Entries for March 2008

Planning a career in TV news? Then pay attention. Three different metro newspapers are reporting layoffs at local CBS stations.

The Sacramento Bee reported today that the CBS affiliate in Sacramento would be letting go an uncertain number of employees. The newspaper quoted a station executive as saying the layoffs were "the consequence of new technology."

Michael Schwartz is chef and owner of Michael's Genuine Food & Drink in Miami, a restaurant that New York Times food critic Frank Bruni recently said "feeds you so well, in such an unforced way, that you slip into a state of contentment that's pure. Honest. Genuine."

Schwartz has been helming restaurants in Miami since the mid-1990s. He opened Michael's last year. Popular British chef Jamie Oliver told the Miami Herald last month that the restaurant ranks among America's 10 best.

What's a job application without a résumé? What's a job posting that doesn't ask for one? Ask Aaron Strout. He's vice president of new media at Burlington, Mass.-based Mzinga, a firm that creates social networks and online communities for businesses.

He's looking for a PR director and a social media marketing manager, and these are his rules:

Some careers are just plain risky—for your bank.

What do heads of state, senior members of the armed forces, labor group officials, and city mayors throughout the world have in common? All rank among the top 10 jobs with the greatest risk of involvement in money laundering, illicit payments, corruption, and other illegal activity, according to Dow Jones Watchlist.

It turns out a lawyer can ditch his profession for another and still work 90-hour weeks. You can find out how here, courtesy of the Washington Post's Express.

The mortgage mess has had Wall Street banks cutting jobs in the greatest numbers since the tech bust of 2001, according to Bloomberg. Over the past nine months, Wall Street firms have slashed more than 34,000 jobs. "So far, Citigroup has eliminated 1.7 percent of its workforce, while Lehman has chopped 18 percent. Morgan Stanley has cut 6.2 percent, and Merrill has eliminated 4.5 percent," Bloomberg reports.

From Bloomberg:

"This crisis is much worse than 2001 and we don't know how long it's going to last," said Jo Bennett, a partner at executive search firm Battalia Winston International in New York. Job cuts "could be more than 100,000 in a few years."

Do high school students need career coaches? A Virginia newspaper's profile of a recently hired career coach raises the question for me. It sounds as though the coach is probably a great asset to the school, offering students various interest assessments as well as giving them a good look at the training and requirements of different careers.

But I do wonder how early students should be defining their career paths. My father always told his kids—there are four of us—to study what we loved or what interested us in college, rather than prepare for our careers. Elsewhere in Virginia, however, career coaches are being deployed in high schools to combat some worrisome statistics: More than a quarter of the state's students entering ninth grade don't graduate within four years, and more than half of those students don't move on to postsecondary education. The results look quite good. The Winchester Star reports that in high schools with career coaches, 40 percent of students who lacked college plans now have them.

Of all the things Eliot Spitzer has been labeled in the past two weeks, none seem to have been used with such frequency as "hypocrite."

The self-named "steamroller"—a seeming paragon of moral rectitude and righteous indignation as New York's attorney general and then governor—was reduced to being "Client 9." The man who had overseen the takedown of a sophisticated Staten Island prostitution ring in 2004 was now called out as a customer of call girls. He has a wife. He has kids. And he had a state at stake.

Another dream job bites the dust. This time, New York Times reporter Kim Severson shares an ugly truth about food writing, which is, of course, the sort of gig that seemed impervious to ugly truths. But it turns out that one can try too many morsels of pork belly and duck foie gras terrine and end up with a serious health problem:

If 1960s Las Vegas had its Rat Pack and 1980s cinema its Brat Pack, early 21st century food has its Fat Pack....

The journalists, bloggers, chefs and others who make up the Fat Pack combine an epicure's appreciation for skillful cooking with a glutton's bottomless-pit approach. Cramming more than three meals into a day, once the last resort of a food critic on deadline, has become a way of life. If the meals center on meat, so much the better.