Arts and Crafts Session

I am almost finished with my clips (the packet of stories that you send out when looking for a job as a reporter). There are a few last wrinkles that I have to iron out before sending them out, though. One is that almost all of the clips I chose are news stories. And a disproportionate number are breaking news stories.

There's two reasons that so many of my best clips are newsy. One is that I like writing hard news and breaking news stories. But the other is that feature stories are harder to turn into clips because they tend to be bigger. The one I'd most like to use takes up almost a whole broadsheet page and I'm struggling with how best to shrink it down to fit on 8 1/2 by 11 sheets of paper.

If I only had to worry about a resume and cover letter, I could have applied to the local papers two weeks ago. In fact, I'd probably be working by now. Instead, I'll be spending the day on what basically amounts to an arts and crafts project, complete with scissors, scraps of paper and no-wrinkle rubber cement. And then another trip (my third) to the Staples photocopy center.

But, thank goodness, the end is in sight. I finished my resume this morning. Next step: phone calls and cover letters.
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