Yesterday, media-type Tweeps and bloggers alike were in quite a shock reading Tiffany Wright's "Real life/women’s magazines intern wanted" advert on EditorialJobs
Wright first mentioned that she wanted an intern on her blog, The Stiletto Diaries:
Having decided that i need someone to help me find some fab real life stories, I have spent the day trying to word a suitable “ooh, i really want that job” type ad. Ideally I’m looking for a recent graduate who wants to write for magazines like Cosmo, Glamour, Grazia, Now and More…so, if you know anyone?
This original job posting was utterly ridiculous, not least because Wright decided pink was an appropriate colour to write an ad in, and because she included a smiley. The list of tasks expected from the intern is rather thorough and includes "Writing teasers to send out to magazines" and "Coming up with features ideas for women’s magazines scouring newspapers
and online every day for great potential real life features and then
chasing these stories", two key duties when you are a freelancer. The very idea that she is willing to outsource those to an intern is quite worrying. By the look of it, anyone completing this internship would be in charge of so much of Wright's actual job that s/he will gain an invaluable insight into what being a freelancer entails. If you are good enough to be the ghost worker for someone, why wouldn't you do the same for yourself, and make actual money out of it?
Peter Watts, at The Great Wen, probably has the best, and funniest reaction to Wright's job advert, choosing to take the piss out of it rather than going on a rant. Funny can be so much more powerful than angry:
Tasks
- Coming up with features ideas: scouring newspapers and online every day for great potential features to steal
- Chasing stories, interviewing, transcribing, writing and taking cheques to the bank every week
- Sending commissioning editors obsequious emails containing poorly conceived feature pitches and then ranting impotently when they fail to respond
- Networking (ie having coffee with John O’Connell, where you will both gossip like old women about other journalists while trying to avoid paying the bill)
- Experiencing general low-level resentment every time you see a peer’s byline in a newspaper or magazine
- Pretending to be pleased for them
- Finally mastering practice/practise and effect/affect
- General admin duties (milk no sugar)
- Liaising with girlfriend and daughter
- Watering the potatoes
- Monitoring Twitter, hoping this will be the day when @caitlinmoran finally retweets something of yours that is witty and pithy
- Or failing that, @indiaknight
- Look, even @gilescoren will do at a pinch
- Coming up with witty and pithy Tweets
- Taking crap photographs for self-indulgent personal blog
- Getting three stars on tricky 5-7 level of Angry Birds
Wright has been rather silent since the beginning of the controversy. Her Twitter is still unmanned (maybe she does need someone to look after it after all), and the The Stiletto Diary entry she did yesterday was about the Bergdorf shoe application, with no mention of what is said online about her (though it's hard to know whether it's because she's chosen to ignore everything, doesn't know how to respond or wrote her post before her ad appeared on EditorialJobs).
Whether or not she gets an intern, or unpaid PA, call it as you wish, if she's any good at self-publicity, she could get quite a lot out of her little blunder. I'm pretty sure the number of hits on her blog have more than doubled since Monday morning, and her name is a lot more visible on Google.
You'll get farther in life, by properly applying your mind, than you will, by only trying.
When it comes to counting our "luck", it all adds up.No harder thing to know, than what to hang on to, and what to let go.ffxiv gilhttp://www.buy-ffxiv-gil.org/
Posted by: Account Deleted | 08/25/2010 at 07:33 AM