Prototypes and protests
I subscribe to a lovely little service called Stack. It’s great if you’re into magazines, or serendipity, or design, or journalism… or just bumping into new ideas. And frankly, you should be into at least one of those things, shouldn’t you?
The Stack principle is simple: you pay a monthly subscription fee, and in return you get a magazine. Sounds pretty normal, so far. Except the thing is: you don’t know what magazine it is. Steve Watson, who captains the operation, works with a selection of independent publishers and sends you a surprise package each month.
My recent Stack delivery included two magazines (not one) both linked to crowdfunding campaigns: perfect material for my Year of Giving Dangerously project.
First up was We Are Here, a beautifully wrought travel magazine that aims to document a different city each issue, and ran a small and successful Indiegogo campaign to raise the money for a special second edition that got nixed by the media censor in the United Arab Emirates (the magazine’s editor is based in Dubai).
That’s a great little tale of protest, and how the idea that the network routes around censorship crosses over into other media too.
The other magazine was Intern.
OK, it wasn’t a magazine as such. More a taster, a prototype — and an advert for a Kickstarter campaign.
Intern is effectively a showcase for creative graduates, the kind of people that media organisations generally treat pretty poorly. It’s an attempt to wrestle back a bit of control and. As editor Alec Dudson writes, he spent a year interning around the place to try and break into the magazine business. It was fun, and hard, but…
Despite this overwhelmingly positive experience, as the year drew to a close, I was no closer to a paid job in the industry as when I had set out all those months ago.
I began considering this concept of a ‘career’ and had seen how the creative industries are full of those for whom a career means freelancing and can be littered with uncertainty. It struck me that there were ways in which people like me could be helped on their quest to get established in their field of expertise.
So, he assembled a team of interns to put out a magazine that would display their work for potential employers, ask some questions about the state of internships, and give them all some valuable experience. And they’re running a Kickstarter campaign to fund it. Very smart!
As I write, they’ve raised £5,067 of a £5,500 goal. Almost there. I like the idea of pushing out a prototype magazine as an advertising campaign for the Kickstarter — it’s a sort of rootsy zenith to the nadir of A Manzoni & Fils’ big money, big media campaign.
(Actually, between writing this post and publishing it, they’ve reached the target. Congratulations!)
The prototype was kind of interesting, but I want to see more. Specifically, I’m interested in how the magazine really tries to tackle the question of internships, which I think are a huge problem for the media industry.
Interning has become such an important part of a media apprenticeship that you’ll meet very few people who haven’t been through it. And yet the way most media organisations treat their interns is as some form of indentured labour: they are regularly hired for nothing (sometimes even when the law says otherwise) and given real shit to do, used up, thrown away. That’s bad.
What’s even worse is that interning tends to reinforce the existing cultural lines around mainstream media. It means that those who can afford to spend a year or two dicking around earning peanuts get internships, which are usually handed out to people who are lot like the people who are handing out the internships in the first place (who themselves could afford internships, and so on). And so you just see the same sorts of people getting on the pathway to real jobs and eventually real influence. You are perpetuating the same viewpoint.
The people who can’t afford it, for whatever reason, are the people that the media really needs, and internships lock them out.
As an undergrad student a few years ago, I could afford to do zero-pay placements one or two evenings a week. I worked most of my vacations and a day or two each week doing dull office jobs that helped me pay the rent and afford books. Once I graduated, that was all of the window: I was out on my own, and already in a world of debt I had little chance of servicing. Working for nothing was never going to happen.
As it turns out, I was lucky enough that I found actual jobs that paid actual (small) amounts of money to get me started. But most people aren’t, and yet the reliance on interning as a pathway to a job seems greater than ever.
Anyway, I’m not really sure what “the debate” looks like. But it’s a debate worth having, so I’ve thrown in £120 to see what happens next.
