Tuesday, October 29, 2013

journalism/ write a book/ Pity the Interns

Oct. 23 Journalism: Today I was reading the Edmonton Journal business section and it says the Edmonton Journal and the Edmonton Sun has increased in online readership and decreased in print readership.  Metro has increased in print and online readership.

So that’s my counter argument to The Simpsons joke:

News reporter: I’m from the newspaper.
Grandpa Simpson: What?  The newspaper?!  That’s going to die before I do!

STC Alberta: I found this brochure and I check marked it.  That means I wrote about it already.  I checked my blog and here it is:


It’s for technical writers and I didn’t take that as an elective back at Grant MacEwan.  STC stands for Society for Technical Communication.  The website is good, but it’s not really for me.


Hart Hanson: I also have a “Gaze into the Stars” brochure from MacEwan.  My friend Dan L went to it.  On Feb. 2010, there was “Corus Entertainment Distinguished Lecturer Hart Hason, the Gemini Award-winning Canadian film and television writer and producer, and creator of the long-running Fox Television series Bones.”

Dan L. and I chatted and he told me.  I took notes about it.

City Palate: I found this piece of paper about this Calgary magazine.  It’s about food and drink.  If you’re a foodie, you’ll like this magazine because it has recipes.  Lol.


Filling Station: I have written about this before.  It’s a literary magazine in Calgary.  They are looking for a volunteer non-fiction editor and a fiction editor.  On the website it says it will take about 5 hrs a week for these positions.  I’m going to email them and ask if I can work from Edmonton.

It says send a resume, cover letter, and 3 references so it’s pretty serious for a volunteer position.  Unlike the Golden Vanguard, they will usually post any movie review I have written within the 500 words limit.


Editor: After going to MacEwan’s Professional Communication website, it made me think of going into editing.  I went to the Editor’s Association of Canada:

“Whether an editor is working on an article, book manuscript, report, speech, news release or some other form of communication, the editor is responsible (along with the writer) for ensuring that the document is
  • accurate enough to satisfy the most informed audience member,
  • clear enough for even a novice to follow and
  • interesting enough to catch and hold the attention of all readers.”

If I get the volunteer position at the Filling Station, then it would be a good start into becoming a paid editor.

Oct. 24: I got an email from Filling Station, and the woman said that I had to reside in Calgary to work there.

Oct. 28 Todd Kipp: I was reading the Edmonton Journal about fashion.  It talked to Todd Kipp who is a Calgary Filmmaker.  I had to look him up.  He has made short films and premiered his movie at the Calgary Film Festival.


Write a book:

50 Shades of Grey: I read that Jamie Dornan from Once Upon a Time is going to be Christian Grey in this movie.  He was the Huntsman and Sheriff Graham on Once Upon a Time.  I didn’t read the book.  The book was self-published, and now made into a movie.

Maybe I should write a book, and then get it made into a movie.


Pity the Interns: I cut out this article called “Pity the Interns” by Mireille Silcoff from the National Post on Nov. 10, 2012.  This article really discusses about being an intern and a writer.  This is a really good article and I bolded all the things I liked about it:

Every three months, a new intern begins working with me. They arrive and I apologize. Because usually they are in their early thirties, and would probably rather be making a living as a journalist than working for free. The internship is as much of an exchange as I can make it. I offer access to my contacts and to any skill or wisdom I might have that could help the intern get published in good venues. I spend a lot of time talking to the interns, offering advice, direction, and if needed, solace, about making a career of writing. And yet there is still someone in the equation working gratis.

Perennially, I have a waiting list of youngish people wanting to intern, sometimes wanting to intern very badly. This might be because working with me is one step closer to actually being paid for words written than the other option open to them: writing for free for the web, where the culture of content is relentlessly unpaid, and unapologetically so. The standard offer from an online magazine is: Do what you do on your blog for me, kid, and I will give you more eyeballs per word. The proposal is presented as favour more than content grab.

