What do writers, editors, "mega-curators" and street hustlers have in common in a digital age? And how can you "design your own profession?"

This from Anne-Marie Slaughter, a politics and international affairs professor at Princeton University. From 2009 to 2011 she served as director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department.

In a recent blog for the Harvard Business Review titled "Design Your Own Profession," Slaughter writes that with the digital revolution in full swing, "many old titles and jobs no longer make sense, and many new functions are just waiting to be claimed." She says:

Between the reporter and the editor is now an entire layer of verification functions. Top magazines have always had "fact-checkers": the New Yorker is famous for theirs. But traditionally the verification of facts reported in a newspaper was performed by the reporter and his or her editor. Considering the countless information streams that can produce a set of facts for any particular story these days, media outlets need "verifiers" who are expert at cross-checking information coming from different sources and assessing the credibility of individuals on the ground. Andrew Carvin, a senior NPR strategist who has become one of the principal digital curators for tweets and posts coming from the ground in the Middle East revolutions, is invaluable in part because he has developed the expertise to evaluate the credibility and accuracy of live sources.

One level up, editors are not only super-storytellers but super-curators, figuring out what streams of information should weave together on the website and in actual stories. Publishers are not producers of one finished stream of information but aggregators of many, from raw to polished.

Well, that's a pretty good description of the megatrends. But how can this information be useful to students in journalism, writing and publishing? Slaughter frames the question like this:

So what does all this mean for job-seekers in this uncertain economy? Forget the titles on the org charts and the advertised positions. Design your own profession and convince employers that you are exactly what they need. In my view, the New York Times and other information hubs ought to be advertising for curators and verifiers, but you shouldn't wait for them to do so. Define the functions you think they need and you can supply, and then apply for a corresponding position, whether or not they've created it yet.

This advice isn't anything terribly new. I remember being inspired when I was in grad school, as I read in a book called "What Color Is Your Parachute?" that you create your own job description.

I'm not sure it always worked like that, but all of us were well aware you had to have the instincts of a street hustler in order to survive in the arts. (I'm counting journalism as an art here.) And successful street hustlers have always had something of the artist in them, right? That was true in the 1970s, and it's even more true now. Read the rest of Slaughter's blog. It may not land you a job, but it can get you thinking along lines that will.

Thanks to Associate Academic Affairs Dean Joanna Beth Tweedy for showing me Slaughter's post.