“You don’t want a job in media. Honestly. You don’t.” This is what Felix Salmon, a financial writer at Reuters, told a group of 130 young journalists and bloggers at NYU’s Silver Center on Saturday. Most of them were there because they want to get a job in the media. Salmon, along with seven other bloggers from New York and Washington, D.C., spoke on a panel about blogging and the changing landscape of journalism for NYU Local’s inaugural Young Media Weekend. (The other panelists were: Anthony De Rosa, Willa Paskin, Foster Kamer, Irin Carmon, Kat Stoeffel, Matt Yglesias, and Alex Pareene. Full bios here.)

Twitter played a large role in the panel, allowing those who weren’t able to attend to direct questions at the panelists and comment on their answers. (You can still see all the tweets from #YMW here. If you didn’t make it to the panel, they’re worth reading through.) Sadly, we weren’t able to archive the livestream of the panel, but here are some of the things we learned on Saturday:

Link out. For those who don’t know, “linking out” refers to the practice of citing other reporters or sources with a link to their original post. It’s a practice that increasingly separates blogs from print institutions like the New York Times, which won’t link to other sources even after citing them in articles. “It’s going to become an ethical issue. If you’re not linking out, you’re stealing,” said Foster Kamer.

Internships suck, but you have to do them. Doing work for free can be demoralizing, but know this: most editors would hire you if they had the money. Kat Stoeffel, who got a job at the New York Observer after interning there as a student, advised the audience to only take internships at places that are hiring young writers. Competition means it’s still necessary to work for free – at least for a while. “Do [internships] in college, because you’re not going to get paid,” said Willa Paskin.

Write. A lot. “If you want a job that involves writing on the internet, there’s no reason to not be writing on the internet,” said Matt Yglesias. ”Get the attention of the organization where you want to work. Do it in your spare time. Get friends together. Have a body of work,” said Alex Pareene. (Or you can join NYU Local!)

“Be lucky. My career path was bizarre and accidental,” Alex Pareene said. Kat Stoeffel said she got the job she has now because the man who was vacating the position once dated her friend. Though it might not sound helpful to be told you need to be lucky to get a job, if anything it demonstrates the need to network and meet people working in the media now. Your current internship supervisor could help you land your first post-grad job.

Don’t major in journalism. “It’s not that it’s bad,” said Willa Paskin, “but it’s absolutely not necessary, and you’re paying a lot of money you’ll never get back.” All the panelists seemed to agree that journalism is a skillset one can learn outside of an institutional J-school program. It’s more important to have in-depth knowledge of a particular field you can capitalize on: “It’s easy to underrate the value of understanding something. You have to know more than your readers,” said Matt Yglesias. Niche reporting will continue to be valuable to readers.

It’s not about being first. “A lot of news orgs are falling into habits they once mocked,” said Irin Carmon. “Reporting means bringing something to the table that wasn’t there before. And if you’re young, it doesn’t matter if you’re the first.” “I think it’s more important to be the first person to tweet something funny about the news,” said Alex Pareene.

Impartiality is a myth. Credibility and transparency are more important than objectivity. “Impartiality is bullshit,” Anthony De Rosa said. “Everyone is coming from their own point of view.” “The New York Times’ coverage around political events is a good example of where it goes to shit. If you know someone is lying, you can’t say that. They’re following the letter of the law, but not the spirit,” said Willa Paskin.

Print isn’t dead – yet. “Now, it’s clear there’s not a long-term future for print journalism. 30 years from now, no one is going to have a career in print,” said Matt Yglesias. “If you’re going to write for print make sure it appears online – otherwise it’s a complete nonstarter,” said Felix Salmon.

Take initiative. “There’s very little mentorship or hand-holding [in blogging]. You have to be self-motivated,” said Alex Pareene. Most bloggers don’t have the luxury of working closely with an editor. You need to be able to make decisions quickly and write well without having someone standing over your shoulder fixing your mistakes.

The panelists also spoke briefly about aggregation, Twitter, the iPad, the future of investigative reporting, and the difficulties of writing short-form pieces. Despite the challenges ahead, the panel ended on an optimistic note: “It’s very easy to get nostalgic about some mythical golden age of journalism. In a lot of ways the golden era is yet to come,” said Felix Salmon. “We have this incredible distribution mechanism. The cost of doing journalism is incredibly low compared to what it used to be. The audience is essentially infinite. Let’s be enthusiastic about this. Money was always a means to an end.”

Young Media Weekend really exceeded all of our expectations. NYU Local has never done something like this before, and we want to say thank you to the panelists, everyone who came to school on a Saturday to hear them speak, and to Annie Werner for planning everything.

Check out the pictures from our afterparty at the Thompson LES Hotel at Guest of a Guest, and more images from the panel in the gallery below.

Photos by Alison Lentz and Priya Vij.