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?

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?