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Part 3 (2/2)

How to Get a Job in Publishing Alison Baverstock 155780K 2022-07-22

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Whether this is a dysfunctional family or a harmonious one depends to a large extent on the editor's ability to get everyone to pull together. If you're very lucky you'll have an editor who is teacher, mentor, protector and boss. If you're very unlucky, you may find you have an editor who is a small-minded tyrant who hates to share glory or do work, who has as much loyalty as a c.o.c.kroach and will sacrifice you without a moment's regret if it suits. Most editors, of course, fall somewhere between the two extremes.

It's not rare for the happiness in your working day to be determined by your boss. But here, in Magazine World, you're part of a small, tight team and your boss has a particularly powerful influence on your career, at least while you're on this particular magazine. If it's a good experience, savour and celebrate it; if it's not, grit your teeth and remind yourself it's not forever. It'll just feel like it.

Among my duties were acting as a receptionist, dealing with the switchboard and picture files, and delivering complimentary copies around Fleet Street on Thursday mornings, before the magazine formally came out on Fridays. I also typed up handwritten contributions. Quite often my job was simply to keep people at bay, as the all-women editorial staff were really quite eccentric, sometimes even hanging out their underwear on a little line in the corner after pre-publication all-nighters, I suppose. They were all on edge at such times and I often got shouted at, and suffered greatly from all the smoke in the air. But soon I was having to pitch in and help with the subbing and do mock-ups for the little booklets brought out by the magazine. I saw a younger member of the team leave to work on the fas.h.i.+on pages of a big daily, and realised that this was a way into journalism at a more exciting level, and it was obviously a valuable experience for publis.h.i.+ng too.

(DR JACKIE BANERJEE, ON HER FIRST JOB WHILE WORKING ON MAGAZINES SHE EVENTUALLY OPTED FOR A CAREER AS AN ACADEMIC) 5. Editorial integrity makes good sense Your proprietor or, more likely, editor, calls you into his magnificently opulent office and lights a cigar. 'Look sonny/darling, ' he'll drawl, scratching himself in a most unseemly manner, 'The Nitwits Company is our biggest advertiser, and we don't want to go upsetting them, now do we? So perhaps we can give them a good review and not say anything about that camera they make that keeps exploding and blinding people. Am I right? You know I am. Now run along and let's not have to have another chat later. Close the door on your way out.'

Well, perhaps. If anyone really ran their magazine like that, readers would sniff it a mile off pretty quick and drop the mag shortly thereafter. Life isn't quite like that.

Instead, here's a real-life scenario. A very, very big car advertiser books a whole heap of advertising in a publisher's magazines and, much more importantly, across the publisher's TV channel, which is in fact where 90% of the money is spent. As part of the deal, the advertiser demands lots of things (like slots in the breaks of the biggest shows), and, oh yes, nearly forgot, right down the bottom, almost as an afterthought, it demands a front cover for its next launch on one of the publisher's car magazines.

Now it's not as if this manufacturer's latest launch isn't one of the biggest of the year, and in fact it has a reputation as a maker of pretty good cars. So why did the editor feel compelled to resign? Think about it for a few minutes we'll come back to this later.

Editorial integrity in magazines is often more subtle than that in newspapers and on TV news, where it's pretty obvious what you should do. If a newspaper proprietor you're working for doesn't want you to report that the leader of his favourite political party beats her children with a heavy rolling pin, you can easily see the threat to the public's right to know. Whether you pan the latest toaster that is advertised in the same edition of the magazine you're working on, however, is less a moral issue than a commercial one.

What do we mean? Well, short term you'll make more money if you bury the bad news and don't trash your advertisers' products, because your advertisers won't flounce off in disgust and will continue to advertise. Over time, however, your readers will start to notice how you're a ma.s.sive fan of everything that Nitwits & Sons makes, while at home they've a pile of melted toasters and kettles that make the water taste funny. Once the word gets around you're a prost.i.tute, it's very hard to get your good reputation back. So longer term, your magazine will suffer and your proprietor will find himself buying cheaper cigars.

