there is a hyper specialization that is going on in human resources. So, we need people who are good at HR IT. We need people who are really good at HR and business analytics. So, the kind of job that HR is in the future is really a specialized job that requires more business skills and tech skills than the administrative skills that really, quite honestly, brought me to the career. But the human resources function of the future has a higher set of expectations, and, in order to succeed in it, you need to have, frankly, an MBA minimum, business experience and an understanding of finance. What’s going to happen is a lot of these older women in human resources are going to retire, and they’re not going to be replaced by that same skill set. They’ll be replaced by people who have floated in and out of marketing, and in and out of sales, or in and out of technology.

What sort of things do job seekers have to think about now that the process of recruiting is changing so rapidly?
Recruiters have always been on the forefront of technology. So, back in the day, they were using the fax machine in crazy weird ways back before people even knew what the fax machine was. They’re out there because they are a sales function and they are trying to generate leads, uncover information and uncover intelligence. They have really two roles: They want to uncover intelligence about job candidates, both good and bad, but also companies, so they can find out where they can fill a role, or where they can steal people from.

So, they are little mini spies out there on the fringes of society, especially now with the Internet. So, they are looking at your online activity. They are looking at your online profile. In some places, like Germany and other places in Europe, that is verboten. But in America that is still allowed. So, they’re out there, they’re looking, and common sense applies: no naked pictures, no stories about binge drinking, all that stuff.

Except that, if there is a picture of you that’s posted by an ex-husband or posted by a former employee, or a former colleague who is mad at you, you can’t necessarily control your online identity. For example, if my ex-husband — I don’t have one — but if my ex-husband gets mad at me and posts a sex tape, why is that my fault? And why can a company feel like they can make a hiring decision based on my abusive ex-husband’s behavior? That litigation is coming.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever heard or given about changing your career path?
First of all, don’t quit a job before you have a job. That is understated. A lot of people reach a breaking point and they’re just burned out, especially in this economy. They haven’t had a raise for four years. They’re frustrated. They don’t feel any passion around what they’re doing, and they quit, and they don’t have a plan. The best advice I’ve ever given is that you can simultaneously work on your next career while currently working in your current job. It is possible. There are 24 hours in a day. And, also, if you’re not committed long term to the job you’re doing, it doesn’t matter if you’re using company resources, and it doesn’t matter if you’re not showing up 100 percent. You can show up 40 percent for your job mentally, give 60 percent of your brain to your new proposition and you’re fine.

So, it’s really nice to have secure employment, infrastructure and a place to go every day when you’re working on your new role… Another thing is a lot of employees aren’t taking advantage of their employees assistance program. An employee assistance program can be therapy, but you can also just go talk to someone to help you figure out your next path. Psychologists love that. In fact, they would love to talk to you about your next career than your drug addiction. A lot of them really relish the opportunity to help someone figure out who they are and where they belong in this world. So, I love advising people, if they have access to it, go use it and go talk about your career. Go figure out who you are.

What tips do you have for people looking for jobs in the media?
I think a lot of people forget that there are media jobs available at regular companies, so they’re always focused, especially in the New York market and Los Angeles, on going to major mainstream media companies. But, increasingly, smaller to mid-size companies are using those media skills to help with all sorts of stuff: marketing, PR, human resources. We use media people all the time on employment branding campaigns. So, it’s really incumbent on media professionals to think about their job skills and how they can be used across the economy instead of focusing on media companies. Because when you focus on media companies you really limit your pool of opportunities. So, think about companies that advertise, consumer product companies, pharmaceutical companies. They can all use media skills and they don’t all outsource those jobs. Many of them keep those jobs internally.

As the title of your Career Circus presentation suggests, if you’re paid to do a job, you don’t have to love it. So, how does a person do that?
I’ve never given this presentation before, and it’s one of these things I passionately believe in. I really, really, truly believe that it’s ideal and awesome to do something that you love and be paid for it, but I also believe that there are a million examples of jobs out there that pay very, very well that no one absolutely loves. There are a million examples from this economy where people are doing things for money, and, you know, once you have a little bit of money in our pocket, then you can do what you love. So, I like to volunteer with animals as well. Because I make an awesome living, I can donate to my favorite causes; I have free time to volunteer. Believe me, there’s nothing I love about human resources and I don’t particularly like public speaking. It’s fun for me to blog, but it’s more fun for me to blog about my life than about human resources. But the market is paying me to do something, so I enjoy it. I have some balance about it, but it’s not my passion. It’s not my passion in life to be an HR blogger; that’s pretty pathetic.

Laurie Ruettimann presents ‘Do What You’re Good At’ instead of ‘Do What You Love’ at Career Circus August 4 in New York City.

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Amanda Ernst is a freelance writer living in New York. She also manages business development and social media marketing for B5 Media, the publisher of five women’s lifestyle sites.

When the Journalism School at Columbia University released a report prepared by Leonard Downie and Michael Schudson about the future of American journalism, it did what many organizations do when they want the maximum amount of publicity for their news: They offered the report to a handful of journalists under an embargo.

