Magazine work experience: a glamorous prize?

Work experience is a necessary evil for all student journalists. Sometimes you can get lucky and be treated as one of the team turning out lots of copy. On others you will not be so lucky. Perhaps you will be asked to tidy the stationery cupboard (lots of journalism in there I’ve heard), or too organise business cards or perhaps address envelopes. Or maybe you will be left staring into space for hours at a time as no-one attempts to keep you busy enough (yep, these have all happened to me).

Either way, it’s something that has to be done and the contacts and cuttings (if you’re lucky) are usually worth it. But whether it is useful or a waste of time, work experience is not a prize.

Currently the Sunday Times style magazine is offering “one lucky reader the chance to enter the world of fashion journalism with a two-week internship”. You could be lucky enough to tidy the fashion cupboard and make tea for two weeks. It’s dogsbody work no-one else wants to do tarted up as a prize. In the small print it says that the “lucky reader” won’t even get travel expenses. Even a small B2B will usually cover that. The Times, for shame.

And a few months ago Grazia ran a competition entitled “Grazia’s Next Top Intern” where candidates had to pass a series of tests at Westfield shopping centre in return for an internship. Such competitions seem incredibly patronising, especially when pro-active wannabe journalists will no doubt have applied for work experience the old-fashioned way: by making hundreds of phonecalls and sending thousands of emails saying how much you admire their publication. But perhaps this marketing of journalism as so aspirational and desirable only the “winners” need apply is a knock-on effect of the such high numbers of student journalists at the moment.

Still, I’d rather win a holiday I think.