Jumping Into an Internship Head-First

Only a year ago, I was a subscriber to Paste magazine. What drew me in were the monthly mix CDs released with each issue, chock full of musical artists I’d never heard of – most of whom I ended up loving immensely. Like any culture magazine, Paste was full of reviews and witty banter about the state of the entertainment world, but what kept me with it as a publication was the heart – it felt so much more sincere than other culture rags, more accessible than anything I’d found labeled “indie” and more readable than Hipster Runoff. Only a year ago, Paste was in trouble and sending e-mails to loyal customers asking for a hand up in the tough economy. Only a year ago, issues were being combined and smaller hold-overs released so that it continued to be a magazine that produced great content, just on a more sustainable scale.

Nowadays, it’s still going strong – and as one of a team of hard-working interns, I’m at the heart of the heart that is indie journalism, and I’m loving it.

Getting an unpaid internship as an undergraduate student in journalism is a rite of passage. An obnoxious, unnecessary, entirely expected rite of passage and one that I had not been looking forward to, given the comfort I’d settled into living off Federal financial aid and the earnings from my part-time on-campus job. I won’t lie: it’s been a struggle and I’ve had to budget, but fortunately that financial aid and those earnings helped pay a large part of my bills this summer, leaving my worried brain free for the enormous workload ahead of me.

There are a lot of folks who will tell you that interns get all the grunt work, and it’s true: interns are expected to sort through mail, keep the office clean, update the calendar, respond to readers, et cetera. You’re taught from the first that you’ll be miserable as an intern. Or, at least, that’s the impression that I got; people choose their internships and a lot of people love them like I’ve grown to love mine. But all of those horror stories have to come from somewhere.

Paste is a bit different, though. It’s no Billboard, no Spin magazine, but culture is different from anything I’ve covered as a city writer. A lot of my work ends up on the web, meaning there is flexibility in the inverted pyramid hammered into your head in Newswriting and the ability to have a voice – a wry, sarcastic, hipster-observing-the-world voice, but that works for me. As a Paste intern, I get the mail, open it and sort it (usually stacks of CDs), but I also fact check print pages, write news items and features for the website every day, interview bands, and pitch stories that run the gamut from a new band I found somewhere and want to get out to the world to an interesting film project that we’ve never covered before. I get all the weight and responsibility for these pitches, and it’s a lot to deal with – especially fresh out of the gate, thrown in head-first.

It’s been an interesting two months in Decatur, Georgia, adjacent to all the life and all the drama of Atlanta. Here’s to another month.