The school reached out to reporters on the media beat, including Reuters journalist Robert MacMillan and Slate.com’s Jack Shafer. The embargo was set for the morning of Tuesday, Oct. 20, 2009, and both MacMillan and Shafer accepted. But on the Sunday night before the embargo was up, The New York Times‘ Web site published David Carr’s weekly media column which outlined the report.

MacMillan was angry that he had been scooped. “I called the spokeswoman I had been working with, and she told me that someone else there got a call from David Carr who asked her if he could run a story about the report for his Monday column,” he explained. “She said yes, but no one told me.”

Shafer heard the same story. “I was told that David had asked, and if I had asked they would have lifted it for me. So why have an embargo? If they were going to lift it, why not tell everyone?”

The Case for Embargoes

An embargo occurs when journalists are requested to delay running a story until an agreed upon date and time, explained Sandra Sokoloff, senior vice president and director of national media relations for PR agency Porter Novelli. But it’s not to be confused with an exclusive, which is an arrangement with a specific media outlet or journalist to get and run a story first.

Many journalists will agree that accepting an embargo runs counter to their instincts to find and report breaking news, and bloggers like TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, Alan Mutter, and Shafer himself have written about the death of the practice. Still, their prevalent use by public relations professionals, corporations and nonprofit organizations makes them difficult to avoid, especially when covering specific beats that focus on public companies, medicine, science, technology or the government.

Nicholas Lemann, the dean of the Journalism School at Columbia University said this was the first time he had ever used an embargo during his tenure as dean. He said Carr, The Washington Post‘s op-ed editor, and Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz all approached him seeking to run a story on the report a day early. “I made the call to say yes to these things,” said Lemann. “What I should have done, and what I wished I [had] done, was send an email to everyone who had been sent an embargoed copy, telling them that the embargo had been moved back to 8 a.m. Monday. I apologize for not doing that.”

Despite the slip-up, Lemann said he believed in the rationale behind embargoes and, if necessary, would use one again. “The argument for an embargo is that we wanted people to read the report,” he said. “If you just put it up online all of a sudden, then it’s very hard to get people to actually read it.”

Even staunch critics, like Robert M. Steele, Nelson Poynter Scholar for Journalism Values at the Poynter Institute and a visiting professor of journalism at DePauw University, say embargoes have a place. “Ideally, an embargo is only put in place in cases where it’s valuable for the journalist to take time to understand some complicated material and to be able to research and verify certain information in order to write a more substantive story,” Steele said.

From a Reporter’s Point of View

Unfortunately, reporters say mishandlings like the Columbia report happen all too often. And it gives embargoes a bad name. Publicists have a duty to their clients to disseminate news as effectively as possible, but a journalist has to trust the information that s/he is receiving from a publicist. When limits are placed on what news can be reported and when, red flags naturally arise.

“Generally I don’t mind embargoes when the people involved in setting them up handle them fairly,” MacMillan said. “I would prefer that we didn’t have embargoes and that reporters did their job by chasing news. And I would prefer that companies, if they had something to say, would say it, rather than setting up an event for the simple purpose of getting maximum press coverage in what almost looks like a spontaneous burst of news from all over the place.”

Like many reporters, MacMillan has been burned by embargoes. Sometimes, another reporter will break the embargo on purpose. Other times, it might be accidental. Most infuriating is when a publicist promises an exclusive to one person and allows them to release the news before anyone else, keeping other reporters who agree to the embargo in the dark. To avoid this trap, MacMillan asks publicists who else is getting the news and whether they are subject to the same restrictions.

“I’m under an ethical obligation not to tell lies. If I’m going to be reporting news that is going to be fed to me by a public relations professional, they should also be telling me the truth. The reader is the highest priority to everyone, including the flack,” MacMillan said.

MacMillan has also started to experiment with a technique that he calls “the suicide option.” After accepting an embargo, he warns the publicist he’s working with that if the story comes out anywhere else before his runs, he’ll pull his story. “I tell them that I’d rather hold a gun to my head and pull the trigger than run it,” he said. “Because at that point, what good is it doing my readers?”

“This is why honesty and transparency are so important when dealing with exclusives and embargoes,” agreed Porter Novelli’s Sokoloff. “Many times miscommunication can lead to an embargo break… We recently managed an exclusive with a national business publication, and offered embargoes to other outlets with the understanding that their stories could not run until one minute after the exclusive story was up. We emailed every journalist we spoke to about the terms of the exclusive and the embargo and asked them to email us back indicating that they agreed to these terms. All of the journalists felt they were dealt with fairly and honestly, and the client received wonderful, widespread media coverage.”

While Porter Novelli found reporters who were receptive to their terms, others like MacMillan might not take lightly to playing second banana to another news outlet. “In practice, I accept embargoes often because I want to get certain bits of news out, and if this is the only way I can do it and if I think that readers will benefit from this news, I’ll accept the embargo,” MacMillan said. “But don’t disrespect me by telling me that I and my readers are less important than someone else.”

A Symbiotic Relationship

The worst part about poorly executed embargoes is the feeling of helplessness they create. Reporters can’t choose not to work with certain companies and publicists again, especially if they cover a specific beat. Publicists also must work with the same reporters over and over again, depending on the news coverage their clients desire.

