I spend every Sunday visiting my 94-year old grandmother. She is unusually healthy and independent for her age. But what strikes me most about her is that she is lacking in purpose. Little things take on big importance because not very much happens from day to day. And she is always looking back at the period in her life when she felt useful and productive. When she could do things and go places. This experience, coupled with the fact that I really enjoy my work, makes me think I will likely work until I can no longer work.

The interesting thing is that my grandmother doesn’t even understand what I do — a common issue for people who age and lose connection to the workforce. In fact, we had a running debate on whether “blog” was a real word since it wasn’t in her dictionary. Finally, she saw a reference on CNN to Larry King’s blog and then an article in her Readers Digest about blogs, and she conceded that I was not making up this work I claimed to do. Since my grandmother has never been on the Internet, I can understand why blogs don’t seem real. And thought it’s easy for me to say I’ll commit to staying current on the ways people work, I do wonder how hard that will be once yet to be envisioned tools are created by those generations younger than I. {Read the rest at Yahoo!}

My colleague, Sarah Milstein, just wrote a book on Twitter (conveniently called “The Twitter Book”). Before her book came out, I liked to think of Sarah as my own private Twitter tutor. She was the 21st user of the service and tried to get me interested in it back in 2006. I resisted. I couldn’t see why I’d want yet another communication tool in my already over-communicated life. Once I got started though, I had a fairly typical Twitter path, moving from resistance to hooked in a matter of weeks. I recently read that Twitter is a little like coffee. It tastes awful at first, but then suddenly you’re addicted. (Anyone know where I read this so I can give credit?)

I asked Sarah to collaborate with me on a post about five ways to use Twitter in your career. If you’ve never even visited Twitter.com, this is a good primer on how to set up an account and get started. If you’re already on the service, but still don’t really get it, read this.

And now, our five tips:

Keep up with industry news. Follow thought leaders and/or people who post links to new ideas in your field. To find people in your sector, try tools like MrTweet.com and wefollow.com, which organize Twitter users by category. Once you’ve followed a few smart, relevant people, you’ll have created a customized news feed of headlines that interest you. {Read the rest at Yahoo!}

You’re stuck. You want to change careers and can’t figure out how or what you’re even good at. Maybe you’ve been on scores of interviews, but no one’s biting.  Or worse, you’ve sent out hundreds of cover letters and resumes and the phone is not ringing. These are all indicators that it might be time to hire a career coach.

When I changed careers nearly 10 years ago, hiring a coach completely jumpstarted my process. Career changes and job searches take a long time and I’m impatient. I also had a lot of fear and anxiety about the process and I didn’t want to overburden supportive friends and family with my constant need to talk about my process. I figured that working with a professional who’d seen hundreds of others through transitions was a way to speed things up. And it did. I used my coach for about 8 sessions to come up with a plan and a strategy; after that, I called her for advice now and then, but mostly felt comfortable on my own.

Here’s some things to think about if you’re wondering whether it’s time to bring in a pro to help moves things along: {Read the rest at Yahoo!}

At a time when nearly all of us are scrambling for opportunities and helping others to do the same, people are in networking overdrive. Not a day goes by that I don’t get a few emails from friends seeking introductions to other friends. All that connecting carries a huge risk of mistakes and missteps. Here’s just a sampling of the many ways that well-intentioned attempts at networking can go wrong, and some simple ways to do better.

1.  Asking for an introduction when you are too busy to properly follow up. We’ve all been there. You learn that someone you know knows someone you want to know and you are champing at the bit. You shoot off an email without much deliberation, the person replies promptly (since you have a mutual contact), and because you’re completely swamped, you find it impossible to make time to meet.

Solution: Next time you learn that one of your contacts knows someone you want to know, file that information away and tell your friend you might ask for an intro when you’re less busy. {Read the rest at Yahoo!}

At the Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference last weekend, I was interviewed by my friend/colleague Josh Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab, which is trying to answer the question of what the future of journalism should be.

Josh posted the interview this morning and as I listened (and read the transcript), I realized that I overstated my concern for journalists wearing many different roles in the stories they cover. I do believe that journalists have to be mindful of conflicts of interest, but there is a lot of room for journalists to write about subjects they have connections to as long as they are transparent and make the right disclosures. Speaking of disclosures and transparencies, I love both Malcolm Gladwell’s disclosure page (which is almost as long as a typical New Yorker article) and Jeff Jarvis’.

This is the beauty of online writing. You always get a chance to add to the record, which I did in the comments section of Josh’s post.  That’s my real lesson here – if you ever regret or want to revise something you said in an online interview, head straight over to the comments where you can clarify your point, especially if you were quoted in a place lots of journalists will be reading.
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I’ve just returned from the annual Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference at Harvard where the mood was a mix of anxiety and inspiration. The anxiety came from the many staffers who had recently lost jobs or were preparing for that possibility. The inspiration came from the heady conversations about craft and narrative that typically characterize this gathering of master storytellers and those aspiring to that title.

Since this was a conference where almost all the attendees and speakers were journalists, and where people were live blogging and tweeting, there are plenty of vivid recaps of the event. So I’ll spare you the full-blown summary.

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In 2007 soon after my book came out, I wrote a guest post for the New York Women In Communications blog about making the transition from journalist to journalist/author. And every time I stumble onto the musings of a journalist making that transition, I think about how challenging that transition was for me. So I’m reprinting that post here, for anyone going through that process now (and so that I can have it properly archived in my blog since I never put it here!)
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I’ve spent the past couple of weeks learning about social entrepreneurship — a growing niche in which people use the skills of entrepreneurship to solve social problems. The result is a story in today’s New York Times: “A Social Solution, Without Going the Nonprofit Route, which looks at when and why these entrepreneurs would choose a business rather than a nonprofit to accomplish their goals.

While reporting this article, I stumbled across so many other story ideas that I have a feeling I’ll be revisiting this terrain often in the coming months. Writing about people doing good in the world gave me a nice dose of inspiration, something that is in short supply when so much of the current news is anything but inspiring.
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Like so many people in journalism, I spend a lot of time pondering, talking about, and trying to prepare myself for what the future of this profession might be. And next month I’m going to be speaking on a panel at the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism called “Making the Most of Turbulent Times: Finding Opportunities in a Changing Industry,” that seeks to add to the conversation on this subject.

In preparation for that panel, Tommy Tomlinson, the moderator, sent out an email to get us all thinking.

I put together something a few days ago in response to his prompt and while it’s fairly unbaked, writing it made me feel a bit hopeful — both about the panel and about the future of journalism. Here’s what I wrote:
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By Katie Hellmuth

Once you’ve started your Facebook Page, you need to bring over the troops, your true fans. Make the page. Use a few applications on it to jazz it up. Profile HTML is a good one for ultimate coding freedom, but can be buggy at times. The YouTube Box application is another good one. When it is ready for prime time, try a few techniques to engage your audience to do what you want them to:
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