News will find me
I didn't get my first reporting job because I wasn't tech savvy enough. This was back in the 70s and it meant that I wasn't a fast enough typist. True story.
Laugh if you must, but the same holds true today, only the technology has changed.
That's what I told Ryan Thornburg's brown-bag lunch gathering at UNC today. The more students learn blogging, Twitter, social networking, beat blogging, video, programming and the like, the better prepared they'll be to be on the front end of "if the news is important, it will find me" rather than choking on the dust trying to catch up.
When I ask job candidates if they do any of those things and they give me a befuddled look, that tells me something about them.
I don't want to be the smartest one in the room. (I know; no problem there.) I'm more impressed when someone discovers a useful new tool and adapts it to his/her work or tries to. If, say, a job candidate shows me the value of Twitter as a reporting tool, they have a leg up. It tells me that they're keeping up with what's happening in the field.
Innovation is more effective when it comes bottom up than top down.