Tag Archives: interns

Freelance journalist Peter Watts is looking for an enthusiastic and motivated intern to assist with finding stories for magazines such as Uncut, Prospect, New Statesman and many – but not that many – more.The position is based in a south London coal cellar and you must be able to commit for six weeks or you can just piss right off you time-wasting loser.

Tasks

• Coming up with features ideas: scouring newspapers and online every day for great potential features to steal
• Chasing stories, interviewing, transcribing, writing and taking cheques to the bank every week
• Sending commissioning editors obsequious emails containing poorly conceived feature pitches and then ranting impotently when they fail to respond
• Networking (ie having coffee with John O’Connell, where you will both gossip like old women about other journalists while trying to avoid paying the bill)
• Experiencing general low-level resentment every time you see a peer’s byline in a newspaper or magazine
• Pretending to be pleased for them
• Finally mastering practice/practise and effect/affect
• General admin duties (milk no sugar)
• Liaising with girlfriend and daughter
• Watering the potatoes
• Monitoring Twitter, hoping this will be the day when @caitlinmoran finally retweets something of yours that is witty and pithy
• Or failing that, @indiaknight
• Look, even @gilescoren will do at a pinch
• Coming up with witty and pithy Tweets
• Taking crap photographs for self-indulgent personal blog
• Getting three stars on tricky 5-7 level of Angry Birds

Experience required

Preferably a background in journalism or slavery. Otherwise, anybody lacking self-dignity and imbued with a lacerating self-loathing will do fine. Any applicant related to somebody already working in the media will obviously receive preferential treatment.

You need to have a hunger for wiping other people’s arses. We also need you to be highly organised, motivated, determined and really, really desperate – for you, no boot is too shit-encrusted to lick if there’s half a chance you might get another unpaid intern job in a dying industry at the end of it.

This position may give you herpes. You will leave this role without a soul or pride, making it a great position for anyone wanting to have a successful career as a freelance journalist. Previous experience in real life is probably not ideal.

Please submit an updated CV and a covering letter explaining why you’d be perfect to do my dirty work for me. This is initially a temporary unpaid position although for the right candidate there is the definite potential for it becoming a permanent unpaid position.