FAQs about Poynter Career Center

What is the Poynter Career Center?

The Poynter Career Center is an online service aimed at connecting job seekers and media companies in ways that help applicants further their careers and employers find the job candidates they need. The Center includes help-wanted advertising (paid for by employers), resume posting (free to job seekers) and editorial and tutorial content provided by Poynter faculty, staff and contributors.

What is The Poynter Institute?

The Poynter Institute is a nonprofit school dedicated to teaching and inspiring journalists and media leaders. The school conducts weeklong seminars at its campus in St. Petersburg, Fla.; publishes a variety of material in print and online at www.poynter.org; and partners with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to produce e-learning at www.newsu.org.

Why did you launch the Poynter Career Center?

The idea came up initially as a way of generating revenue to help support our training, publishing and other projects. As we explored the possibilities, a more significant purpose emerged: serving journalism with a site that works for individuals — staffers, students and others — as much as it does for media companies.

Where does the money go?

We’ll use revenue generated by the Career Center to support Poynter training, publications (print as well as online) and other projects. Poynter is a 501[c](3) nonprofit organization that is exempt from taxes, but we will pay taxes on whatever portions of Career Center revenue are considered taxable for organizations like ours. You can learn about Poynter finances here.

Who do I contact if I have a question, suggestion or complaint about the Poynter Career Center?

Reach Tina Dyakon at (727) 553-4343 or by calling toll free at (888) 769-6837. E-mail her at tdyakon@poynter.org. We work with a vendor, Boxwood Technology, to provide the engine that runs the job bank in the Career Center. You’ll find an FAQ addressing a number of user questions here. Boxwood customer service, available from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, can be reached at (888) 491-8833.

What’s the connection between the Poynter Career Center and Poynter seminars?

The work of the Career Center has no connection with the work of our seminars. The seminars are focused on the work itself — the reporting, the writing, the producing, the leading and managing, the designing, the ethical decision-making, etc. — not on seeking or finding new jobs. Revenue generated from the Career Center helps us subsidize the training Poynter provides in various settings, including scholarships and modest tuition fees for seminars.

What’s the connection between the Poynter Career Center and the rest of Poynter Online?

We’ve added a new right rail to Poynter Online, which links to a variety of Career Center content — some of it advertising, some of it editorial. Just as news organizations handle advertising sales separately from their editorial operations, so does Poynter Online. You can learn more about Poynter Online here. We address various ethics issues here.

Does the Poynter Career Center function as a placement service?

No. We’ll leave it to employers and job seekers to find one another.

What’s available to employers in the Poynter Career Center?

Employers can purchase ads for their open positions and use a special-skills-assessment feature to help screen candidates. News organizations can also promote their companies in a Featured Employer ad. Potential customers of the Center include newspapers, television stations, radio stations, online sites, magazines and journalism schools.

What advertising packages are available, and how much do they cost?

1.) You’ll find all the details linked from this page, with specifics on rates here. The Poynter Basic Package, which costs $75, includes a 45-day job listing in the Career Center and is available for searching and browsing by all visitors to the site. To increase exposure, the ad is linked on a rotating basis from the Job Sampler area of Poynter Online’s right rail. Each time a page is refreshed — or a visitor clicks to a new page — a new selection of five jobs is randomly selected from the database for display in that area.

2.) The Poynter Plus Package, which costs $100 includes all features of the Basic Package, plus extra exposure in the Sponsored Jobs area of the right rail. For another $100 Employers can also have their ad listed on all the internal pages the job seekers goes when searching for a job.

3.) Employers can also purchase Featured Employer ads. The premium version costs $300 and enables employers to promote their companies with banners measuring 468 by 60 pixels linked to the company’s full profile in the Career Center. These ads rotate with other featured employers on high-visibility job-seeker pages, and highlight your jobs on the search results and include a link to your online profile. The basic version costs $200 and provides a link to your company profile and your jobs posted on Poynter Career Center. We will be happy to work with you on special bulk purchase packages.

