A few months ago, I was looking for a way to escape the relentless sunshine of California’s Central Valley, to shorten my 110-mile daily commute, and to move back into journalism and more applied science topics. I had a job many people would consider the kind you keep until retirement, as a science writer at the University of California, Davis, News Service. But I was restless.
Meanwhile, on the east coast, Sylvia Wright was assistant editor of Consumer Reports On Health monthly consumer newsletter. Wright also was working for a respected organization and had the kind of satisfying writing work and solid resume that enabled her to be choosy about her next career move. But she was interested in more of an advocacy role, yearned for a university environment, wanted to move from consumer medicine into hard science, and couldn’t bear another long, gray winter in Brrrrrr-lington, Vermont.
Here’s the happy ending to our story: Wright and I found great new jobs. In fact, she and I virtually traded insider job tips, and the story about how we moved into each other’s worlds offers some lessons in how to identify and land a science journalism or public-information job these days. And our story shows how essential the Internet has become at three key steps in the process.
Independent of the Internet, the goals and strategies of job-hunting necessarily depends upon where you’re going and where you’ve been. Wright and I are both in what you might call mid-career. We’ve got enough experience, skills and clips to support reasonably impressive resumes. We know talented colleagues who like us well enough to offer flattering words on our behalf to prospective employers. We can count on getting another job of the same type, but if we want to find a slightly different or better job, we have to work at it.
This is in contrast to the early stage, where newer science writers cast a wider net looking for more fundamental training and essential experience, such as the police reporting job that Deborah Blum recalls in A Field Guide for Science Writers as giving her the basic reporting skills and valuable lessons that led to a Pulitzer 20 years later. There also seems to be a third career stage characterized by prominent reputations and unbidden job offers, such as the one that induced Paul Raeburn to move from Associated Press to Business Week when he hadn’t been looking to change jobs.
Regardless of career stage, most journalists learn to hone job-hunting techniques as assiduously as other writing, editing and interviewing skills. There are good reasons for this. At many publications, it’s as unlikely for a person to move up the masthead or up the editorial ranks as it is for an assistant professor at Harvard to be promoted to full professor. So an ambitious writer or editor may have to move to a new organization for each “promotion.” Also, although science writing seems to be a relatively safe haven from the rampant insecurity of other journalism jobs, many of us frequently find ourselves out of luck and out of work after a bureau closes, a publication changes ownership or a painful round of budget cuts.
Journalism jobs in general, and science writing jobs in particular, are most reliably found through professional networks. One day over lunch, my editor at the San Francisco Chronicle told me that my best strategy for landing a full-time reporting position at a major paper in the San Francisco Bay Area (I was freelancing the occasional piece) was to become an alum of the UC Berkeley journalism graduate school, like him.
In science writing, such networks are similarly defined by journalism schools and educational programs, such as UC Santa Cruz’s science writing certificate program and Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Knight Science Journalism Fellowship. They are also defined by related large professional organizations, such as NASW, European Union of Science Journalists’ Associations and the Society of Environmental Journalists, or independent regional science writing groups, such as the Northern California Science Writers Association.
Even the most tenuous connection goes a long way. Seven years ago, when I had just moved to California, I called Diane McGurgan to change my NASW mailing address. She and the two people on my NASW application were the only people I knew in the group, but it was enough. She had heard UC Davis was looking for a science writer, and I immediately applied — on the last day applications were being accepted.
The Internet has not only made these existing professional networks more powerful, effective and accessible, but has also created new networks, which translates into more opportunities for the savvy job seeker. “The Internet is only part of a successful job line or personal job search,” cautions NCSWA jobs lines coordinator Sheila Stavish. But as Wright and I can attest, the Internet can also be a powerful new system for identifying, researching and competing for a job.
E-mail may be the best Internet tool to find jobs. Many groups run job lines for members or post jobs regularly to listservs (e-mail broadcast to a group of people who sign up for the service), but access is likely to be restricted. For example, only paid-up members can receive the NASW jobs line. (See http://nasw.org for subscribing instructions). Since July 1996, NASW cybrarian Bob Finn reports, “We’ve posted 129 job ads for permanent and temporary full-timers, free-lancers and internships. That’s an average of slightly more than two per week.” Later on the day of posting (usually), co-cybrarian A’ndrea Messer posts all those ads up on the Web-based job archive (http://nasw.org/NASW/jobarch.htm)—also members only —where they remain for 12 weeks (or less if the advertiser requests). Not all listserv ads go into the newsletter (which is published too far into the future for most advertisers), Finn says, and not all newsletter ads go out on the listserv.
ProfNet, best known for an e-mail service that sends reporters’ requests for expertise to member research institutions and businesses, also runs a separateweekly jobs listing for public-information positions. Reporters’ queries are confidential, but the ProfNet Hiring Line is regularly forwarded by recipients to other groups’ e-mail job lists. Six to 20 jobs are posted every Wednesday. (For a free sample of Hiring Line, drop a note to hiring_line@profnet.com, says ProfNet sysop Dan Forbush.) ProfNet members may subscribe simply by dropping a note to newaddress@aol.com, while non-subscribers should send a check for $26 made out to ProfNet, 100 North Country Road, East Setauket, NY 11733, attention Rita O’Brien.
