Think

Internship at Think Publishing

April 21st, 2017 by Sharna | Posted in Internships | Comments Off on Internship at Think Publishing
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Towards the beginning of the year, I applied for and was offered an editorial internship with Think Publishing, a membership communications agency. If you’re not sure what ‘membership communications agency’ really means (which I didn’t until I did some pre-application research!) it just means that they create publications on behalf of professional membership organisations, charities and corporations. These are usually magazines, books, e-newsletters, and online content channels.

Before I started, I was advised that my time as an editorial intern would include: article research and writing, phone interviews, interview transcription, image research and proof reading. Through the course of the internship, I did complete all of these tasks except for phone interviews, which I guess is a bit of a blessing because I don’t know how I would have fared at that.

The first big issue that I had to deal with on arrival, was an iMac. I purposefully do not use macs because I can’t get my head around them, they make no sense to me, and windows forever! But that’s all I had, so I had to just work around it, and quickly! But it was not as bad I expected it to be even considering the fact that one particular day the keyboard and InDesign stopped working. But apart from that.. spot on! (insert slightly sceptical face here).

 

I had the wonderful opportunity to actually work on a variety tasks for different organisations. This meant that my work load was different every day which, obviously, kept things far more interesting than reading the same publication day in/day out. The changes in tasks also helped me to develop more practical skills. Previously I had been an editorial intern (there’s clearly a theme here) at Sweet & Maxwell in London, and, yeah, I had different sections of work to do, but all I was doing was reading legal jargon and doing copy- and structural edits. At Think I got to write articles, do image and article research, as well as copy-editing and proofing. As much as copy-editing is my ambition, it was nice to put some of my other skills to use as well.

All in all, working at Think was a great experience! The whole experience allowed me to take in some of the new things I’ve learned on the course and it was so interesting to me that I found myself enjoying the other parts of publishing almost as much as my main interests (okay, maybe not as much, but pretty high up there!) I couldn’t be more grateful to everyone at Think, firstly for giving me the opportunity, and for being helpful when I needed help and being very supportive of me in general.

by Sharna Vincent

Interning with Think Publishing

April 29th, 2015 by Leia Forster | Posted in Blog | Comments Off on Interning with Think Publishing
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think logoIn January 2015, I began to intern with the award-winning content and publishing agency Think. Founded in 1999, Think Publishing employs more than 60 members of staff, work with over 40 clients and have offices in London and Glasgow. I was lucky enough to work in the editorial department of the Glasgow branch which produces a number of great magazines for a variety of organisations.

During my time at Think I believe I learned a great deal about magazine publishing as well as gaining insight into the workings of an office environment. I quickly found that the inner workings of a magazine publisher were quite different to that of a book publisher. On my first day I was presented with strange magazine terminology such as ‘furniture’ and ‘copy’, but I caught on quickly. I found myself intrigued by what could be considered a somewhat unconventional business model in the realms of publishing – client funded publications. Trade fiction publishers essentially gamble with every publication they choose to publish. They invest money in these publications and rely greatly on their commercial success. Think’s business model provides a secure financial platform to support the publications that they print for their clients.            scotland in trust

While I was at Think I worked on a number of magazines such as Scotland in Trust, Historic Scotland, Escape, Splash and Legion Scotland. Tasks included the transcription of interviews, research for features, writing content for magazines, sourcing images and coming up with ideas for future features. I found that there were far more opportunities to undertake creative tasks than could be expected in typical book publishing editorial roles, and one of the most rewarding parts of the internship was being able to produce a piece of copy and watch it progress through different stages before finally being included in the magazine.

Despite working primarily on editorial tasks, Think’s office environment allowed me insight into all the different roles and tasks involved in the creation of a magazine. The open layout of the office meant that I could look across the room and watch the designers working on magazine covers and spreads. Being able to observe staff interactions and listen to office discussions was very useful and my time spent doing feature research was never wasted as I found myself leaving the office on a daily basis with a new selection of random facts and knowledge.

I am very thankful to have had the opportunity to intern with Think, and this insight into the world of magazine publishing has given me the confidence to consider magazine publishing as a potential career path to follow upon completing the course.