“A breach in trust on either side runs the risk of permanently damaging a relationship, and there’s so much competition out there — for publicists trying to get their stories told and for journalists living in a fragmented, volatile media world — the importance of these relationships has never been greater,” said Matt Biscuiti, senior vice president at The Lippin Group.

No matter how hard both sides work to cultivate open and honest relationships, there are some from both camps who continue to argue for its demise. “Embargoes should go the way of the dodo bird,” said Curtis Hougland, the founder of PR agency Attention. “Our communication with the media should strive to be more transparent — sharing versus pitching. Regardless, invariably the information leaks out, and a blogger not on embargo ends up scooping the news. Embargoes are in neither parties’ interest.”

Shafer agrees: “I think [embargoes] are one of the many mechanisms that sources use to manipulate journalists,” he said. “I think they should all be abolished. I think they should all be put in an iron coffin and taken out to the Marianas trench and lost forever. They’re useless.”

Regardless of their efficacy or lack thereof, embargoes don’t seem to be disappearing any time soon. That means both journalists and publicists need to tread carefully. Steele, who warns against accepting embargoes, has perhaps some of the best advice: Remain skeptical.

“I think journalists should always ask the question of why [a publicist is] asking for an embargo,” Steele said. “It’s the same question we should ask when people ask for confidentiality. Why should I honor this embargo? Then you can hear what the argument is, the rationale in the case of an embargo, and ideally the journalist, or the reporter and his editors, will decide, ‘Is this is an embargo we should agree to?'”

Tips for publicists on placing embargoes:
1. Make sure the strategy is best for your client and the news that you are releasing.
2. Know a little about the reporters you offer the embargo to, their publications and their audience. “If you know, for example, that a particular blogger never honors embargoes, then you probably don’t want to approach them unless you are best friends,” Biscuiti said.

3. Be transparent and honest in all your communications with journalists.
4. To avoid getting burned, make sure that both you and the reporter understand the terms of the agreement before you share the entire story. But, be ready to react in case someone breaks the embargo.
5. Whatever you do, don’t send a press release to everyone you know and claim its “embargoed.” It’s important to have a dialogue with your targeted journalists in advance.

Tips for journalists on accepting or refusing an embargo:
1. As Steele advises, always question why the information is being embargoed and if it’s worth agreeing to. How important is this information to your readers?
2. See if you can have the information being offered as an exclusive instead, or if you can have it before other reporters. “I once asked recently if I could have something exclusively, and they said yes,” MacMillan said. ” You never know what you get if you ask.”
3. After accepting, confirm that everyone else who agreed to the embargo has the same terms as you. Also remind the publicist to let you know if anything changes before the embargo is lifted.
4. If the embargo times sound strange, like 8 a.m. or noon instead of midnight, ask why. And don’t forget to check the time zone.
5. Add your own reporting. Even though a publicist is handing you news, don’t be afraid to do original coverage of the story.

Amanda Ernst is editor of FishbowlNY.

As the serious, uber-prepared host of Bravo‘s Inside the Actor’s Studio, James Lipton is famous for his tower of blue index cards and his ability to turn our favorite actors into sobbing piles of mush. But Lipton is more than your average TV talk show host. He’s also an actor, director, producer, choreographer, playwright, author and founder of the Actor’s Studio Drama School, the largest graduate drama program in the country.

And, with 14 Emmy nominations already under his belt, the man who called Norman Mailer and Marlon Brando good friends says he has no plans to relinquish his interview chair anytime soon. In fact, he’s switching things up. The 18th season of Inside will feature the ensemble casts of some of his favorite TV shows, with the cast of Glee up first on April 9 at 8pm. “You’ll have to watch,” he teased when asked about any standout moments from the episode. “You’ll see some dancing; I’ll tell you that.”

Name: James Lipton
Position: Creator, executive producer, host and writer of Inside the Actor’s Studio and dean emeritus of The Actor Studio Drama School at Pace University
Resume: Began acting at a young age, most memorably playing the Lone Ranger’s nephew. Worked as an actor on Broadway, in film and on television; produced and wrote for television; wrote book and lyrics for two musicals, Nowhere to Go but Up and Sherry!; wrote the novel Mirrors, which he also adapted for TV, the non-fiction book An Exaltation of Larks and Inside Inside, a memoir and backstage look at the Bravo hit. Founded the Actor’s Studio Drama School and launched Inside the Actor’s Studio.
Birthday: September 19
Hometown: Detroit
Education: Wayne State University, then 12 years of acting, modern dance and voice study
Marital status: Married to Kedakai Turner Lipton, a vice president of the Corcoran Real Estate and the model for Miss Scarlett on the original game of Clue’s box and cards
Media Idol: French talk show host Bernard Pivot, who Lipton famously cribs his Inside questionnaire from and modeled his own interviewing style on. “He was the person I wanted to be like. I’ve never succeeded, but I’ve come as close as I could.”
Favorite TV shows: Inside the Actor’s Studio, Arrested Development, Glee, Modern Family, Mad Men
Guilty pleasure: Show jumping horses and flying airplanes
Last book read: Stephen Sondheim’s Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat

When you were younger you wanted to be a lawyer. How did you end up on this career path instead?
Even when I was in high school, I was working as an actor because it was the easiest way to earn some extra money and I had enough time to do my homework… Then when I moved out to New York, I was going to go to continue my education in the law. That was always the intention; I was going to be a lawyer. But I had to work as well, you see, and so I looked around me and I saw that the [acting] track was pretty fast. And I thought that if I was going to work in New York as an actor I should study some of that at least. Otherwise, I’d be unemployed and I’d starve to death and terrible things would happen.