What do you know about the audience for Poynter Online?

According to the Urchin software provided by Google Analytics, about 300,000 unique visitors come to Poynter Online each month and view about 2 million pages. The site delivers more than 125,000 e-mail newsletters, including Romenesko, Al’s Morning Meeting, E-Media Tidbits and other columns and centerpieces.

What’s available to job seekers in the Career Center?

Job seekers can post their resumes with links to written or multimedia clips. The Career Center also provides:

• a password-protected account for managing a job search
• a system of sending resumes and work samples to potential employers
• a way to post resumes confidentially or publicly
• e-mail notification from a search agent when a job match is posted
• editorial and tutorial content about careers, including Ask the Recruiter
• online and in-person career coaching at reasonable fees

How do I find the Poynter Career Center?

You can find the Poynter Career Center via the right rail of any page on Poynter Online or directly at: http://careers.poynter.org.

How about walking me through that right rail? Why did you add it, and what does it link to?

When it comes to rails, right or left, we learned the hard way a few years ago that users don’t always welcome big changes. So instead of altering either of the existing rails on Poynter Online to accommodate the Career Center, we decided to add a new one.

What if I’m having difficulty viewing that rail without scrolling?

Our statistics indicate that about 85 percent of our audience will be able to view the additional rail without scrolling. If you fall into the 15 percent group and would like to adjust your settings to avoid the scroll, click on Start at the bottom left-hand corner of your screen, then Control Panel, then Display, then Settings, and then set your screen settings to 1,280 by 1,024 pixels or 1,280 by 768 pixels.

What is “Ask the Recruiter”?

This is an existing column that’s new to Poynter. Joe Grimm, recruiting and development editor of the Detroit Free Press, began writing Ask the Recruiter about three years ago after a visit to Poynter. Joe has been a key ally in the development of the Career Center, and we’ve incorporated the column into the regularly updated content of the Career Center. The idea is pretty simple: You have questions about jobs in journalism. Joe has answers (or will help you find them). You can write to Joe here.

How do you handle the question of anonymity in the “Ask the Recruiter” column?

Users who pose questions for publication are asked to provide their full names to Joe but, because of the nature of the column, have the option of withholding them from publication.

What do I get when I click on the Employers area? How do I post jobs and screen candidates?

It’s a simple process. Register as an employer, and you’ll get a username and password that will provide you access to your account in the Poynter Career Center. From there, you can purchase and post new ads, edit or remove old ads, search resumes, set up a resume agent to alert you via e-mail to newly posted resumes that match your needs, and find answers to questions about rates and customer service.

How about the Job Seekers area?

You can browse or search job ads, post your resume, and set up a job agent to alert you when an ad for a job matching your description is posted.

How do I post my resume?

Also pretty simple. (We’re relying on you to tell us how we can make it more so.) No registration is required to browse and search jobs. We require registration only for services that can be provided no other way, all of them free of charge. You’ll get a username and password that will enable you to post a resume, to set up a job agent to alert you via e-mail to newly posted jobs that match your interests, and to save ads you might apply for later.

How do I post my resume on the Career Center without revealing my identity?

If you choose to keep your resume confidential, you will need to remove from your resume all information that identifies you. This would include your name, address, phone and e-mail contacts, and even names of employers and universities. Instead of listing your current employer by company name, you might describe it as “one of the top-20-circulation newspapers in the country.” Your confidential resume is posted for employers to view. If potential employers want to follow up after viewing your resume, they’ll alert the Career Center, which will forward the note to you without revealing your identity to the employer. It will then be up to you to decide to respond directly to the employer or not. If you do, remember to send them a resume that includes the information you deleted to preserve your confidentiality.

How do I search jobs and tailor searches?

You can customize your search by the key words you list for a job title, by category, by geography/location, by level of experience, etc. You can also display posted jobs by the time frame in which they were posted, from the last 24 hours to the past 60 days, from 25 to 50 job listings per page.