Wright found out about the UC Davis science writing job through the NASW jobs list. It takes time to find and subscribe to the lists that provide the jobs tailored to your interests, skills and location. “Subscribe to listservs while you’re happily employed,” Wright recommends. “You’ll at least stay abreast of what’s happening in your field. And if the day comes when you need to make a job change, you’ll already know a lot about markets, including which ones are growing, what sort of applicants they want, and even if they have red-flag histories, such as worrisome amounts of turnover.” Wright literally drew a latitude line on her map and considered only jobs south of her personal border. That’s when she noticed most of the good science and medical writing jobs seemed to be in the Northeast. She also recommends offering to e-mail a cover letter and resume to demonstrate online savvy.
Another influential e-mail jobs list is run by John Wilkes only for the 115 online alumni of his UC Santa Cruz science writing program. Bay Area science writers and UCSC alumni Blake Edgar and Mary Miller both value the list for leads to freelance assignments. Wilkes posts an average of one job or internship a day from around the country. About half are repeats from other sources, sent in by alumni, Wilkes says, and the rest are usually phoned to him from an employer seeking a small but specialized pool of job candidates. Many of the jobs are exclusive to the list, such as a recent temporary position of environmental writer at UC Davis News Service (to cover for someone on a six-month leave of absence).
“Since I can’t stop the inevitable leakage, I told my grads they could forward postings to friends who might fit the bill,” Wilkes says. “I’ve implored my students to ask their friends who receive our postings to make clear in their application that they are not grads of the program I run.”
On any e-mail job list, Miller recommends taking immediate action. “My only advice is that when you hear about jobs that lots of other people have heard about too: jump very fast. Don’t even wait an hour or two, get that resume and cover letter or something out by e-mail as soon as you read it.”
I found my new job — managing editor of a new specialty consumer health newsletter — because several people began leaking me job postings from another rather exclusive e-mail list run for past and present MIT Knight fellows, a mid-career science writing fellowship. Unlike Wright, who discreetly scouted while employed, I had quit my job and moved to Boston without steady work.
For his fast-growing company, my new boss, Bob Whitaker, a former Knight Fellow and co-owner of the Boston-based publishing company CenterWatch, prefers to post job notices to the Knight list to attract only a small pool of highly qualified candidates. “I don’t have time to wade through a huge stack of resumes and clips,” he says. I had heard about the job before I drove across the country and e-mailed Bob telling him I was interested. He was willing to wait to talk to me in person. Not only was I able to refer to mutual acquaintances in my cover letter and job interview, I was able to quiz those same helpful Knight fellows to research the position and prospective employer before I applied. Most of this happened by e-mail.
The Web is a less efficient and frequently frustrating tool for identifying science writing jobs. There are general jobs sites, such as Monster Board or CareerPath, that harness the power of database search engines to quickly extract jobs with certain key words from the Sunday classified ads of dozens of major newspapers. Some even offer to automatically search under your keywords and e-mail you the results. The problem is that the science writing job you are seeking may never be posted in a major newspaper.
Specialized journalism websites are more useful, such the California Journalism Job Bank, which posts job openings in the western states, or the National Diversity Journalism Job Bank, which seems to live up to its reputation as the largest journalism job site, for print, anyway (and you don’t have to be a member of a minority group or a woman to apply for these jobs). Few science-related jobs are posted, but in August, Editor & Publisher’s Interactive Classifieds posted a job opening for a health and medical writer for ABCNEWS.com and the diversity job bank listed several health writing and editing positions.
And if you have the time and motivation, you can do what Sheila Stavish heroically used to do for the NCSWA jobs line: accumulate a list of sites that belong to prospective employers and check them every week for jobs. “Virtually everybody with a Web site has a jobs listing on it, including jobs that are not advertised elsewhere,” Stavish says. “But it’s also incredibly time-consuming.”
The Web may be most helpful for researching and landing specific jobs.
Wright used the Web to investigate the UC Davis science writing job before she applied, and then she used the Internet to research the campus, region, and strengths and weaknesses of the science writing at UC Davis. In her interview, she could rattle off the name of the library and top research programs on campus. She knew what campus activities were being covered by the region’s key newspapers. In particular, she could effectively point out ways her own strengths would support the overall new service efforts.
Wright probably wasn’t the most sophisticated Internet user among the finalists for the UC Davis science writing job. But she used the tools to showcase her own talents in a way that worked. She got the job. As she said in August, “It’s over 100 degrees here today, and I love it.”
* Most of the job sites on this list are provided by Sheila Stavish, who is the most expert person I know for digging out jobs on the Web. I have added a few general sites to her list.
(Carol Cruzan Morton is launching a new specialty consumer health newsletter on October 1 for CenterWatch, a Boston-based publishing company that covers the clinical research trials industry.)
Carol Cruzan Morton is managing editor, New Medical Therapies, an independent consumer newsletter evaluating new drugs and treatments for health and well-being, Boston, Mass. Ccmorton@nasw.org Work telephone: (617) 247-6074; Home: (617) 924-6022.