So I began to study. I started studying with Stella Adler, who was one of the most famous teachers of the Stanislavsky system in New York. I realized after about a year with Stella that this was really what I wanted to do. And that began 12 years — and I’m not joking or exaggerating — of study. I studied two and half years with Stella Adler, four years with Harold Clurman, the founder of the Group Theatre, two years with Robert Lewis, also of the Group Theatre. I started studying voice; I studied almost up to the operatic level. I studied dance and became enamored of that. I studied modern dance. I studied classical ballet to the point where I actually choreographed a ballet for Ballet Theater. This was an extraordinary time of my life.

When you first started working with the Actor’s Studio, what was your role?
I was a director. I was invited by Norman Mailer and his wife, Norris Church, both now sadly deceased. And at that time — this was about 20 years ago — many cultural institutions were in dire straits, as cultural institutions frequently are. And we were looking for ways to somehow support the studio, and I said to myself, why does the studio not have a school? And I went to the president of the New School… and I said, “What if I was able to provide you with a major drama school? What if I could get my colleagues to create…a degree-granting program?” Then he said, “Where do I sign?”… I had no intention of staying with it. I was just doing it on behalf of the studio.

When did you develop the show, Inside the Actor’s Studio?
At the same time. We were accredited very quickly, which we hadn’t expected. Suddenly, there we were and I thought, we’ll do a master class, a seminar, because I had people who would teach. All of our core classes are taught by members of the Actor’s Studio, life members, and I had stars like Ellen Burstyn and Arthur Penn and people like that who would come and teach a six-week course, and that was all they could give us because they were working very hard.

And then I had people like Paul Newman who wouldn’t do that, so I sent a letter to a bunch of them and asked if they could give me one night. Can you give me one night for a master class and I’ll conduct an interview? Paul Newman said yes, Dennis Hopper said yes, Sally Field said yes, and that was just as we were starting, in the weeks before we opened our doors. So I sent word back to television people, where I had worked as a producer and writer and actor, and I said, “I see something worth preserving. Is anyone interested?” And Bravo, to its eternal credit, said yes. And so we began the school and these master classes at the same time, in the fall of 1994.

What determines who you invite on the show?
It’s very simple. I ask myself one question: Does this person have something to teach our students? That is the criteria. And it’s worked very well for us. And I thought we would stick to craft, no gossip, no nonsense like that, not like other talk shows… What I didn’t realize is that if I were to ask you about the turning points in your life, about whatever lead you to wherever you are now, who are the people and what are the moments and the events that shaped you… as a person, you would find the same thing as everybody on the show: that the most painful moments are often the most emotional. And that’s why we’ve kept the reputation of reducing our guests to tears but I didn’t expect that; it wasn’t something I had anticipated. Bradley Cooper couldn’t stop crying for the whole time we were on our stage. He was trained by us; he’s a graduate of our school.

The other fateful decision I made is that there would be no pre-interview. None. It’s the only talk show in America that has absolutely never had a pre-interview and never will. That forces us into a conversation, and the guest doesn’t know what’s coming next, and I have to spend two weeks, 12 hours a day, preparing for it because no one is out there doing a pre-interview. Nothing is handed to me. I get raw material from my researcher… and then I watch all the movies, read everything that the person has written about himself or herself, and I go through all the articles that have been written about them, and from that I distill the blue cards, which are approximately 300-500 [cards] for each person. And then they come to me and they’re on stage with me for three and a half to four hours, up to five or six hours, because it’s a class. The students would stay all night. I literally threw [the cast of] Mad Men and Glee out of there in the middle of the night.

There are a few commonalities that you have found in the people you’ve interviewed over the years, like coming from divorced families.
That is the dominant theme.

Are there others you’ve found in your years interviewing actors?
Shyness. Many of them are shy, were shy as children and are shy to this day. So shyness is one. These are things you would not expect. Most people think they’re all supremely confident, because once they step in front of a camera or on stage they are. But the reason that they are is that they are overcoming something always, and that something is usually shyness. Very often one of the motivating factors is a loss of a parent, either from death or through divorce where it happens at an early age where something in them says “I’m going to show you; you’re going to see.” And so the drive begins.

Have you ever been completely caught off guard by someone’s answer?
Oh, frequently. Those are some of the best moments. I’ve done my cards and I’m expecting a certain answer, and it goes off in a random direction and that’s when we find ourselves galloping off together. I’ve compared it to a high wire in the circus. We come out on stage, there are our students out front, I go up one rope ladder on one side of the stage, and the guest goes up the other, and we meet on a high wire after three or four or five hours.

