Dear Ed,
I discovered that an assistant editor rewrote a 300-word article
that I’d researched and written for the alumni magazine I intern for. Nothing is directly taken from my article besides factual information. She basically trimmed it down and rearranged the order. And, of course, she put her name at the end.
Does this happen to a lot to interns? I feel as though she could have asked me to rewrite it since we had plenty of time. I’m kind of peeved, since that assignment is one of the few I get to do, and I enjoyed working on it.
-Alum Intern
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Dear Alum Intern,
It’s not at all uncommon for an editor to use an intern’s reporting to completely rewrite a story, especially a shorter one like that. Nailing the magazine’s style is tough for interns, since they’re only on-staff for a few months. It’s sometimes easier for the editors, especially when they’re pressed for time, to just rewrite the whole thing than to ask you for a revise. If your story didn’t have a logical flow and it was running longer than the space allotted to it, trimming it down and rearranging the order is the editor’s job.
That being said, if the editor felt that your reporting was solid enough to use it in her rewrite, she should have at least given you a reporting credit. Some magazines don’t do this; they’ll just have one byline with one person’s name. But others allow the story to be written by more than one person or an extra line to be added that says “Reporting by ____.” Either way, the editor should have had more sense to come talk to you about her proposed change rather than wait for you to find out on your own. The fact that she was so sneaky about it leads Ed to think that the editor knows she was wrong.
What to do? You can’t exactly chastise her for her icky move since she pulls rank. But, if she’s the only editor around, you can say that you’d love the chance to write something else (pitch some ideas—don’t just demand another story) and you’d really appreciate it if she could tell you what you could have done better on your last story. If she has the time, she’ll probably be too happy to share her tips. But, there’s a chance that she’s trying to get as many clips as possible, too. If she doesn’t assign anything else to you, talk to you internship supervisor (which hopefully isn’t her!) and let her know that you’d really like to write a bylined piece, you’ve pitched the following ideas, and you even wrote that first piece, but did not receive a byline for it.
Love,
Ed
