Wednesday, December 12, 2007

Use me, use me, go on and use me.

The thing about being a professional intern is that you have to be prepared to be heavily underutilized.

Sometimes entire days will go by where I am not given even one task, such as a brief to write up, a meeting to attend, a staff member to observe, or even some edits to go through. A good intern will use this freedom to pitch story ideas, make up assignments for themselves, spend an entire day scouring the news, reading poynter.org and learning everything she can about journalism. But that situation isn't always applicable.

For example, you work for an organization that edits its publication a week before it gets printed, and it's almost time for the holiday break. Well you can't pitch story ideas because all the publication schedules are sewn up for the rest of the year, and the paper is tight for space as it is. The Web site editors are so busy and overwhelmed that they can't add anything else to their editing schedule. You've been reading the news for the past four hours, and frankly, that's enough.

So where does that leave me? Well, here. I think I'll start with Wuthering Heights.

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