Elon University School of Communications
communicators it can be a highlight tape or DVD. The nature and size of a portfolio vary greatly, depending on job application requirements and the type of employment position, but some characteristics are common to all good portfolios. You should keep all of your best work, and select the best items to take to each job interview. As you put together the work samples that will accompany your cover letter and resume', touch these bases:
Meet the employer's requirements. If the people at a hiring organization want eight clips from writers, send eight. Not six. Not 20. If they don't tell you how many they require, you should be safe with 6-10 clips. Artists and designers should go with about a dozen samples and photographers should go with about 20. Edit your package down to requirements, but don't go under or they will see you as a shallow candidate. Avoid material with shared bylines - they'll be suspicious about who really did the work.
Be neat. Only submit clear, crisp, dated photocopies, well-exposed transparencies, and pages that are nice to look at and easy to handle. Don't shrink type or chop the edges off of your stories. Don't submit grayed-out photos, art or underexposed slides. Sloppy print or video packages that take only minutes to make aren't going to get a second look. You can photocopy writing clips on to 8 1/2-by-11 paper, one side only. You may have to cut the article and put it back together again, like a puzzle, pasting all of the parts together to make them fit nicely on the page, but this will make it easier for others to read your work, copy it for others or file it. Web printouts are acceptable at most organizations - try to get them to fit-to-page. Broadcast tapes should be well organized, with black or some other buffer between stories or elements. Get it all on one tape; do not submit multiple tapes. When storing your work, be sure to keep all potential portfolio items out of the direct sunlight, where they can be damaged. Keep them in a cool, dry, dark spot.
Show your range. If you're a writer, choose a spot-news story or two, a feature, a profile, a research piece and an enterprise story. If you're a photographer, submit news, sports and features images. Show portraits, a studio shot under controlled lighting and a picture story with a clear beginning, middle and end. If you're a designer, include feature pages and news pages. Throw in a brilliant solution to a slow news day. Choose examples that show how you handle display type, photos and color.
Be dynamic. Your writing must have great leads. Strong writing with lame leads will probably not get read. Well-composed writing with word pictures that pop will pull the eye into some of your subtler work, but a collection of subtle images might not get noticed. Photos, video news packages and page designs must have energy and flare as well.
Provide context. If you got the photo of the policeman rescuing the dog and her puppies while everyone else was at the other end of the building, explain why you were in the right place at the right time. If the remarkable thing about that story is that you turned it around in an hour, attach a neatly written Post-it note explaining the conditions under which you worked, or type an explanation on the accompanying page of the portfolio. In addition, you can mention portfolio highlights and the story behind them in your cover letter - it's a way to tease potential employers into reading your clips carefully.
Winning clips win great chances
Your clip package may be the one thing that keeps you from getting a job interview Ń or opens the door to one. You want to choose clips carefully, and that's the key to clips: choosing wisely. Cull clips with these things in mind:
Freshness: They should have been produced within the past year - and NO high school stuff, no matter how proud you happen to be about it.
Range: They should reflect different subjects and story types - show your versatility and your expertise.
Flash and Flare: They should grab attention immediately. The lead or a quick first impression may be all a recruiter will give you. These people donŐt generally read more than the first six paragraphs before moving on in the hiring process - sometimes they don't get that far.
Excellence: More than error-free, they must be remarkable in some way. Present your clips cleanly and efficiently. A $100 leather-bound portfolio is not necessary, but a ragtag pile of multi-sized pages won-t get you anywhere. Be clean, consistent and keep it simple. The 8 1/2-by-11 format is preferred for copying, filing and faxing purposes.
More tips for clips
• Find out as much as possible about the position available, so you can make your selected clips fit what you know about the job. An opening for a police reporter requires a narrower set of clips than an opening for, say, general assignment reporter. An opening for a crisis communications manager is narrower than one for general PR. Ask the person who is hiring what she or he would like to see; do your reporting. (Don't have good, recent clips that truly show your range? Get busy!)
• Edit your clips with a critical eye. Include only your best. While you don't want to come up one clip short of the requested number, it's better to submit one fewer clip than they ask than one you don't want to talk about. After you've edited your potential clips for good leads, check over the finalists. Are the leads all different? They should be. You don't want to send six clips in which four of the leads are question leads. Think variety and flexibility.
• The clips must be labeled with dates. You can meticulously clip out the actual folio and paste it near the headline, or you can go the library or an office and find a typewriter to type the date on the clip. Package your clips simply and cleanly, not elaborately. Photocopies are fine, but do not shrink your clips to fit them on the page. Leave the type it's normal size. Cut the clips up and reconfigure them to fit the page if necessary.
