Sometimes blogging can actually get you out of your pajamas and into your first real gig.
By Ezra Klein, UCLA
Gather round kids, and let me welcome you to Get a Job, a regular feature here at Campus Progress. We know you’re broke. We know you are staring out over the precipice of graduation scared of free-falling into adult life. And we know you’ll soon want a job solving both afflictions. This feature will try to give you some ideas on that front. We started with Gideon Yago last month. Now, every other week, we’ll be profiling a kick-ass progressive holding a position other kick-ass progressives might want. We’ll cover who they are, what they do, how they got there, and then close with some wise words on how you can do it too.
Let’s start things off with Matthew Yglesias, a 23-year-old staff writer for The American Prospect. In January of 2002, he started up an eponymous weblog; by Labor Day of 2003, he was installed as the newest writing fellow at The American Prospect. By the Republican National Convention, he was an acknowledged young up-and-comer. During the RNC “festivities” – that would be the festive part somewhere before Zell Miller’s speech left us all with permanently recurring nightmares – I remember talking to another young journalist who, with a sigh of resignation, told me: “Look, Matt’s a superstar. I’ve accepted that. I just can’t match him.” Shortly thereafter, Paul Krugman spent a column talking about a piece Matt wrote. The kid’s got skills.
But our interest isn’t so much in how he does his job, but how he got his job. To that end, I spoke to him this week about his path upward, and what he’d recommend to those seeking to follow it.
The story, to hear him tell it, is blog-bites-man. Matt was an early adopter of the medium, starting his site “more-or-less on a lark,” with little intention of it becoming an occupation. At the time, he was studying philosophy at Harvard and editing The Independent, a campus newspaper there. But it soon became apparent that the blog, more than the paper, offered a path into professional journalism. A reader e-mailed to tell him of the job at The American Prospect, some journalists who read his site wrote him recommendations, and soon Matt and his computer moved to D.C. to fill the position.
Of course, you might wonder, how exactly did so many assorted journalists land on Matt’s blog? "Back when I started my site, the blogosphere was tiny, and it was easy enough to get links by just emailing a couple of high-profile bloggers whose work I admired.” But nowadays, Matt cautions, “That strategy probably doesn’t work so well. Better to start with people whose audience is big enough to help (i.e., bigger than yours) but not so big that they’ll just ignore you. Beyond that, a lot of people starting blogs seem to overlook the crucial question of quality. You’ve got to fill a valuable niche of some sort, post consistently enough that people want to come back, but not so frequently that you end up turning out stuff that’s no good. There’s no sense in writing a blog that reads like Eschaton or just linking to the same news stories everyone else links to and offering the same sort of commentary, nobody will notice. It’s useful to try and stick to something you actually know something about—my site’s probably a bad model in that regard."
Matt was one of the first to use blogging to enter journalism, but he’s unlikely to be the last. Blogging, he says, “ is a useful way to build an audience for yourself and get a chance to address some national issues that you won’t get to deal with at a school paper.” But with so many aspiring pundits starting blogs and looking to pontificate on more than Student Union openings and campus government screaming matches, his advice has the potential to be overused. To head that off, he told me, “It was an important step, but [blogs] have their limits. My site had some fans at The New Republic, too, but they wouldn’t hire me thanks to, among other things, a really bad job interview. I think it was very important that I had years of experience as a writer and editor for a student magazine in college as well as some internship experience in the journalism world. A blog is a good way to get attention, but it’s not the same thing as magazine writing, which I think editors are very aware of.”
Having cut my own teeth on websites and then having spent a summer at The Washington Monthly, I can back that statement wholeheartedly. The thought required to power 600 clever words rarely has the fuel to motor through four pages of newsprint. Structure, chronology, progression, reportage – blogs demand none of that, but paying positions are rarely as lenient. Nevertheless, Matt’s path will soon cease to be a rare one. All the major progressive magazines have adopted blogs. The American Prospect and The Washington Monthly both have one. The New Republic has two. The Nation has five. Five! So attaining familiarity with the medium won’t hurt you none.
Nor, apparently, will learning a thing or two. After all, there are a lot of bloggers, writers, and newspaper editors out there. How can you get noticed over them? Matt says, “ actually knowing what you’re talking about can be a good way to gain some comparative advantage over other candidates. The low level of understanding many journalists have of policy issues is pretty astounding. College is a good place to learn this stuff and develop a skill or specialty that not every aspiring writer will have.” So back away from the Playstation and go find yourself some think tank reports.
Once you know stuff, people might head to your site to learn it. Among those people might be professional writers who can hook you into the industry. Blogs are a way to make contacts in a profession that’s pretty, in Matt’s words, “connections-oriented.” A fair portion of the media checks in regularly with their favorite bloggers, and the various magazines, particularly The Washington Monthly and The American Prospect, frequently link to blogs aside from their own. And what better way to be noticed by editors than to have your name pop up on their websites, recommended by their very own writers?
But keeping a blog, writing for the paper, “actually knowing what you’re talking about” – it’s a lot of work. So is it worth it? Yglesias thinks so: “ The great thing is that, mostly, my work just consists of doing things I would like to do otherwise: Reading and talking to people about politics, policy, and other ideas. It’s a real pleasure to do something you enjoy. Without that, the transition from having months and months of vacation every year to just two weeks could be pretty awful.”
Eternal sunshine for the political mind. Got it. Here at Get a Job, we like to close out with a bit of wisdom from our world-weary respondents, and Matt offered up a gem to all you over-stressed achievers: “When I was in school I worried too much, as if setting off on a path when I was 22 that turned into a dead end would be some catastrophic setback in life. I felt a pretty strong impulse to do something safe like go to law school, and a lot of other people I know succumbed to it. The reality is that it’s very easy to revise your plans once you’re out in a world that doesn’t operate on a four-year time horizon. Taking a risk or two is well worth your time.”
So write for the newspaper, keep up a blog, learn some policy, and don’t stress over the future. Got it? Now go get a job.
Ezra Klein is a Junior at UCLA. He does have a blog, it’s at http://ezraklein.typepad.com. He does not work for the school newspaper. Which leaves him time to respond to your e-mails: ezrak@ucla.edu. Who do you want to see profiled in Get a Job? Drop him an email and let him know.