Here are three little questions that you may like to think about now, rather than when they crop up at work . . .

a) Suppose you're working on a gossip mag and your proprietor's daughter appears topless on the beach. Do you use the pic?

b) You said no? Good on you. Try this. Suppose you're working on a lads' mag and you have the choice between two bikini pictures: one of Girl A, and another of Girl B. Girl A is married to the son of your proprietor's biggest enemy. Does this influence your choice?

c) You said no, because you're better than that. Now, you find out that Girl B is married to the son of the proprietor. Does this influence your choice?

(By the way, your first and natural reaction may well be to say that you wouldn't work on a lads' mag anyway, and certainly not one that prints photos of young women topless on the beach. Would you, though, work for a company that profited from such grubby activity? If not, you'll soon find your scope for potential employers is greatly reduced: most of them have their grubby department.) Issues of editorial integrity are difficult, and can be tangled. Work hard to do the right thing, think hard about the choices you're asked to make and don't be too quick to condemn others until you've stood up for yourself and refused to do something you believe to be wrong. A principle is not a principle until it's cost you something.

The Mystery of the Resigning Editor So, why did our car magazine editor feel he had to resign? (See above.) Two reasons, in fact: one commercial, immediate and largely irrelevant; and one longer-term and also commercial, and hugely, ma.s.sively relevant.

The short-term reason is that the car in question was perfectly fine for its market, but that market was not the one the magazine in question serves. Putting a safe, value-for-money family car on the front of a boy-racer magazine is commercial suicide. Magazines are highly sensitive to what's on the cover, which can make a ma.s.sive difference to sales.

(The chick equivalent, by the way, is putting a model entirely dressed in Marks & Spencer or (in Australia) Sussan on the cover of Vogue.) The second, longer-term reason is that once the word gets round that your front cover is up for sale, it's going to become next to impossible to make your own decision as to what goes on it. If the compet.i.tor to the company mentioned here knows you've done it once, it's pretty hard to refuse when they come knocking.

Once you're for sale, you can never again make a stand on principle. That's really why our editor resigned, and would have done even if the car in question had been suitable for his readers.h.i.+p.

Jobs on magazines While it's unfas.h.i.+onable these days to talk about hierarchies, the fact of the matter is that you'll find yourself a good way down the pecking order in your first job.

Bear in mind, though, that there are no hard and fast rules on getting jobs in publis.h.i.+ng, and this is particularly true of magazine publis.h.i.+ng. 'Sometimes it does come down to whether you as the employer have a gut feeling about an applicant, whether they have a GSOH (good sense of humour) . . . anything really, ' says Andy Jones, Director of feedBack Media & PR and much-experienced magazine journo and editor. Sometimes the most bizarre route can result in a job, as this cracker from Greg Ingham ill.u.s.trates: My first job was as a staff writer on a now defunct TV listings mag called TV Choice. I hung around for five moons in their unmanned reception, waiting for a job interview. Phone rang: it was a splenetic Peter Dulay, from Candid Camera, complaining that the BBC had stolen one of his sketches for The Late, Late Breakfast Show. I pretended to be a journalist, quizzed him, got some great quotes and then rang Michael Hurll at the BBC (I'd remembered his name from seeing TV credits; deeply, deeply sad, I know). Hurll rudely reb.u.t.ted or rebuffed or refuted or whatever it is that you do, and I got some even better quotes from Dulay when I told him what Hurll'd said. I then wrote all this up and so had a real, live, almost interesting story ready by the time I was eventually interviewed. Mag went bust six weeks later, mind. Moral? You can have too much planning, you know.

(GREG INGHAM, CHIEF EXECUTIVE,.

MEDIACLASH AND FORMER CHIEF EXECUTIVE OF FUTURE PLC, AUSTRALIA).

The term for this is chutzpah or, perhaps better, b.a.l.l.s. Magazine World is no place for shrinking violets, and a ridiculously cheeky swagger will often do the trick (either that or get you thrown out).

However, there is one absolute golden rule for every job in magazines, or indeed any job in publis.h.i.+ng with the exception of sales: I can't overstate how important and obvious it is to be good at English. The number of job applications I have dealt with and CVs I have seen with bad English is appalling. I don't even bother looking at qualifications if there's a typo on the CV. (ANDY JONES, DIRECTOR, FEEDBACK MEDIA & PR, UK) So here are the five traditional routes into magazine publis.h.i.+ng . . .