Have you ever asked someone to come on the show and they’ve refused?
Sometimes they can’t come because of their schedules. The only person who ever absolutely refused was Marlon Brando, because by the time I started the show — although he was a member of the Actor’s Studio and had been trained by Stella Adler as I was; we knew each other, and we used to talk on the phone for hours at a time — but by that time he was already reclusive. I couldn’t get him out of the house and neither could anyone else.

You’ve been doing the show for 18 seasons now. How much longer do you think you can keep up the 12-hour days seven days a week?
For as long as I live. I love it so. It’s very much a part of my life, and I think I’m very much a part of its life, and I’ve never thought ever, ever of stopping for any reason ever. We’re already starting to cast next season.

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Amanda Ernst is a freelance writer living in New York. She also manages business development and social media marketing for B5 Media, the publisher of five women’s lifestyle sites.

Marian Salzman has made a career out of predicting the future — or at least the trends of the future. Known for her annual list of trend predictions and work on influential campaigns for major brands like Pepsi and Aol, a career in advertising gave her the room to think big. But she didn’t realize just how much her own perspective would change until, right before making a TV appearance in the summer of 2007, what she initially dismissed as “the worst cold known to man” turned out to be anything but.

“My makeup artist at Good Morning America said, ‘Hey Marian, I’m not sure if we’re going to keep booking you; you’re starting to look terrible.’ And instead of reacting like every vain, middle-aged woman, I said, ‘I think I have a brain tumor,'” Salzman recalled.

After getting confirmation from a doctor and going through treatment, Salzman decided to give up her jetsetting lifestyle as CMO of JWT and enter the world of PR — a world that, although she’s grown to love, doesn’t always agree with her way of thinking.

Name: Marian Salzman
Position: CEO, Euro RSCG Worldwide PR North America
Resume: Started a career in advertising after co-founding a small market research firm with Jay Chiat in the 90’s. Became head of new media and consumer insights at Chiat/Day, then moved to TBWA when the agency was sold. Served as the worldwide director of TBWA’s Department of the Future and helped launch Apple’s Think Different campaign. Left for Young & Rubicam, then headed to Euro RSCG as EVP and chief strategic officer. Named CMO of JWT and, later, CMO of Porter Novelli. Returned to Euro RSCG to run the company’s PR agency in 2009 and was promoted to CEO last year. Author of 15 books and winner of countless awards.
Birthday: February 15
Hometown: Bergen County, New Jersey
Education: Studied sociology at Brown University
Marital status: Lives with her boyfriend and his four children
Media Idol: Carrie Bradshaw. “Because I feel that she is both acting and writing simultaneously.”
Guilty pleasure: Trash novels, New York Post and eating dinner for breakfast
Last book read: Falling Apart in One Piece by Stacy Morrison
Twitter handle: @mariansalzman

With the job market the way it is now, many people are thinking of changing industries. For example, people with journalism backgrounds are thinking that PR would be more lucrative.
I’m going to be honest: It is a more lucrative way to go. It’s not as pure a way to go. In journalism, you can chase the good story. In PR, you are forced to craft the good story. Notice my choice of words? I believe if you are enormously hard working and incredibly able, you will do very, very well in the PR business.

What does it entail today to get into the industry and be successful if you’re making a transition from another field like journalism?
I think you need to have a vast amount of intellectual curiosity. You need to have an enormous amount of personal flexibility. You’ve got to not only be interested in the great story but the great package. Some of it’s the aesthetics; some of it’s the spin in terms of you have to figure out how to both be radically transparent about the facts, but then position the facts in such a way that the consuming public can absorb them.

I’ve never met a journalist who doesn’t have the skills. They’re great writers; they are great interviewers. They tend to be pretty well organized intellectually. They may not be great with budgets, so they need to have basic budgeting skills.

How was making the transition from advertising to PR for you?
In advertising, you have very, very large budgets and you are very aesthetic. So, I was used to big budgets where there is a lot of room to experiment and things are very aesthetically pleasing and very visual. In PR, things are not as aesthetic; there’s not as much attention placed on how things look, and there was no margin for error because the numbers are so tight. Also, PR people tend to be afraid, and advertising people tend to be provocateurs. And so I had a very hard time… because I’ve grown up in a world of, ‘There’s no such thing as a mistake; there’s just a bigger challenge to repair.’ Because that’s the nature of the advertising industry: You’re only as big as your last failure.

So did you go in and make a big mess?
No, I went in and challenged every assumption. I’m the kind of person that looks at the faucet and says, “Wait, we have a hot water and a cold water faucet here. Shouldn’t our third faucet be miso soup, because in my house the third most popular beverage is miso soup?” And you say that in a PR agency and they’ll say, “What?” You say that in an ad agency and they’ll say, “What are you talking about? It should be watermelon shots.” That would be the beginning of a difference.

I wasn’t used to all this group think. In an ad agency you’re really on your own; it’s sink or swim. You’re really out there with a couple of other people just thinking great thoughts and just doing and pushing the envelope from a young age. In PR, it’s really hierarchical. In advertising, there’s a badge of honor for being really young and really smart and getting it really fast.

