What Really Happens to your TV Resume/Tape (Part 1)

Anyone who’s applied for almost any job, anywhere, EVER has had to put together a resume. This alone can be a huge task - paraphrasing relevant work experience, deciding what is and isn’t relevant work experience, coming up with enough to look professional, having too much to fit it neatly together. The list goes on and on, and there are plenty of tools out there to help you find the perfect ways to express your skills. What I’m going to talk about is what happens after you’ve produced and sent off your “self-marketing materials.”

That’s essentially what your resume is - a way to market yourself to make potential employers want to hire you. And in the TV and journalism world they typically want a little more than just a resume - these are your materials. If you’re trying to get into a newspaper, magazine or other print medium, they may want clippings. If you’re looking for an edit position, they’ll want to see some samples of what you can do. As a reporter you’ll be expected to have some sort of demo reel - same goes for producing. Again, this post isn’t really about how to do all those things - just to alert you to the fact that you’ll need those things, and then to let you know they’ll probably go right in the trash.

This is the truth and it can obviously be discouraging, but that just means you need to be careful with these “marketing materials.” I can tell you from experience that I’ve been at many stations where, any time a job was posted anywhere, we’d be inundated with resumes, reels, demo tapes, etc. News Directors and EPs often don’t have time to watch dozens and dozens of tapes - who would? That’s why frequently these packets go straight to the “recycle tape bin” - bypassing VCRs, TVs and DVD players entirely. And it’s worse at bigger stations - there’s a lot more people that want to get to these coveted market spots.

I’ve seen this happen time after time, so I know it’s also happened to my stuff. It’s part of the game. You know how I know? There have been several occasions where I’ve sent my stuff off, unheralded, no connections at the receiving station, only to discover later I DID have a connection there. I’ll retro-actively work that connection and end up in touch with “the powers that be.” they’ll invariably ask me to send over a resume and reel. Obviously they never saw it in the first place. It probably ended up in that “recycle tape bin” every station has.

you can't really guard against this 100%, but there are some things you can do. I'll explain in part two.

*alexis (www.10thfloorpr.com)