I learned about personal branding from a very unlikely source: Kwame Jackson, you know, the black guy from the Apprentice.

He came to speak to my class one day about how some people make fun of him for just being a reality show celebrity, but the last laugh is on them he said because the show helped him market and develop his personal brand. Something he did must have worked. Kwame is still giving speeches and milking his 15 minutes of fame five years after the reality show aired.

I surveyed the members of our Carolina Association of Black Journalists and most of them didn’t have a web portfolio, Twitter or a LinkedIn account so I created a checklist for them to actively create and monitor their personal brands online. I have spent the last month creating this site, establishing profiles on different networking Web sites and posting my resumes everywhere. It seemed like a wise step since I am graduating in December. However, DigiDave (David Cohn) brought up an interesting point in his blog about making sure to be authentic when you are creating a personal brand. Is it phony for students who are looking for jobs to develop an online personal brand?

I was writing some thank you letters in Starbucks when an older gentleman came up to me and told me that, “My mother should be proud.” He also reminds his daughters to write thank yous. There are a lot of people I need to thank for a lot of things in my life. We all should just buy a couple boxes of thank you cards on Thanksgiving and try to write a bunch of the people in our lives that we need to thank.

I decided to create a Tumblr blog. It’s a nice quick way to post about the random things that I like without having to give an explanation.

It’s called “Farther Down The Rabbit Hole.” I have really been obsessing about children’s books lately.

In case you don’t get the reference:

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) is a novel written by English author Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll.^[1] It tells the story of a girl named Alice who falls down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar and anthropomorphic creatures.

“Down the Rabbit-Hole,” the Chapter 1 title, has become a popular term for going on an adventure into the unknown

Source: Wikipedia

It is almost the one month anniversary of NicoleNorfleet.info! (Balloons and confetti fall from the ceiling) This site’s main purpose is for employers and other recruiters to find out more information about me. It is basically my online portfolio. With my blog, I am trying to give the perspective of a soon-to-be journalism grad. I have to admit, nothing too special about it. But this site helps me focus. While right now the blog just has a couple of posts about my opinion on journalism issues, I am going to grow it into being a more personal look at some of the anxieties I’m experiencing during my last couple months of being a student.

Today I found myself going over my future plans in my head, a habit that I seem to do more and more lately as my booting from the nest looms near. I am now deadset on going to Japan next year. Before I would just mention my goal to live in Japan during networking events as a way to sound interesting. However, I am now actively looking for opportunities in Japan. I’ll talk more about that in a later post. Anyway, I am definitely going to Japan next year whether that country wants me there or not. When I’m there, I’m going to write a detailed blog about my daily experiences. I want it to be kind of like a Tokyo Times. When I was in a journalism class two years ago, I started a blog for class called Black Otaku. I basically just talked about otaku culture from an African American’s view. It was kind of popular (mostly because of a post I did comparing Kanye West’s “Stronger” music video and Akira). Today I bought the domain www.blackotaku.com in preparation for next year’s adventures. Exciting! We’ll see how it turns out.

Photo by Wendy Thigpen Holmes

Today is First Amendment Day at UNC. I’m in class with black tape across my mouth to show the importance of this amendment. This campus-wide, day-long event is designed to both celebrate the First Amendment and explore its role in the lives of Carolina students. Today students are reading from banned books, singing banned music and discussing the importance of each of the rights protected by the First Amendment. The Carolina Association of Black Journalists is staging a demonstration of the ways African Americans pushed back when they were denied First Amendment freedoms during the Civil Rights Movement in America. More about that after the jump. Remember to be tolerant when others exercise their rights.

Can you name all five freedoms mentioned in the First Amendment? (I always forget one) Get the answers after the jump!

NYTimes tech columnist David Pogue has been accused of a journalism no-no, engaging in conflicts of interest. Critics have ranged from his techy counterparts to even his paper’s public editor. Pogue is criticized for reviewing new products in his popular column and also writing books about some of them. The NYTPicker just blogged about a podcast Pogue was interviewed in Sunday when he admitted that his “Missing Manual” series might be a conflict of interest but that other tech writers were guilty of the same practice. What’s more is that Pogue chose to defend himself by saying he was “not a reporter.”

Robert Niles over at the Online Journalism Review wrote an interesting story Monday about the “Eight things that journalism students should demand from their journalism schools.” I really like the sandbox idea. He has a point with the knowledge of another field too. I took the Carolina Business News Initiative, but I also wanted to take business classes at the b-school.

I would add a couple of other demands to his list:

1. Computer assisted reporting – I would have thought that because Niles is a member of the ONA that he would have put more of an emphasis on computer assisted reporting, but maybe he didn’t want to go into the particulars of course subjects. While UNC has expanded its multimedia and online reporting course load, there is no class to instruct students on how to collect and present data online.
2. A place to publish – Luckily, there are several different mediums at my school to generate clips, however, j-schools themselves should give opportunities for students to be published. If I had to choose between completing an assignment for my college newspaper or an assignment for my reporting class, I would choose my newspaper story. Why? Because I want that clip! Schools need to find ways to give incentive for students to do their best in class. Why not just make a classroom an online newsroom and create a simple WordPress site to publish the class stories?
3. Research opportunities – Schools should have honors classes and independent study courses for students to explore particular interests and media issues. A big part of fostering research is giving some wiggle room in the j-school curriculum and requirements so that students can afford to take classes with research opportunities. J-schools should also make an effort to provide scholarships for students who want to conduct research outside of the classroom too.
4. The business of news – I commented on the OJR article that students need to understand the business of news. Especially now, students need to understand the idea of creative destruction and why people are getting laid off left and right. Penny Abernathy’s class opened my eyes to the real issues plaguing the news industry.

What are some other demands that you can think of?

CitySourced screenshot (Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET)

QUICK POST

Journalists Tweeting at TechCrunch 50 are excited about the prospects of CitySourced, a digital startup focused on mobile civic engagement tools.

Here is how the people at CitySourced describe their mobile apps:

1) a free, simple, and intuitive tool empowering citizens to identify civil issues (potholes, graffiti, trash, snow removal, etc.) and report them to city hall for quick resolution; 2) an opportunity for government to use technology to save money and improve accountability to those they govern; and 3) a positive, collaborative platform for real action. Our platform is called CitySourced, as it empowers everyday citizens to use their smart phones to make their cities a better place.

It’s finally come…my last semester at UNC. Due to my four-year commtiment to The Daily Tar Heel and my tendency to take classes that I was interested as opposed to classes that were required, I have had to take an extra semester. It was a decision I made last fall after consulting several professors and friends.

I don’t regret the decision. The job market isn’t too hot right now. Many of my friends have set up base at their parents’ houses until they find jobs. I’m using this semester as a sort of transition time.

Last semester, Prof. Abernathy introduced me to a new way of grading students. In The Art of Possibility, I learned about Benjamin Zander, a conductor who gave his orchestra students an assignment at the beginning of each term. He asks them to write a letter to themselves, dated for the end of the term, describing what they did during the semester to deserve an A.