Alexa Lash

I create, design, and write for the Emerson College Journalism Department’s newsletter. Below is an article I wrote about what journalism students should do to get a job after they graduate for our most recent issue (April/May 2012).

The designed page:

So You Graduated. Now What?
By Alexa Lash

Whether you dread or embrace graduation doesn’t matter; you’re graduating. But being a journalist should be a comfort: you’re good at research, you know how to talk to people, how to network; and the jobs you are applying for aren’t the regular 9-to-5s (for the most part). But like any good article, your next steps after graduation require an outline, quotes, and attention to detail. You must attack your post-grad life with equal ardor. The story of your life is too significant not to make a front page. As a recent graduate, here are a few tips for what to start doing now that you’ve flown the educational coop.

Clip It Together
You should be saving every piece you publish, and highlighting your best pieces in an online portfolio. For broadcast students, make sure your reel is clean, organized, and showcases your best work. If you don’t already have one, consider creating a website with links to your reel, print/electronic portfolio, and resume. You could also add a blog element to showcase more of your writing (but don’t make this your only writing sample).

Get Connected
Find out from your professors if they know someone who’s hiring (your professors are a valuable resource when it comes to getting a job). Attend alumni events, and bring your business card when you’re going to meet visiting speakers and students. Trade contact information with classmates and keep in touch—you never know who will be your next coworker, or even your boss. Keep connected on a professional network like LinkedIn. Attend conferences and networking events with desired employers.

See the Sites
The dedicated job-seeker should be visiting sites with frequent journalism job postings such as mediabistro.com. Follow job sites on Twitter and Facebook. Visit the employment section of companies you want to work for.

Do Your Post-Grad Homework
If you want to work somewhere specific, or you want to pitch a story to a particular publication, get to know the names of your editors. Use an online resource or a directory such as Bacons Media Directory (available at the Emerson Library). Become familiar with the style and content of the company you’re contacting—employers take notice of a good journalist who’s done his/her research.

Think Small
You may not come out of school with your dream job at a big company, but you do have ways of getting to it. Don’t be afraid to work for a small publication or network. Oftentimes, you’ll end up doing more types of work, and end up with more diversified experience than other candidates you’re up against when applying at a large publication.

Practice, Practice, Practice
Write in a blog, take video of an event, but don’t stop using the skills you learned in college. You want to remain active with your journalism skills. Doing this can also lead to stories you may want to pitch in a cover letter, or to a publication as a freelance piece.

Master Your Skills
If you’re graduating as an undergraduate, don’t rule out getting your Master’s degree. This is a great tactic in finding a specialization (such as science journalism), and an effective tool if you want to later teach Journalism.

I create, design, and write for the Emerson College Journalism Department’s newsletter. Below is an article I wrote about editing for our most recent issue (February/March 2012).

The designed page:

An Editor’s Work is Not Quite Never Done
By Alexa Lash

Despite the fact I’m out of college, it doesn’t mean I’ve stopped writing and editing; I live by the credo that a paper without edit marks is just words on a page. You need to look back at what you’ve written, to breathe grammatical life into unedited sentences. And if you find yourself in need of ideas, I have a few editing tips that may work for you as they’ve worked for me.

Louder, Please
Reading your work out loud, whether alone, in front of an audience, or to a tape recorder, is important for more than finding repetitive points. You can pick up double words, misspellings, missing words, and tone; flawed logic and weak points. And if you find yourself saying, “I wouldn’t really say that, would I?” then reading out loud has helped you find your voice, too. It’s one of the easiest tricks to self editing, and something I still do with everything from texts and tests, to short stories.

Time Heals All Wounds
Sometimes you need a little distance from your work. If you have the time, or even if you don’t, set down your work for an hour or a few days. Distancing yourself from your writing helps you come back to it with a keener editing eye. You’ll likely see what you would have missed if you’d edited while you wrote.

Book Smarts
Keep your stylebooks close at hand (the real editors do it, so why shouldn’t you?). Some of the texts I have include the 2011 AP Stylebook, the 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, Einsohn’s The Copyeditor’s Handbook, and a dictionary and thesaurus (if you’re not near a computer).

Help Me, Seymore
Don’t ever be afraid to ask for help. Another pair of eyes on your work can be equally, if not more effective than giving your piece distance. Help can range from your college writing center, to a professor or a classmate. Be wary when you ask for your friend’s help; you’ll want an unbiased eye to look at your writing.

Practice Makes Sort Of Perfect
Practice editing and good writing beyond the work you do for school: edit your emails, find mistakes in the newspaper, etc. Offer to edit work for other people.

A Pen of a Different Color
When you’re editing your work, or having a friend edit, pick a pen color that doesn’t terrify you. Red is such a strong color; picking an alternate hue, like purple, will ease the stress and be less of a burden to look at if there are a lot of edits needed on a page.

Three Strikes
You should be editing your work more than once. You can do different types of editing to multiple drafts, or split your editing between local (line-by-line) and global (major aspects such as overall theme and focus) types. If you look at your draft once and think it’s perfect, at least hand it over to another person to see if it’s clean copy. You’d be surprised with what you miss.

Avoid the Easy
As wonderful as programs like Word are, you shouldn’t depend on them. Homophones and dual spellings can be overlooked. And if you use fragments for effect, it’ll keep marking those statements incorrect. Once you know the rules of grammar, breaking them can be OK, with care.

Reflect the Possibilities
This tip is one I learned from a leadership program. Put your goals on a mirror: editing goals, what grade you’re going for. Having what you want written out helps you get the work done, and pushes you harder to achieve those goals if you see them every morning when you brush your teeth (or so we hope).

When someone gives me an idea, I can’t help but react by being happy about it. For once, I have an excuse to procrastinate. None of this deadline stuff; just a friend, an idea, and a potential piece of mediocre to fabulous writing.

So this is the idea: pressure on sentences.

And this is the friend: Monty [Montague] Kaplan (see photo).

I have dubbed the following “Under Pressure” simply because I love Queen. The pun, well, that just worked out in the end.

Under Pressure

I loved the way she looked at me, her eyes peeking above and below me, stumbling their way unabashedly back to the middle, touching a finger under words like “sexy” and “anneal.” She lingered there, breathing in, then out as she exited from a phrase with a semicolon; and I lay there without words, panting hyperbolic. Moments like these make my life worthwhile. I’ve been used, interrupted, even cut short sometimes, but for a sentence, this is to be expected. What hurts most is when your life is punctuated—taken from a complex thing to a simple phrase often overlooked. A supporting role in the theater of a page. Enter stage right, then die quietly like Villager #4.

At least that goddamn fragment is getting some action. Look at him, tucked between an exclamation point and a period. And I thought the thesis statement had it good over in academics. I wanted to be introductory, conclusive. Anything but stuck in the middle, between some overgrown, puffed up metaphor (much like a cloud), and then some silly little nothing of a thought. It even started with the word “therefore.” For God’s sake, THEREFORE? What are you, Shakespeare? I was supposed to be something, something special. She wrote me down in a little notepad and screamed out, “this’ll be my masterpiece”—I’m telling you, it was deafening. And I could feel pride fill me up like soda up a bottle after you shake it. Me. A sentence. An important sentence. Up there with the greats like “Call me Ishmael.” That dude Herman Melville knew how important it was to make a sentence feel loved. But what do I get? I get shifted, almost crossed out with a red pen. I inspired this piece, my nouns and verbs the muses to the writer. She used to linger.

She rewrote me, revised me. And my heart, in ellipses…suddenly stopped beating.