And it seems like you thrived in that kind of environment.
Right. To me, age has no place in the conversation. I don’t care if you’re 19 or 91. If you have the answer for me, you can sit next to me. I don’t believe in physical offices. I think offices are the most middle class permutation on work. And so I think PR — where people are worried about the corner office, the big couch — just give me a computer and let me work. Again, I don’t believe in titles. I have this big title, big deal. Can you just tell me what needs to be done? So that’s really off-putting to a lot of PR directors.

Do you feel like the definition of PR has been changing? Just a few weeks ago there was a definition of PR that came out…
Those imbeciles at PRSA [Public Relations Society of America]. I’m trying to figure out what kind of committee would form a committee and then retain consultants to figure out the definition of what they do. Every agency has to figure out what its deliverable is. I believe we’re in the business of newscasting. I love the media relations side of it, so to me, I’ve pushed us away from the high flying, brand building stuff, which I still see as more brand consultancy and ad agency stuff. And I love the newscasting, the making news side of it. That’s just my opinion, but I don’t think we need trade organizations to sit down and figure out the definition of public relations. We need a different industry if that’s what we need.

What can women in any industry do to get to the CEO level?
I actually think it’s a lot easier to do than people realize, but it’s about making choices. And I think men tend to be more prepared to make the choices. You have to choose to delay your family plans well into your 30’s. You have to be prepared to live on at least three continents early in your career. And that means that someone’s career is going to come first, and someone’s career is going to have to come second, so you have to be in a subordinated relationship, which means that guys have to be prepared to be with a partner who is going to be subordinated, and women have to be prepared to be with a partner who is going to be subordinated. And I think if you’re going to be comfortable with that, that’s fine. It creates a lot of serial relationships; I think people move in and out of things as they grow through them.

How has your methodology or strategy for predicting trends changed over the years?
Because of social media, I’m in communication with 8,500 people on Twitter alone. I was just doing a piece for CNBC on the state of real estate in Dubai, and I put out a tweet question and I was in touch with 35 people who really know the state of real estate in Dubai. So, it’s very different. I can have real-time conversations on really any topic.

Is there a trend that you regret making or that you wish you could take back?
Oh, sure. I wish the whole real estate collapse… I could have postponed it long enough to remortgage or sell houses that I own. I always think these trends are never going to impact me. I’m very good at advising other people; I’m absolutely stupid when it comes to myself. I’m not very good at acting myself; I’m good at observing.

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Amanda Ernst is a freelance writer living in New York. She also manages business development and social media marketing for B5 Media, the publisher of five women’s lifestyle sites.

If there were one person who could shoulder most of the credit (or, if you prefer, blame) for the popularity of reality shows, it would be Jon Murray, co-creator of The Real World, one of the longest standing and much-imitated reality shows in TV history.

After the success of The Real World, which premiered on MTV in 1992, Murray and his business partner, Mary-Ellis Bunim, went on to innovate the reality genre further with the development of the first reality game show, Road Rules, for MTV and the first reality sitcom The Simple Life on E! in 2003. After Bunim’s death in 2004, Murray continued to lead the company they founded together, Bunim/Murray Productions, and produced a slew of successful shows, including Project Runway, Keeping Up With The Kardashians (and the family’s whole line-up) and The Bad Girls Club.

Today, you’ll find the executive producer working on BMP’s current slate of shows from conception to casting to editing, or funding independent film and documentary projects like Autism: The Musical and Pedro, a scripted film based on the life of Real World cast member and AIDS activist Pedro Zamora. “Our main business is always going to be reality and nonfiction,” Murray said of his production company. “But, if it’s appropriate, we’d love to do other things that still fit our core DNA.”

Name: Jonathan Murray
Position: Chairman and founder of Bunim/Murray Productions
Resume: Worked as a news producer at local TV stations before joining HRP, a television rep firm in New York, where he helped local stations buy and schedule their syndicated programming. Started pitching and developing his own ideas and was paired up with Mary-Ellis Bunim by his agent Mark Itkin in 1987 to work on a pilot called Crime Diaries. Bunim and Murray liked working together so much, Murray moved out to Los Angeles and the two founded Bunim/Murray Productions. Today, the company also produces documentaries and independent films and has a music management arm.
Birthday: October 26
Hometown: Syracuse, NY
Education: Two years at SUNY Geneseo before ultimately getting a Bachelor’s in journalism from University of Missouri
Marital status: Has a partner, Harvey, and a son Dylan
Media Idol: Grant Tinker, television producer and former NBC CEO
Guilty pleasure: British costume dramas, like Downton Abbey
Last book read: History of a Pleasure Seeker by Richard Mason

When you were first pitching Real World, it was a unique idea. Were you surprised when it initially got picked up?
We only pitched it to MTV, because we had been working with MTV on an idea for a scripted show about young people starting out their lives. And when the network decided they didn’t want to do a scripted show, we pitched the idea to do an unscripted show of young people starting out their lives and sort of laid out our ideas… We were thrilled when they agreed to do a pilot. And we did that, and then they took a long time to pick up the show’s first season as they struggled with whether they wanted to do something more than music videos. At that point, most of their programming was very inexpensive, because it was mostly free or it was studio-based. So this was a big step for them, so they took it very cautiously. When they decided to pick it up after about nine months of debating the merits on whether they should or not, we were thrilled. And then we did the first season, and it was an immediate success, and then we had to figure out how to do it again and again.