1. Editorial Your first job in magazine publis.h.i.+ng might be as editorial a.s.sistant, which means running errands, helping out, filing and generally doing the jobs no-one else wants to. Do them exceptionally well, stay cheerful and keep telling yourself that one day you'll be in a position to be nicer to the editorial a.s.sistant than this lot are, and you may find that you get yourself a role as a staff writer, writing the bits no-one else wants to. Do them exceptionally well, stay cheerful and keep telling yourself that one day you'll be in a position to be nicer to the staff writer than this lot are (does this sound familiar?), and you may make it as a departmental editor. Here's where things get interesting, and where you get some clout to manage your own area of the magazine, and we'll come back to this in a minute.

Naturally to succeed as a writer on, say, a photography magazine then you'll need to be pa.s.sionate about the subject matter yourself. So take a look at yourself and work out what you have to offer the market. However, if you 'quite like' music, that really doesn't qualify you for a job on Q magazine: you need to know what track Vanilla Ice was ripping off on Ice Ice Baby (Under Pressure by David Bowie and Queen), Justin Timberlake's middle name (Randall), how many Billboard number one hits Michael Jackson's had (13 we're not expecting this information to get outdated), who originally recorded Toploader's Dancing in the Moonlight (King Harvest), what amp Jimmy Hendrix used (Marshall) and about a billion other bits of knowledge.

2. Editorial production Alternatively you may find that you enter Magazine World on the editorial production side of things, dealing with copy-editing and the transmission of the ma.n.u.script from receipt onto page. (That's how Steve started, working on a computer magazine basically as a filter to stop too much geekish being left untranslated.) Although this may seem less creative than being a writer, it leaves you with a surprising degree of responsibility and the opportunity to really contribute to the magazine.

Your department gets to write the captions, the crossheads (the mini-headlines in the story), the introductions and the headlines themselves. Work up a good reputation in this area and you can quickly get noticed. (Steve's favourite from his computer magazine days was a letter from a reader complaining about what was on the cover disk: 'Now is the Whinger of Our Discontent'.) Arguably you don't need to be an expert to work in production, though opinion is divided on this. (Some feel you need to be able to verify all the facts as they come speeding through; others that you need to make sure the magazine doesn't end up appealing to a smaller and smaller subset of uber-experts like the writers themselves.) 3. Design A third option is the design stream, the graphic design department. (Department might be putting it a bit strong, since on many magazines it's a grand total of two or even just one.) Yet again in your first role your t.i.tle may well have the word 'a.s.sistant' in it, and from there it's just a case of putting strychnine in your boss's tea and working your way up to the lofty position of art editor or art director.

4. Sales A fourth option is on the advertising or commercial side. Here you'll find opportunities for advertising sales, getting out there and selling advertising s.p.a.ce in the magazine. We talk elsewhere in this book about whether this is the right kind of gig for you (see Chapter 7). If you're entrepreneurial, outgoing, something of a lone wolf rather than a team player, terrible at paperwork and generally a bit of a geezer then advertising sales may well be your thing.

A word of warning: do not try to try to use selling advertising as a way to get into editorial: it won't work. Yes, it's definitely possible, but it's such a bad bet you'd be better off getting an editorial job any editorial job and work your way up that way. (The same is true in the opposite direction, by the way.) 5. Magazine production The fifth and final option is magazine production, the logistical department who are responsible for ensuring that the adverts sold by the advertising team make it into the magazine, and that the editorial doesn't turn up. Again, it is rare though not unprecedented for someone to get into a magazine this way and then make their way across to editorial, and it's probably not a good way to try and do it.

I applied for a position called 'Person Friday' at an educational publis.h.i.+ng company then called Longman Ches.h.i.+re [now part of Pearson Education]. After being there for a while I then moved into production and became a.s.sistant production controller and was employed with Longman Ches.h.i.+re for five years.

(TERESA PONCHARD, ADVERTISING PRODUCTION COORDINATOR, UNIVERSAL MAGAZINES, AUSTRALIA).

So, that's a brief summary of the various ways you can infiltrate the closed world of magazines. How you do that is what this book is all about. Part III will show you how to start making your wish a reality.