NewsJobs.Net: Because you need to eat.

Monique Cuvelier stands in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Her self-employed status allows her to travel regularly.

An unemployed journalist who googles the NewsJobs.Net Web page of Monique Cuvelier ('96) gets hit right in the gut, so to speak:

"NewsJobs.Net/Because you need to eat."

She's been there.

"That's how it started. I was looking for work," Cuvelier said. After graduating, she had obtained an internship at the Western Mail, the major newspaper in Wales.

"After six months, I decided I didn't want to live in Cardiff anymore. So I came back to the States and started bouncing around looking for work."

While attending CU, she had picked up some Web experience working for the geophysics department, so the notion of putting the job links she was compiling online came somewhat naturally. After that, she said, her site slowly kept getting more hits.

"I just started getting e-mails from people asking, 'Have you heard of this link?'" Cuvelier said.

She found work with U S West's DiveIn city guides. That put her in touch with specialists who helped design her journalism employment Web site.

"I started editing reviews at DiveIn and ended up managing content. Then I went to work for myself in 1997. I've been working for myself ever since," she said.

After six months, it was apparent that the site had a consistent following, and Cuvelier named it NewsJobs.Net. Eventually, she said she decided she needed a slogan, and remembering how she was hungry for a job herself not that long ago, adopted "Because you need to eat."

Cuvelier said the site is a public service for job-seeking journalists in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada.

This spring, the site is getting more hits than usual, she said.

"Traffic is actually peaking a little bit because of the gloom and doom of the news industry. But it definitely has its peaks and troughs," she said.

Those who want to contact Cuvelier or provide job listings can use the links at the bottom of the NewJobs Web page to do so.

"It's an enormous amount of work, and the blog I started is just that much more work. But I value the help that people gave me when I was started out as a journalist after I graduated," Cuvelier said.

"It's more of a network now, and we call it NewsJobs.Network. We are user supported. It's not a nonprofit, but it's definitely altruistic; it's not for-profit, either."

Cuvelier said the for-profit part of her career comes from another company of which she is a co-founder and partner, Talance Inc. The company is based in Burlington, Mass., where she lives. "Talance builds content management systems for nonprofits. We provide Web site tools so that people who don't know html can easily edit text and also update and add information," she said.

Cuvelier said that while she was at CU, Bill Celis, a former SJMC associate professor who now holds the same position at the University of Southern California, was instrumental in her career preparation.
"He really was a mentor to me. And he put me in touch with some of his contacts after I graduated," she said.

"I used to do some freelancing for magazines like Family Circle and Cooking Light. I did something for Writer's Digest last year, and I enjoyed writing for The National Enquirer for a while. For the Enquirer, I did the kind of reporting that I'd never done before. I got to talk to people all over the country. Nothing sensational, just true community reporting. Mostly uplifting stories about people, such as someone who had lost a tremendous amount of weight."