Why do you think it took so long for the broadcast networks to start including reality TV on their schedules?

The people who were in charge of the networks had all come out of scripted television, and they just didn’t get it. They just didn’t understand it. We would go to various places and people would ask us, ‘So basically what you do is all improv, right? You bring everyone together and you improv the shows? You have a script and you improv?’ There was just no understanding of how we did this. They just couldn’t understand that if you chose the right people and put them in a house together and just filmed what happened you would get something as compelling as The Real World turned out to be. It just took a while. Quite honestly, most of the people who run broadcast networks are conservative and cautious and live in fear of getting fired, so it took the success [of Big Brother] in Europe before they felt they could take a chance on this… It was a slow process.

How much of what ends up on the air is actually what happened, and how much is prompted by producers, staged or edited to be more exciting?
Well, everything is edited. Every journalist, every writer edits things to make them more exciting. That’s the nature of storytelling. You’re going to leave boring stuff out. So, that’s always a false charge. The Real World is pretty pure. We don’t prompt them; we don’t tell them what to do. We didn’t tell Tami [in Season 2] to find herself pregnant and we didn’t tell her to terminate her pregnancy. This is what happens. In some seasons we’ll give them a part-time job, but we don’t tell them what do to, how to react to each other; we don’t tell them to fight; we don’t tell them to drink alcohol.

Other shows, like Kardashians, are shows where it’s stuff that goes on in these people’s lives. We usually sit down at the beginning of the season and figure out what they’re going to be doing and then we cover it. While we were covering the current season of Kardashians, Kris Jenner had come out with a book, and in it she talked about a relationship she had during her marriage to Robert Kardashian and how that hurt her family. That book and that story in the book, a lot of stuff has happened since that came out that has prompted a lot of stuff in their lives, and we’ve covered that as part of the new season.

With Kim and her marriage, she showed up for Kourtney and Kim Take New York a week after the honeymoon, and we just documented what happened, and it was pretty clear that these two people maybe weren’t exactly right for each other, that they didn’t have as much going for them as a couple as they thought they had when they entered the relationship. Every reality show’s producing method is different. I can’t speak for other people’s shows, but I find, generally, the closer you stick to the truth, the better the show. I think when producers try to prompt stuff or stage stuff, it usually falls flat. These are not actors and staging stuff, in my opinion, usually ends up with bad acting.

Maybe you can put to rest, once and for all, whether the show’s producers had any involvement in Kim’s decision to get married. Or was that a decision she came to all on her own?
No, of course not, Kim did not seek us out as to who she should marry, nor should she. All we’re doing as producers is saying, ‘Kim, we want to cover it.’ We want to shoot the marriage, hell, if they’d let us we’d go on the honeymoon with them. (They didn’t let us.) We’re just the people who document what happens. I would not want the responsibility of telling Kim what to do in her romantic life.

On the latest season of Kourtney and Kim, it seemed there were moments when Kim was dealing with her relationship with Kris and trying to escape your cameras. When stars try to escape the cameras during a crucial moment in their storyline, what’s going on for you as a producer of the show?
We are sympathetic to the people on our shows, and with Kim there are times when, yeah, we leave the room. She needs some privacy, so we give it to her. But, overall, the Kardashians as a family have been incredibly trusting in their relationship with us and their openness to the camera. And that’s why I think the show is so good because they do not yell, “Stop filming!” They are very much supportive of our need to film it as it happens and then, if we have to, we’ll sit down afterwards with the network and decide whether something should air or not air. But it’s really important that as much as possible they let us do our jobs as producers so that we can gather the story, because it’s so much better when we have that freedom. I think that’s why the show works. It’s not just a bunch of phony set-up stuff. It’s really stuff that happens in this family’s lives and they let us shoot it.

What do you think Mary-Ellis would think of the current state of reality TV and TV in general?
I like she’d be excited by it. I think she would love the fact that reality has become a larger genre for many different kinds of reality programs. I think she’d love that there are so many networks from History Channel to A&E to Style to E! to Oxygen that embrace reality programming. And that even networks like TNT and TBS that have done a lot of scripted programming have embraced reality. AMC is embracing some reality programming. So I think it’s an exciting time.

What advice would you have for someone who wants to work in or create reality TV?
I get asked that question a lot by young people, and I [tell them] if you really do have a passion for reality programming when you come out of college, you have to work in it and you need to get that first job. I think we hire 20 to 30 young people each year to start out as PAs and loggers and all these different entry-level jobs. And I always tell them that you really need to work in it to understand it. Get a good liberal arts education. I’m always looking for people who think well, who are curious, who can write well, who are well-read, who understand story, and then we can teach them most of the rest of the stuff as a company. They come to us and we help them figure out where they’re going to go with their career, whether they want to focus on story editing, or editing or they want to be in production. It’s the only way I think you can really create reality programming… I think it’s something that’s best learned while you do it and you work your way up.

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Amanda Ernst is a freelance writer living in New York. She also manages business development and social media marketing for B5 Media, the publisher of five women’s lifestyle sites.

