As a student, Chen helped Common Cause of Rhode Island introduce a Clean Elections proposal in Rhode Island. She later interned with and freelanced for the Providence Phoenix, and graduated from Brown University in December 2007.
“I guess my advice based on personal experience is to get to know an outlet by freelancing or interning first,” Chen says via e-mail. That’s how I first started talking with my editor at the Nation about staying on full-time, and that’s how I got my current job with ICIJ.”
Magazines, books + publishing
Magazines, especially mass-circulation publications, have a reputation for being tough nuts to crack for job-seekers. So what’s the way into a consistent, non-freelance magazine position, short of having been hired in the more free-wheeling mid-’90s?
The answer once again: score an internship.
“All the current Esquire assistants are former interns,” A.J. Jacobs, an Esquire editor-at-large, Brown grad, and best-selling author, says via e-mail. “And for the Esquire internship, the cover letter is important,” he notes. “The guys who hire the interns are looking for writers, so I’d recommend against a formal boring business-like letter, and instead write one that is funny or vivid and shows your love of the magazine.”
Being very familiar with the publica-tion for which you want to write is another time-tested requirement. But networking and thinking creatively also help.
Jacobs recalls having pitched his first book, The Know-It-All: One Man’s Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person In the World, in which he read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, blindly by sending query letters to 50 agents. “I don’t recommend this way, though,” he says. “The better way is to track down a friend of your uncle’s manicurist who knows an agent, and then drop a name in the query letter.”
Cranston native Sarah Rainone, 29, is an editor at HarperCollins. She used networking to score a deal for her first novel, Love Will Tear Us Apart — about old friends meeting again at a wedding in Rhode Island — which is scheduled to be released next summer by Three Rivers.
Rainone, a former Providence Phoenix intern, was working as an editor at Doubleday Broadway (an affiliate of Random House) within a few weeks of her graduation from Syracuse University in 2001, landing the job by taking advantage of a job fair offered by her university. “I think being entrepreneurial, no matter what you do, is the most important thing,” she says.
The blogosphere has jobs, too
As blogging has become more established, blogs have been adopted by newspapers, magazines, TV stations, and other media entities. And though independent blogs, such as Rhode Island’s Future, which was launched by Brown grad Matt Jerzyk (a Phoenix contributor) run mostly on the passion of their creators, the blogosphere is home to a growing number of paying jobs.
Jessica Grose, a 2004 Brown grad and former Phoenix intern, for example, has freelanced for publications including the Village Voice, Salon, and the New York Times, mostly after hav-ing moved to New York City. This helped the 26-year-old to land a job, currently as an associate editor, at Jezebel, a female-oriented part of the Gawker Media blog empire.