Earlier this year, I read Ross Perlin’s Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy, an impressive, timely book about what Perlin calls the “recent chaotic phenomenon” of the contemporary internship, an umbrella term, once belonging mainly to the medical profession, under which we now place “an explosion of intermittent and precarious roles we might otherwise call volunteer, temp, summer job, and so on.”

There are no official numbers on internship, either in the United States or Canada. But in his book, Perlin makes an educated guess: perhaps as many as 75% of the nearly 10 million Americans currently in four-year university programs will take on at least one internship. We can figure the numbers in Canada are not too different.

For Perlin, who writes that interns are the fastest growing segment of the U.S. workforce, it’s a landscape that contains a wide plain of illegality. Because here we have a large group of workers without any benefits, and very often not receiving overtime or anything close to minimum wage, if any wage at all.

And while I am clearly not Condé Nast or the Hearst Corporation — I am something more along the lines of a non-profit — the question remains: Am I employing bad ethics by having a helper who, for about four hours a week, orders books for me, helps me with research, explains Twitter to me (uselessly) and schedules my interviews?

It’s an issue I think about a lot. When I was starting out as a journalist, I had a few mentors. I stayed close to these people, and learned from them. I received not just information — here are some interesting ideas — not just shaping — what is your take on these ideas? — but also education in real-world process — this is how you will be able to make a career from your ideas.

And I did work for a few of these mentors — a bit of transcription here, some bookshelf or file organizing there. I had one mentor, a well-loved professor of cultural studies, who never asked me to fetch so much as a glass of water but got me my first book offer. I had another, a writer, who dishonestly used my ideas for her own articles. In a way, it all balanced out — some instances were more than fair, some less.
And while as long as there has been trade, craft and vocation, there have been apprentices, mentors and systems of teaching and guidance, plunging into these areas now brings up new issues, because of the intern economy that is without question slicing into the number of paid positions on the job market, possibly harming the understood worth of work in the process. You work for free so you can later get a good job. There are fewer good jobs because of all the people working for free.
Up until about four years ago, nearly every established magazine I had written for had a fact checker on staff. Now it is just as likely that a marginally skilled intern will be checking copy.

What this de-professionalization of “lesser” editorial tasks does to articles is one major problem. The way it deflates and distorts the position of the fact checker — and believe me, a good fact checker has bigger balls than your average opinionated columnist will ever grow — is another, larger issue.

And yet, to have the right kind of résumé, today’s aspiring journalist wants to intern, or even needs to, and it seems easy to get trapped in this zone.

Last year, I met one woman who had done six internships and was looking for her seventh. She was about to graduate from journalism school with honours. Among her greater worries was that, once out of university, she would no longer be able to apply for a large number of major magazine internships, which give class credit, and thus hire only students.

One woman who interned with me writes prolifically for the Web, has been doing so for years, has a following, and has never earned anything close to a living wage for her efforts (sometimes she lands a story at a Montreal newspaper. For her last story, she was paid 20 cents a word. This is less than I made per word 20 years ago).

And I know I am conflating issues, but on a sinking ship, everything can get a bit mixed up. The print industry, currently leaking money, is also a place where full-time unpaid or badly paying internships are generously in place. In this environment, it’s hard to figure how any new journalism school graduates can ever expect to make it in their area of study without wealthy, supportive parents. The hope, I guess, is that they will be the one-in-a-thousand shooting star — the intern who gets hired as staff (I am glad to say that at this newspaper, there are a happy number of those.)

Last week I went for lunch with the woman currently interning with me. She is only 21 years old, the youngest helping hand I have had yet. She asked me what it was like when I was her age and freelancing, and I told her, contritely, about making enough to live in my own apartment as a music journalist writing for some very marginal publications in the early 1990s. Even to my ears, it sounded like a spun-up tale from a fantasy universe.

We discussed her pitches and talked about her plans — should she move to New York? Should she start a blog? And I didn’t say the thing, my standard cold-water rinse, about having a backup career plan outside of print journalism. Because to me, this girl looked like someone who could be the one-in-a-thousand. So sometimes it’s best to keep your statistics to yourself.



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