Routledge Soft Skills for the New Journalist: Cultivating the Inner Resources You Need to Succeed

Journalism is a pool staffed by distracted lifeguards and no matter how fancy your school is, your first week in a real newsroom will feel like a shove in the small of the back into 15 feet of water. Most of us come up for air eventually, but if you’re like journalist and educator Colleen Steffen, you may still be left feeling like all that training in inverted pyramids and question lists left something important out: you! Journalism is people managing, wrestling truth and story out of the messy, confusing raw material that is a human being, and the messiest human involved can often be the reporter themselves. So it’s time to talk about it. Instead of nervously skirting the sizable EQ (emotional intelligence) portion of this IQ (intelligence intelligence) enterprise, Soft Skills for the New Journalist explores how it FEELS to do this strange, hard, amazing job―and how to use those feelings to better your work and yourself. About the Author A Kentucky native, Colleen Steffen earned her B.A. in journalism from Franklin College (go Grizzlies!) in Franklin, Ind., and her M.A. in English literature from the University of North Florida―but honestly she learned most what she knows the hard way, at four different daily newspapers in three different states. Stereotypically restless, she has dabbled in PR, historic preservation, 100-year-old crime investigation, and keeping a small child out of traffic. She also spent more than five years teaching future journalists at Ball State University in Muncie, Ind., where she currently freelances and lives with her husband, daughter and vicious weiner-mutt. She decided to be a writer when she was 7, and she’s never been sorry yet.