First Day of My Life: My First Day
So before I launched into my entire internship search history, I was on the subway heading to Interview for my first day. I had been to the office before, and I couldn't wait to be inside again.
I am an appreciator of details, but there is nothing subtle about the office. It is gorgeous. In the lobby, Warhol's Chairman Mao prints and dark wood panels enclose the receptionist. The advertising section of the office has huge windows overlooking Broadway, open cubicles made of lightly painted wood, and Warhol prints (originals!) scattered around the office walls. The office certainly exudes the pop culture savvy and class of its magazine. The most exciting part of the office is the library. There are walls of bookshelves all filled with books about art, culture, and the places to see in the world. I get overly enthusiastic about books and libraries because I have held a lifelong dream to have a huge library in my home and be incredibly well read. So to work at a place that highly regards intellectual endeavors is doubly rewarding.
On the first day, I meet my co-intern Brittany who is a student at the University of Wisconsin. She is majoring in some sort of communications, advertising, super specific job oriented major, and I was afraid that I would not be informed enough about the ways of advertising and fall behind. Not to worry, my English major has left me amply prepared for this job. On our first day, we alphabetized and organized 2 file drawers filled with magazines. Since advertising and publication, in general, is a competitive field, Interview subscribes to about 30 other magazines, including Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, Elle, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, etc...and several smaller New York-based publications. So, it was our job to make sure that each competitive magazine had its own file folder in a drawer and that all the magazines were organized by alphabet and by date. It was a physically exhausting job, especially since we started doing it wrong at first by removing all magazines before 2006 and piling them all around the office. We then had to put them all back, and my arms were considerably tired.
Everyone keeps asking me whether I get a chance to mingle and socialize with my co-workers (or more appropriately my bosses) during work. And the thing is, it is really hard because everyone is at his/her respective cubicle working on things he/she needs to do. So, it is kind of awkward to hover around their desks and be like, "Hey, what's up? What's your life story?" There are several younger people who work at the magazine, including my fellow Conn alumni, and I have learned more about them as the days go by. Some of the older people who work here tend to be high up in the advertising food chain, and I rarely speak to them or see them at all. But I smile and say hi as they bustle past, on their way to some important meeting with Christian Dior or the publisher, Sandra Brant.
The great thing about this internship (one of many, I should say) is the hours. I work 10-6, which means that I don't have to get up until 8:15 and I just hop on the subway and I am here in about 10 minutes. It is a wonderful commute, infinitely better than commuting from home (Fairfield, CT) which is about an hour and 40 minute train ride and THEN I have to take the subway from Grand Central. It is not fun, and I cannot imagine how people who live in Fairfield commute every day. I feel like I would have no soul by the end of the month, let alone after 20 something years. I really admire those dedicated individuals, especially the ones that remain pleasant when you accidentally bump into them on the crowded train.
It is really nice working with another intern because you get to have company and commiserate over feeling inadequate and unprofessional. Being my first internship, I had no idea what to expect. What kind of work I would be doing, what everyone in the office would be like, etc. The workload is pretty light, and it is a nice break from school where I can go home and not have to worry about doing anything productive. The problem with having two interns is that the workload is light and we get things done quickly. So for the first week, the amount of free time we had was surprising and almost overwhelming. When our instructions were to sit tight and read a magazine, it seems opposite to what I had expected. It is really nice to flip through old issues of Interview and read these amazing articles, like a conversation between Allen Ginsburg and Johnny Depp or an candid interview with Edward Norton. You can't really get this kind of coverage and understanding from regular publications. No one in the conventional media world cares a whole lot about Edward Norton or Liza Minnelli. But Interview has these amazing couplings of people, and two dynamic personalities make for great entertainment.
Anyway, enough tooting Interview's horn.
We started on a Wednesday, and by the next week, we started doing a few more things and learning more about how advertising works. I now know how to use a advertising database called MagAdvisor, and I can make reports about how many pages in all these competitive magazines featured an ad by a certain company. For example, how many pages featured an advertisement for Dolce and Gabbana for 10 different magazines in 2006. It's pretty neat stuff! I know how to make a media kit, which is a package magazines send to prospective ad clients that feature editorial and advertising information about the magazine including our editorial vision, upcoming issues, circulation and reader demographic, and the cost to run an advertisment. I also have gotten really good at entering information into spreadsheets and using the internet as a research tool. My most recent project is to look up how other magazines utilize ad space on their websites. I need to take note of how many ads run per webpage, what the layout is like, whether the ads change when you click to different linked sites, etc. And now, I have been making a bunch of phone calls, pretending I am from an exclusive company interested in advertising on x's magazine's website, covertly asking for price information about advertising online.
The reason I am doing all of this is because Interview recently launched their website, and we want to know how much our competition is charging for online advertising. Because we want to make our website THE BEST! If you are interested in looking at the site, it is really cool. The layout is way different from the typical website because instead of linked articles opening in a new window, the website is almost laid out like a magazine. So you click on a link for an article and the website runs horizontally across the screen to the article. I don't know if that makes sense, but it is super awesome.
Check it out: www.interviewmagazine.com