Drink alcohol.

If I could offer you only one piece of advice for maintaining your sanity in
the news business, alcohol would be it.

Journalists since the invention of the microphone and camera have attested
to alcohol's time-honored value, whereas the rest of my advice is no more
valid than the rantings of any other disgruntled scribe.

Enjoy the freedom and opportunities of your youth. No matter how jaded you
may think you already are, in just a few years you'll look back and miss
the period in your life when the world seemed so fresh and full of possibility.

Don't worry about writing enough stories or working enough hours to satisfy
your News Director. You will never write as many stories or work as many
hours as your News Director did.

You are not as lazy as your News Director thinks.

Write poetry and fiction. It's the only opportunity you will have to exercise
your creativity. Just don't do it on the computers at work.

Do not gossip about your coworkers' personal lives. Be careful of anyone
who does, since they will gossip about yours as well. This should effectively
rule out socializing with your entire newsroom. If you can succeed in doing
this, tell me how.

Frame your awards. Save your rejection letters. That way, when you make it
big, you can write to the editors who snubbed you and tell them what idiots
they were for not hiring you.

Get a master's degree if you like. But remember that one year at a
prestigious journalism school will not look as good on your resume as a
great, confrontational soundbite caught on tape.

Don't feel guilty if you don't know the names of all the Baltic states.
most journalists I know don't know the names of any of the Baltic states.
Despite what you were told in school, it just doesn't matter. (Unless, of course,
you live in one of the Baltic states.)

Read anything other than a newspaper or magazine, every day.

Watch anything other than CNN or MSNBC every day.

Enjoy your creativity and inspiration. You'll miss them when they're gone.

Maybe you'll stay a reporter, producer, photographer, etc.-- maybe you
won't. Maybe you'll head a network, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll become News
Director at age 30, maybe you'll be producing weekends when you retire.
Whatever the case, you will never get rich working for a television station
unless you own it.

Date, even if you have nowhere to meet people your own age except the local
community college.

Never repeat aloud things you have been told off the record. It will
needlessly inflate your managers' hopes and make you think your story is
better than it really is.

Your story/newscast is not as good as you think it is. If you do not
believe me, watch it in six months and take another look at it. Doing this on a
regular basis is a healthy reminder never to rest on your laurels.

But anytime someone claims your station's news isn't as great as it used to
be, watch newscasts from five years ago. Unless your station was bought by
Belo, doing this will make you feel better about your work.

Read job openings in Broadcasting every week, even if you do not apply for
them. Do not read journalism review magazines. They will only make you feel
depressed about the state of the industry.

Beware of lengthy job classifieds. The quality of a news operation is
inversely proportional to the number of words it spends promoting itself.

Send out resumes as soon as you arrive at your new job. It will take twice
as long to get out of there as you expect, and when it's finally time to
leave, believe me, you will appreciate every single day that you no longer have to
work there.

Be nice to the interns. They just may go farther than you.

Consider jobs in New York or Los Angeles, but realize they won't be the
nirvana you think.

Accept certain inalienable truths: TV news will never live up to its
potential. You cannot regularly work more than 60 hours a week. People in
the newsroom will complain. You too will pass your prime.

And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, TV news was
great and news people worked 100 hours a week without complaining.

Complain. Go to the bar, get online, see a psychiatrist if you must. It is
always better to vent in private than to pull a Jerry Maguire in the middle
of the newsroom.

Big stations are not always better than small stations, but they are
usually more tolerable places to work.

Everyone in the news business will offer you advice. Most of it is useless,
however, since success in TV news has less to do with effort or talent than
it does with fate and circumstance.

Advice is a form of catharsis. Dispensing it enables journalists to connect
with a captive audience in a way that they never could with readers.

But trust me on the alcohol!!!