You may have noticed a certain hashtag this past New Year‘s: #codeyear. The hashtag spread across the Twittersphere as users pledged to make 2012 the year they would learn HTML code.

The company behind the push, Codecademy, was just a few months old at the time, but founders Zach Sims and Ryan Bubinski felt their teaching tool could make coding easy and fun to learn — and users agreed. Just a few days after the site’s launch in August 2011, over 200,000 users had started an easy HTML lesson, and over a million had tested it out by the end of the year, Sims says. And, thanks to the viral marketing push on Twitter, Sims thinks there’s a good chance this could be the year everyone learns to program together.

How did the idea for Codecademy come about?
My co-founder and I have known each other for a long time. We started working on some projects together starting in January [2011]. My co-founder started a group at Columbia, where we were students, called the Application Development Initiative that was basically focused on teaching people to program. And we started working on a bunch of different things, sort of random projects. Ryan was a biophysics and computer science major; I was a political science major and I worked at a number of start-ups in the past, always doing user experience product stuff, business development stuff.

And what we found is that I wasn’t as good of an engineer as Ryan. So, I started working to become as good an engineer as Ryan was, and I was reading books and watching videos, and I really just found the whole process incredibly frustrating. So, we basically wanted to make something better. And we thought about the problems I was having learning to code, and we thought about how we could solve them. And that’s why a lot of what we built is easy for people to get started on, easy for them to follow, and we try to make everything really, really simple.

So this idea came out of your own desire to learn how to code. Do you think it’s important for everyone to learn to code?
I think coding is 21st century literacy. Traditionally, there are the 3 R’s of literacy: it was just reading, writing and arithmetic. And we think the fourth should be algorithms. I think it’s a better way of understanding what’s going on; you’re using your phone all the time, using your computer. But, beyond that, it’s just a skill that’s virtually guaranteed to turn you into a maker. As soon as you can program you can build things.

Codecademy garnered over 200,000 users within the first few days of launch. What do you attribute that sudden success to?
I think we made it really easy for people. I think that’s really the most important thing: We made it super simple for everyone to get started. It’s always like, download a program, download instructions, set up your programming environment, purchase seven different books. So, we really consolidated resources, and we built an educational experience for consumers based on other consumer Internet companies and things we learned by building products for consumers.

We were lucky enough that our users got the word out for us. They were the ones that put it on Facebook and Twitter; they were the ones who shared it with other people. We never did any advertising or anything; it was all user-driven.

How did you go about getting funding the project?
We were lucky; we already had a bunch of traction for us to raise money from the investors that we knew we wanted to raise money from. We knew Union Square Ventures, obviously by reputation, but also because I had worked with some of the people there at previous companies before. So, for us, it was really all about the people and we found a good match with them. It is easy to negotiate with the right people, so it was definitely a smooth process and we’re very fortunate for that.

You make it sound so easy to get funding, but I’m sure it was a lot of work. Did you write a business plan? Did you struggle to get meetings with investors? How did it all come to fruition?
The product that we were building already had a ton of traction. We had gathered users very quickly; we already had the product built. The relevancy of a business plan is less so than it has been in the past. Obviously, PowerPoint decks and well-thought out explanations of what you’re doing are important, but, at the same time, having a product built and executed is important too, and we already had that.

What are the biggest hurdles that you faced in launching the app?
For us, it was figuring out what we wanted to build, figuring out what it would look like, and how to get it into the hands of the right people, and how to get them to continue to use the app and tell their friends about it. Could it really awaken a collective feeling that, “We need to learn to code” in people who normally wouldn’t? This wasn’t a social website that fits into people’s everyday behavior; we want them to do something new that they didn’t want to learn before.

Around New Year’s 2012, your company used the hashtag #codeyear to motivate people to learn how to code. How did that come about?
We decided that we wanted this to be something that everyone had in their collective consciousness, and we thought that right around New Year’s resolutions was a really good way for people who wouldn’t traditionally code to get started with something new that they wouldn’t do otherwise. So, it was a great opportunity to get the word out that way.

What are your ultimate goals for Codecademy?
This is what we want to do for the next 20 years. We want to build something that’s easy to explain for anyone to program. And we’ll keep doing that for a while and do it with different languages. We’ll diversify our method of teaching, but it will all be with the same goal in mind.

Zach’s Tips For Launching A Successful App:
1. Create an app you — and your users — will love. “Don’t settle for something that you think might make you a lot of money that you don’t think you can do for a long time,” Sims says. “Build something that will really make a difference in the world.”

2. That hole in the market is staring you in the face. Sims and Bubinski just asked themselves, “What are you having difficulties with in your own life that you think you can fix?”

3. But you should have the expertise to execute. With Bubinski’s coding background and Sims’ experience with user experience products, they could create a useful, user-friendly tool.

4. Build it and investors will come. “If you build something that people want to use, it’s much easier to get it to investors and to get investors to understand things,” Sims says. “For us, going in with traction was much easier for us than going [in front of investors] and saying, this is something that we think will be really cool.”

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Amanda Ernst is a freelance writer living in New York. She also manages business development and social media marketing for B5 Media, the publisher of five women’s lifestyle sites.