Clip tips for copy editors
Copy editors have a tough time showing clips of work. Just as a good editor's hand is invisible to readers - and sometimes the writers - it is tough to show your work in a quick, clean way. Your first goal is to be sure that every facet of your application package is cleanly edited. People who hire for print operations apply higher standards to the resumes and cover letter of copy editors than to those of other journalists. Perfection is the expectation. Follow AP style.
Copy editors edit, write headlines and do pagination or design. The latter two skills are easier to demonstrate than the first. If you have done design work, enclose some pages. Note what work you did on the page, whether it was total layout, headlines and editing, or just the design.
Headlines give you a real opportunity to show off. Enclose a sheet of your best headlines. Julie Topping, copy desk chief at the Charlotte Observer, says "copy chiefs like headlines the way city editors like leads." This sheet should contain just headlines. No stories, no leads, just headlines. If they're not clear enough to stand on their own, don't use them. Be sure to include some of the tight-count headlines of three or four 30-pt. lines on one column. Select headlines covering a wide range of subjects.
It's tough to show your skill in editing and improving writers' stories. One way is to compile a set of "before and after" leads that you have worked on, neatly printed out, side by side.
Copy editing candidates are asked to take an editing test as part of the job interview, but you won't get the chance to take that test unless you can show a potential employer a perfect resume and cover letter, a sheet of great headlines and some well-designed pages or lead comparisons.
Showing clips of online work
How do you apply for new-media or online journalism job? It's important to know who will be evaluating your application. If it's an old-guard news manager, he or she may prefer seeing printouts of your online work and a printed version of your cover letter and resume. If you are applying to the director of new media, he or she may be happy to accept a digital package, with an e-mail cover letter and resume and a links to your work on the Internet. The savvy editor will want to judge your links and source code. You should ask the people who are hiring what type of application materials they would prefer and adjust your approach to suit your audience.
If you are applying for a job that might include, for instance, reporting for a city desk at a newspaper that posts most of its reporters' work, a hybrid clip package works best. That means you'll want some clips to be traditional and some should be Web printouts or even links provided to an additional online portfolio. It can be effective to show one project that you produced in two ways: for the newspaper, and for the Web. This is only effective if there is a significant difference in the presentation and content.
Clip tips for designers, artists
Artists and designers can show portfolio items in a variety of ways, including tear sheets (torn straight from print publications), slides, DVD or diskette shows and e-mail attachments. You should ask the person who is doing the hiring just what he or she would prefer. Most editors like to have all the submissions in one particular form - it's easier to compare them that way.
Make your work easy to handle. For a lot of editors, this means 8-by-10 copies that are easily photocopied and passed on to other editors. Full-page tear sheets are difficult to handle, and a floppy disk may seem foreign to editors who are not technologically savvy. Everyone can look at photocopies. If your pages are in color, send color copies. If you send slides, include a caption sheet, as photographers do, that describes your thinking as you put the imagestogether.
Be creative and sophisticated. Remember that you are a designer, so editors will expect to see your design talents in the way you present yourself. Pay close attention to how you set up your resume, how your cover letter looks, as well as reads, and how your package works.
Send 10-20 pages or illustrations. This is variable, too, but this covers the range that most design editors seem to want, and will fit nicely in a sheet of transparencies, if you go that route. Mike Davis, design director at the Detroit Free Press, says, "Send as many as are stellar. Send no clunkers." Twenty is a good number.
Show variety. The design directors we spoke to were unanimous on this. Even if you're applying for a news position, show some features pages. Show pages that are heavily dependent on photos and those where you came up with a creative solution to a no-photo day. If you can do illustrations and have incorporated them into your design, great! If your portfolio doesnŐt have this kind of variety now, look for opportunities to branch out and broaden your skill set.
Information courtesy The Detroit Free Press.
Internship/Job Hunting Links
• Preparing a Portfolio: A professional portfolio is an essential part of your internship/job application. Click for details on portfolio prep.
• Putting Together a Dynamic Cover Letter: Don't waste words. Write a letter that piques the interest of the potential employer and encourages him or her to carefully consider your portfolio and call you for an interview. Click for details on writing cover letters.
• What to Include in a Resume': Rule number one is to assume that pretty much anything you did in high school is not of interest. That was then and this is now. Click for details on resume' writing.
• Preparing to Take the Test: Newspapers and other media organizations often administer writing, editing and/or general-knowledge tests to prospective employees. Are you ready? Click to find out more.
