Interested in seeing a history of this very website? Check us out in this profile in Bylines magazine.

If your aims to break into journalism are rather narrow-focused - like to win The New York Times cartooon caption contest - you'll like this great article from Slate.But there are some handy tips in here for general freelance writing, such as:

This is a bit more like a call for submissions, so I'm adding it to the blog rather than the job posts.

How long is your resume? Last time I sent mine out, I went into an 11x17 piece of paper so I could make a kind of booklet out of it. I could also use it to work in testimonials and a long list of publications I've contributed to.

I read this interesting post on The Job Board (via Lifehacker) on someone else who thinks the one-page resume can be unreasonable. I can't help but think journalists' resumes always extend beyond one page if you include decent clips.

How many pages do you have: one or more?

A new report from Project for Excellence in Journalism should make good reading for us media types:

The State of the News Media 2008, PEJ’s newest annual report [5th edition] on the status and health of American journalism, is now online at www.stateofthenewsmedia.org. The study analyzes the major trends in the main media sectors and features: a Year in the News; a Survey of Journalists; a look at the Future of Advertising; an analysis of Citizen Media sites and more.

Seasoned writers don't exactly need the American Newspaper Guild's new study to tell them jobs for journalists are increasingly rare. We've been feeling the pinch since magazines and papers started laying off staffers in favor of cheaper freelancers. But that's not to say there's much work in freelance writing either. Those former staffers became favored freelancers, narrowing down the market even more.

I sniffed out a story on the Portfolio blog the other day that Food Network may be cooking up another new magazine. Specifically, they seem to be cannibalizing editors from Rachel Ray's magazine.

Food editors might want to call in some favors, if you know anyone at Reader's Digest, which owns the Rachel Ray mag.

There's no one secret to getting more freelance gigs (or if there is and you know it - please tell me about it!), but one good tactic is to specialize.

So says Kelly James-Enger, a colleague of mine who herself is a master at specialization and self-marketing. Her book Ready, Aim, Specialize has just moved into its second printing and stands out in the crowd of writing books. I like the samples of winning query letters, so you can see what works and why.

Nice work, Kelly!

Happy New Year. Now it's time to put into action all the foundation work you laid last year. It's time to execute.

Here's where you brainstorm some ideas for articles or your new job, set concrete goals for submissions of query letters or cover letters, and go glad-handing.

A couple months ago, I wrote an editorial about what it was like being a newspaper reporter in the mid-'90s. I can't believe how different my job was. Thought you'd like to see how that's changed over the years: