So what advice would you have for someone who wants to be YOU? A successful editor or someone major in the media world?
So what advice would you have for someone who wants to be YOU? A successful editor or someone major in the media world?
I always say – and I know now that it’s very politically incorrect to say it, but I always tell kids who are young and in college to go and pick what your dream job is and who your dream person is to work for and go and intern for them, and work for free. Show them what you can do because, in my experience, I’d say probably 80% of the people who work at Paper were interns. Including Mickey, including all the people that you read about and know about. The famous ones. Everyone started as an intern and a lot of Editors-in-Chief around town started as interns at Paper. But I believe that doing that really is better than going to graduate school and if you’re really serious about wanting to do something and want to learn from the best, then go and intern for the best. Just say ‘I’ll work for free, anything you want me to do,’ and just learn and make yourself indispensable so that when your internship’s over, they have to hire you because you’re so good.
And I hate that these companies are just refusing to do internships anymore and I hope we don’t get sued, but I think it’s really important that we have a director that’s really sensitive to interns. That’s something I learned early on because we never had money, so we always really needed interns. We never had a dime. But I always had an intern director, someone that was like, their boss, and if you had to schlep a lot of shit, you’d get it to the shoot and someone would balance so that you weren’t only doing the shit and not getting any rewards for it. So that it was fulfilling, at least. And that if you weren’t coming to work or you were doing a bad job, you were fired as if it was like a real job. I just feel like internships are like the best thing for a person who’s ambitious or if you’re not sure really what you want to do. Isn’t it better than getting stuck in a stupid job you don’t want to do and then 10 years later, you’re still at this place that you’re like, ‘Why am I here?’ It’s not a bad thing.
