Due to the large amount of applications received we have decided to close the application process sooner than planned. Please do check back for future opportunities.
Summer’s coming, and we’re looking for interns at The Spectator. We’re looking for digitally-savvy lovers of good writing with fresh ideas to spend a week or two with us at 22 Old Queen St. The position will be paid (but not paid very much). We don’t mind where or whether you went to university; Frank Johnson was a superb editor of this magazine and he had no formal education to speak of. What matters is flair, imagination and enthusiasm. Skills that you can’t really learn in any classroom.
So leave education off your CV – if you send a CV at all. A few paragraphs telling us about you, and detailing any relevant experience*, will be fine. All that matters in journalism is whether you can do it. To enter, please just do some of the following:
- Produce a two minute video with either explaining a topic you’ve read about on the Spectator’s website.
- Prepare a sample 200-300 word blog offering something new on a topic of your choice for publishing on the Spectator’s Coffee House blog.
- Choose a magazine article, and work out the best way to promote it on the website, Twitter, Facebook and beyond.
- Suggest three ideas for potential stories.
- Suggest two ways in which we could improve how the Spectator’s articles are promoted digitally.
If you are interested, email jobs@spectator.co.uk with ‘INTERNSHIP’ in the subject field. Include a short pitch as to why you’d like to intern at the Spectator and the tasks above attached. Due to the volume of applications, we can’t promise to respond to every application if you are unsuccessful, but we’ll try.
We’re looking for people we may one day be able to hire, so please don’t apply if you have more than two years of full-time education ahead of you. We do run internships for school pupils, through the Social Mobility Foundation so those interested can apply through them. (I can recommend SMF to other employers: they send great, interested and talented kids and we’ve hired two of their alumni so far.)
And one final thing: this isn’t a scam to get some underpaid envelope-stuffers. We take this seriously because this is how we recruit. My brilliant colleagues Sebastian Payne, Alex Massie and Camilla Swift all first came through our doors on work experience. (We do offer training on the job, and a remedial course for PPE graduates.)
The Spectator’s formula is to hire a very small number of very good people, then leave them to make sparks fly. We don’t have any vacancies right now, but when we do, we look back over our interns and invite the best ones back.
One of the reasons that we don’t want to see CVs is because, in our experience, they don’t tell you very much that’s relevant for journalism. My brilliant colleagues include people with degrees from subjects as diverse as computing science and history of art. One of our editors left school aged 16. Great journalists come in all shapes and sizes, from all sorts of backgrounds.
Deadline: Now closed.
* The only education reference you’re allowed to make is to a journalism postgraduate course (i.e., if you’re on one, applying to one, etc). This is relevant not because they teach you very much but because it demonstrates commitment. And anyone vaguely interested in journalism will need a lot of that.
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