Carnegie
Corporation
of New York
Spring 2008
Interning At Boston
Review
Boston Review depends on interns to supplement its slim staff. In
the early years, students from local colleges interned for about a month.
“One of our early interns was Daniel Harris [author of The Rise
and Fall of Gay Culture (Ballantine Books, 1999)], who at the time
was earning his masters in English from Harvard,” remembers Roth.
“He seemed to just appear one day, and he was so smart and so capable.
He worked to earn money, interned for us [for a while] and then worked
again to earn money.” In more recent years there have usually been
twelve interns annually, with each unpaid internship lasting five or six
months. “Boston Review takes about twenty-five per cent
of its applicants,” says Chasman. “We seem to attract extraordinary
young people, and, from our side, we could not function without them.”
As they fan out to pursue careers as writers and editors or in professions
other than journalism, former interns continue as informal ambassadors
for the magazine and help widen its audience.
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In the mid-1990s, intern Archon Fung developed the magazine’s first web site. “This was in the early days of the World Wide Web,” says Fung. “Before there was Netscape or Explorer or Firefox, there was Mosaic.” He recently was awarded tenure as professor of public policy at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, and says “Boston Review has helped me enormously as a forum in which to make my own ideas from the ivory tower accessible to its broad, smart and politically engaged reading audience.” Fung uses articles from the magazine as course materials for his classes and says the debate format is ideal for teaching purposes. “There is always a strong, provocative and closely argued point of view, followed by equally sharp responses and counterpoints,” he says. “These forums model how students should think through controversial proposals and ideas in their own minds.”
Chrissy Hennenberg was inspired by her internship to apply to medical school, in part because Chasman introduced her to the work of Paul Farmer, who is professor of medical anthropology at Harvard University and subject of Tracy Kidder’s book Mountains Beyond Mountains: The Quest of Dr. Paul Farmer, A Man Who Would Cure the World (Random House, 2004). Former intern Maddy Kotowicz, who is now a graduate student in creative writing at Boston University, describes her internship experience as profound. Kotowicz, who interned for four months beginning in the fall of 2005, continued at the magazine in a publicity and advertising capacity. “The job gave me a lot of practical experience, including attendance at a spring 2006 Carnegie Corporation conference on dissemination in Washington, D.C., that included a roundtable discussion and presentations by Donna Brazile and Eleanor Clift,” says Kotowicz. She also found the networking opportunities valuable and was able to attend Book Expo America for the first time. “That was a neat experience,” she says. “I was able to share the magazine with people from NPR, authors and others in the publishing world.”
When Kate Ablutz began an internship at Boston Review, she felt “pretty sure” that she wanted to be an editor and a writer. “After a few weeks there, I was certain of it,” she says. “As interns, we helped with just about every aspect of putting the magazine together including fact checking, copyediting, substantive editing, reviewing submissions and design. In some of these areas we were asked to take on a lot of responsibility. In others we just contributed our opinions, but the editors always took our suggestions seriously and engaged us in great debates about ideas and aesthetics.” Ablutz is now studying at Columbia University’s Journalism School, in its intensive one-year program centered on reporting and writing; the experience at Boston Review helped her gain admission to the program and also has informed her journalism studies. “I can see my articles from an editor’s perspective and can look at local stories with an eye for their larger social and intellectual significance,” Ablutz explains. “Our professors say that in the age of 24-hour news coverage and infinite blog commentary, people need newspapers and magazines to provide in-depth writing. That is what Boston Review has been publishing all along.”
A 2003 Dartmouth College graduate, Brad Plumer was headed for graduate school to pursue an advanced degree in mathematics. But post-graduation, he began to reconsider which path to take, decided that he would explore magazine writing and applied for an internship at Boston Review. “The experience there showed me how magazines are put together,” says Plumer, who ruefully remembers doing a great deal of fact checking during his five-month internship from January to May 2004. Plumer says he “wasn’t a political person at all in college,” so while at Boston Review he tried “frantically to learn as much about politics as possible to fool people into thinking that I knew the first thing about education policy as opposed to algebraic set theory.” His internship paved the way for a job at Mother Jones magazine where he began work as a web intern, wrote some articles and became assistant web editor before moving to The New Republic, where he is now an assistant editor.