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Here are some excellent tips about resumes from Melanie Huff, careers services director at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and coordinator of SAJA's annual convention. Also below are sample resumes to guide you.

Resume Tips & Sample Resumes
By Melanie Huff <mgh2@columbia.edu>
Career services director, Columbia Journalism School
http://jrn.columbia.edu/careers

The first thing to know about resumes is that most employers give them only a 30-second glance, so to make the most of it, your resume must be precise, clean, readable and complete. Melanie Huff is always available to critique and guide you in the resume writing process.

There are two basic elements to consider in preparing your resume: information and presentation.

Information
Name, address and phone number: Use the name you use for bylines. Your clips and resume should have the same name. While in school, you should use both your current and permanent addresses and phone numbers. A resume you sent out in December may be kept on file and looked at again for something in June and if you can't be found, you won't be considered for the job (some graduates have heard back as late as six months after sending an application).

Position Desired/Objective: You must be very careful when using an objective that you convey the message you want understood. Too vague or too specific objectives create problematic impressions. They should be included only if you are willing to tailor your resume for each application. Here are some possible objectives and their potential pitfalls:

"Objective: To utilize my skills as a print or broadcast journalist." This objective is both broad and vague. It gives the impression that you neither know what medium or what position you want. If you are applying for both print and broadcast positions, have resumes that are specific to each field.

"Objective: to be a feature reporter for a large metropolitan daily." Since most entry-level positions are neither in features nor at large papers, an editor at a small daily may think you have no interest in a general assignment reporting position.

Your objective should say what you want to do (report, edit, produce) right now at the specific organization to which you are sending it. When applying to an organization that offers news in multiple mediums in which you are interested, demonstrate that you know what they do and what you have to offer in your cover letter.

Education: List all colleges you have attended in reverse chronological order with your major and date of graduation. Make sure the presentation for each entry matches (B.A. should line up with M.S., Bachelor of Arts with Master of Science, etc). Also include study abroad and workshops. "M.S. expected May 1998" is the most common way of listing Columbia prior to graduation.

Experience: List these in reverse chronological order with your dates of employment (failure to include dates doesn’t protect you from age discrimination, it makes you seem evasive). Include name, city and state of employer. If you have had some journalism jobs and some other work, you may want to split your resume into "journalism experience" and "other experience" categories. If your journalism experience is in different types of media, you may want to break it into ‘broadcast," "print" or "new media." You must account for all of your time since graduating from college.

For each entry, you need to describe what it is you did in a manner that shows what you are capable of doing. The writing should be simple and clear. Avoid unnecessary words: not "responsible for editing," but "edited." Use active verbs, "wrote," "researched" "created." Quantify your work. What size market was your television station? What was the circulation of your paper? How many people did you supervise?

The rule for which comes first, the "education" section or the "experience" section, is to lead with your strongest journalism credential. If you have very solid experience in journalism, you lead with it; if pursuing graduate work here is the most important thing you have done in journalism, you should lead with education.

Skills: Your computer, data retrieval and editing equipment skills can make the difference between you and someone with comparable experience who is without them. Also fluency or even familiarity with other languages is important. (Everything you learn in Tools can be listed here)

Professional Affiliations: Membership demonstrates a commitment to journalism (eg. Society of Professional Journalists which you can join here at school)

Honors And Awards: List those for journalism achievement and those of interest to employers. Those from high school are no longer relevant.

Interests: This is an optional category. It should only be included if you have done something unusual, noteworthy, or of interest to an employer. Be prepared to discuss it in an interview. (eg. expert skier listed on a resume for an application to Aspen magazine)

References: References are best presented on a separate reference sheet. (see references section) This saves room on the resume and allows you to tailor your list of references to the job for which you are applying.

Personal Information: Age, sex, weight, height, nationality, health, marital status, number of children, etc. are not listed on American resumes. By law employers aren't allowed to ask about or consider these factors when evaluating you for a job.

Resume Reel/Audition Tape: Those students seeking employment in radio and television will have the opportunity to put together a tape in the spring semester under the guidance of the broadcast faculty.

Presentation 
Resumes are now made available to and used by employers in a variety of ways. You must choose a format that best suits your means of transmission and the needs of the news organization.

Traditional Paper Resumes: This is the basic resume that one sends to an employer with a cover letter in the mail. It must be easy to read. Too many fonts or a tiny typeface make resumes difficult to follow. Use all-caps, bold face and italicizing to make titles, organizations and category headings easy to locate. Your resume must fit on ONE page; only very rarely are additional pages warranted.

Cyber Resumes: see below.
Scanning and E-mail
By Joe Grimm
Recruiting and Development Editor, Detroit Free Press
http://www.freep.com/jobspage
(copyright 2001 Detroit Free Press - used with permission)

As the world becomes increasingly digitized, piles of paper resumes will become computerized files.

Electronic resumes, sent as plain text in the body of an E-mail message (not as attachments), go right in. (Attachments or resumes in word processor or encoded formats are a no-no.) Paper resumes must be scanned. The computer hangs onto a digitized picture of the resume, and creates another version of the resume, from which it extracts words and dates that can be searched over the Web by editors and managers across the country.

To make your resume scanner-friendly, follow these steps that make your resume look sharp to the digital eye, without making it look dull to the human eye:

• Use plain, white paper. Dark paper can make your resume near impossible to scan-- or even photocopy. If you want your resume's paper stock to be distinctive, stick close to white, but go with a slightly heavier stock or choose a distinctive texture. Do not choose a textured paper with colored fibers in it. That will drive the scanner batty.
• Use black print, 12 points or larger. Colored inks generally don't look very professional, anyway, and aging editors like type they can read, too. Don't use bold-face or italic type. People generally don't mind this, but scanners have trouble with it. Instead, use columns and spacing to emphasize your key points or to categorize information.
• Run type in one direction only (don't mix vertical and horizontal). Do not use underlines or borders. Extraneous features add little to a resume, anyway.
• Do not use those cutesy little icons and pictures. They give scanners headaches and can make an editor gag.

TWO SAMPLE RESUMES

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