Hi Ed,
I recently talked to an editor at a magazine about interning. When I mentioned that one of the reasons I wanted to intern was my interest in writing, she said I should be aware that most magazines only have freelancers write for their magazine, and it is very rarely on staff people. Is this true??
Regards,
Laurie
Laurie,
Yes, it is true. But it's a bit misleading because editors also write—a
lot. In fact, at Ed's friend's magazine they don't have one staff writer but
90% of all of the stories are written by staffers. How's that possible?
The editors write the stories. The title of editor sounds like you're grammar-checking
or line-editing all the time. But the truth is that editors, especially junior-level
editors, spend most of their time writing the content of the magazine. Editors
also come up with the ideas for the stories, work with the art department to
bring the stories to life visuallly, and write all the display copy—the
heds, the deks, the captions. The junior-level editors such as Assistant Editors
and Associate Editors almost always write the front-of-book (FOB) sections of
a magazine. These are the pages that have lots of different stories on one page.
Check out your favorite magazine and read the byline on the FOB pages and then
flip to the masthead. You'll probably see that an Associate Editor, or another
editor, wrote it. Or, there's no byline at all, which means that someone on
staff definitely wrote it. (No outside freelancer will let you get away with
you not giving him/her a byline!)
Magazines DO hire freelance writers—some more than others—to write
their stories. Usually these are the longer stories rather than the FOB ones.
The freelance writers work from home and are given the assignments from an editor
at the magazine. The editor then coaches the writer through revisions (oftentimes
several) before it is published. Depending on the magazine, the editor can completely
rewrite the story the freelance writer turns in to make sure that it fits the
tone of the magazine. The freelance writer, therefore, usually has less control
over how the story will turn out.
Hope this helps,
Ed
