More advice than a body can stand

And if you're a pending j-school graduate, all of it good and something to consider -- and much better than that 20-minute graduation speech you're going to have to sit through.

Mindy McAdams, dame de multimedia at the University of Florida, began this round of pre-graduation funsies (aka: how to scare the bejeezus out of pending j-school grads -- for their own good, mind you) with a post on "5 things to tell students." The first two:

1. You don’t have to be a programmer. But you need to have more than one skill. Another way to say that is, You need to have more than only print skills.
2. If you have not taken any online skills courses at all, and spring is your final semester, and the intro online course conflicts with one of your required courses that you waited until now to take — sign up for the online course, and delay your graduation. Do you want to graduate? Or do you want a job?

Ryan Sholin adds to the conversation with some good common-sense advice to a student wondering whether he has the skills, even with the multimedia training and internships he's had.

And Deborah Potter at the NewsLab has been on fire with some great posts that "broadcasters" need to pay attention to.

Try this one, for starters about the "Future of News Jobs":

At WLS-TV in Chicago, says producer Don Villar, writers are editing video. At the McClatchy News Service, journalists are programming robots to surf and gather news from sites that McClatchy has the rights to republish. Jane Scholtz of McClatchy says the company thought they’d have programmers do the job, but it turned out to be easier to teach journalists to program than to teach programmers about news. Jonathan Krim of WashingtonPost.com says he needs technical journalists who already know how to create maps and mash-ups, “people who can write code with a journalism perspective.”

The message for students may seem a little mixed. If you hope to work for USA Today and you’re a photographer, learn video, says Foster-Simeon. If you’re a designer, learn Flash. And you should have experience beyond just writing print stories. But what’s most important, he said, is potential. “We’re looking for teachability and openness, and and an understanding of how this this [the news business today] works.”

Or this one:

Michelle Hord, director of off-air recruiting for ABC News, says the answer to the question–where are the journalism jobs–is just one word: Digital. “We have new terms like predators, producers who can also shoot and edit,” she told the Future of Journalism Jobs conference at the University of Maryland. ” It’s all about being able to do everything.” ...

Holly Neilsen, director of video enterprises for Gannett, says “the jobs are going to be there but they’re going to be really different and you’re going to have to be trained differently to do those jobs.” At Gannett, everything is multimedia. “We are reformatting all of our newsrooms to be multimedia 24/7. Everyone is getting new titles. There won’t be line producers any more.” As for backpack journalism, she says, it isn’t new but it’s going to be a big deal. “It may be unpopular but it’s reality.”

And she points to this lovely little tidbit from one of the anchors at KARE-TV in Minneapolis:

Now TV journalists are faced with a new dilemma: punctuation. We really didn't need to worry about having perfect punctuation in our scripts for many years because no one ever saw them. But now we have to write web scripts, which means YOU get to see our punctuation. It's not always pretty. ...
I'll admit this can be a fast-paced business that forces us to write scripts in a matter of minutes. But that should be no excuse for incredibly poor grammar or punctuation.

See, wasn't that better than some speech?