Journo Resources Is Now Listing Non-Media Jobs. Here’s Why.
We’ve been doing the whole jobs thing for a while now. Our opportunities newsletter started all the way back in 2015 (though it was part of the excellent Student Publication Association back then), and we finally launched our own jobs board in 2018
It kind of goes without saying that our job listings are one of the most popular things we put together. After all, the whole site is about trying to get you a journalism gig.
I’ve always tried to think about how to make the listings different and more useful than your average list (with somewhat varied success).
The first iteration of the newsletter emailed you to remind you of graduate scheme deadlines a week, 72 hours and 24 hours before a deadline, and god that was gruelling, especially as I never even got one interview for the damn things.
Equally, when we finally launched our job site we made sure to only list gigs which had a salary attached — and are still the only journalism job listings site to do so. We also made a fun little button which allows you to only bring up jobs which are outside of London, because journalism isn’t just about our capital city.
But, as with everything, just because you’ve been doing things one way for a while, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t think about having a shake-up. So that’s exactly what’s happening. Or at least what we hope we’re doing.
Today we’re announcing a couple of changes to the way we do things, as we want to do better in getting you to where you need to go, and acknowledging the media industry isn’t quite as black and white as you might think. It’s not a finished process - we’re always open to hearing what you actually need from us - but we hope this will be the start of a bigger conversation.
A New Look Website With New Look Jobs
If you head over to the website today you’ll notice a couple of new things, here’s the TL;DR:
- Non-Media Jobs: Not all the time, you’re here to be a journalist, right? But we want to better reflect the way people in our industry actually work. That means catering for people who want some regular non-journalism work on the side for a few days to pay the bills, allowing them to properly focus on commissions. We think it’s important to be open and realistic about how people make their money as a journalist (seriously, no one lives off a commission a month, no matter what they say on Twitter), and hope that by including a selection of jobs which could work around journalism, we can help more people build a career that works for them, whether that’s jobs in PR and comms, or the amazing chocolatier job we listed the other day.
- All Of The Tags: You probably know what you’re looking for, or at least have a vague idea, so we wanted to make it easier for you to find it. Our wonderful developer, Elliot Davies, has put together all of the brightly coloured tags you can think of. Just want to see side hustles? We got ya. Looking for part-time? Yep. An internship? Ja. Full-Time? Obvs. Apprenticeship? You bet ya.
- Daily Updates: We want to cover a lot more ground with the jobs we’re showing you, and make sure we’re showing you a good selection of jobs from all of the main tags and from across the UK. So, from August 1, we’ll be updating the jobs page every working day (rather than every week as we do at the moment) and, hopefully, it’ll be raining jobs. Hallelujah.
- Freelance Gigs: We list them in our newsletter, but they don’t have anywhere to live on our website. We know that a big part of our audience are freelancers, so we’re going to start listing calls for pitches and shifts on the website, so it’s easily accessible at all times. We’ll also be clearly adding guidance on rates and other guidelines.
A Newsletter That Lands Every Week
To go with these changes, we’re also shaking things up with our newsletter. Here’s what’s happening:
- We’re Going Weekly: We’ve been a fortnightly newsletter mainly due to time constraints, as, currently, no one works full-time on Journo Resources. This means we can entirely miss opportunities and freelance gigs in the space of two weeks. Tomorrow though, I’m finally jumping to full time, so the newsletter will move to weekly, so you won’t miss out on any listings.
- We’re Breaking It Up: We know that not everyone on our newsletter is looking for the same thing, and we want to stay with you as you progress through your career, whether that’s in a staff role, freelancing, or a bit of both. To make it easier for you to pick out the opportunities you’re looking for, we’re splitting the newsletter into three sections; starting out, next steps and beyond, and freelancing, so you can see the gigs which are relevant to you (and see if the grass is greener on the other side too…).
The idea behind these changes is to try and create something which works better for you — but this is only the start of the conversation. We’d love to hear your thoughts on how we could make things better — you can always catch us on hello@journoresources.org.uk.
