Tag Archives: vogue

Current charity auction bid for week’s work experience at Vogue: £7,850

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Anna Wintour, the legendary editor-in-chief of Vogue is offering you the opportunity of a lifetime! Just being near her will make you chic.

Chic, perhaps. Out of pocket, most certainly. For this “opportunity of a lifetime” (read: one week’s work experience at Vogue) will set you back at least the current bid of $12,000 (£7,850).

Now in this instance, and in the unnerving number of instances that have preceded it, the winning bid will be donated to charity. In the current climate it seems unlikely that a mainstream media organisation in the UK would have the temerity to simply charge outright for an internship. But, as this article in the Times revealed in February, should it happen, there will be those willing to pay:

[C]ompanies have sprung up offering UK students the chance to hone their skills by paying for an overseas placement in their chosen profession. Clea Guy-Allen, a London journalism student, paid to work on a newspaper in India last summer. “I paid £3,000. My parents helped out but I used savings. The whole experience was good. I was in India for three months and did learn a lot, but not necessarily from working on the paper.”

How much longer will this practice remain too ethically unsound? With unpaid, full-time internships of three to six months eagerly undertaken by the great recently-graduated, will the media industry slip past that particular point on an already slippery slope?

(Via Mediabistro)

WSJ: Vogue uses Obama’s digital fundraiser for revenue ideas

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Interesting detail from the Wall Street Journal about Vogue’s use of Blue State Digital, the firm behind Barack Obama’s online presidential campaigning strategy.

The company has been taken on by Vogue to help the title analyse its audience as part of a push towards charging for online content on Vogue.com.

Full story at this link…

British Society of Magazine Editors award winners

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Last night the British Society of Magazine Editors (BSME) named its 12 editors of the year along with a host of other awards, including an honorary award for publisher Felix Dennis.

Courtesy of the relaunched BSME website, here’s the full list of winners:

Editors of the year
Customer magazines (consumer readership) – Alec Marsh, Private Banking

Women’s magazines (monthly or less frequent) – Alexandra Shulman, Vogue

Women’s magazines (weekly or fortnightly) – Ali Hall, Look

Youth magazines – Beccy Bland, Sparkle World

Business & professional magazines – Danny Rogers, PR Week

Business & professional magazines (non-weekly) – Dickon Ross, Engineering & Technology

Men’s magazines – Dylan Jones, GQ

Entertainment & celebrity magazines – Mark Dinning, Empire

Lifestyle magazines – Maureen Rice, Psychologies

Special interest & current affairs magazines – Michael Harris, Golf Monthly

Newspaper magazines – Michelle Lavery, Telegraph Magazine

Customer magazines (business readership) – Paul Simpson, DCM

Others
Business magazine website of the year – Andre Rickerby, Drapersonline.com

Consumer magazine website of the year – David Moynihan, NME.com

The Mark Boxer Award – Felix Dennis

Editors’ editor of the year – Jane Bruton, editor-in-chief, Grazia

Art director of the year – Marissa Bourke, Elle

Launch of the year – Phil Hilton, ShortList

Campaign of the year – Rachel Downey, Time Out for Training campaign, Nursing Times

Innovation/Brand-building initiative of the year – Stuart Knott, Contact Sensory issue, Contact

The Fiona Macpherson new editor of the year – Tony Chambers, Wallpaper*

New blog series: Am I too old to become a journalist?

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“So you want to be a journalist,” declares the college leaflet or job advice site.

Yes, of course you do but what if you think you might be too old, have no proper training, did not go to Cambridge or Oxford, have no relatives in the industry and all the other clichés people like to trot out? What if you have all of the above but still don’t seem to be able to get a job?

I have just started a fast-track NCTJ course at Lambeth College in London at the grand old age of 28 and before that I was freelancing without any proper training.

When I finally decided to become a journalist I had loads of questions. Everything from whether to do a course, what ‘off the record’ really means and whether my hoovering to working ratio was slightly unbalanced as a freelancer.

Everyday the Journalism.co.uk forum is peppered with similar questions – well, maybe not the hoovering one – from would-be journalists.

This blog series isn’t designed to tell you what to do to become a journalist. Instead it will chart my progress through the 18-weeks of what is turning out to be utter boot camp – 2 hours per night shorthand practice anyone?

Any work experience I do will also be covered as will networking events with views and opinions from seasoned hacks and the gruelling task of actually getting a job at the end of it.

Hopefully it will dispel some of the myths surrounding the NCTJ and whether you truly need it to succeed – the industry from a rookie’s point of view – and be an agony aunt of sorts to questions like ‘help, I want to be a journalist, but don’t know where to start’.

Amy Oliver has been meaning to become a journalist from about the age of 5, but got slightly sidetracked by the possibility of earning money. She has been freelancing since 2007 and in that time has written for The Times, The Guardian, You magazine, Vogue, Vague Paper as well as local newspaper Bridport News in her hometown of Bridport, Dorset.

She has just started a fast-track NCTJ course at Lambeth College and blogs about her experiences as a slightly mature trainee and not going down the conventional route into journalism. She lives and works in London.