All our internships are six months. We offer internships in the art, IT, and editorial departments. We don't use our interns to do busy work; they are placed in active positions within the company--acquisitions readers, the magazine staff, the art department--and taught the skills necessary to work in those sectors of the industry. We switch them up after 3 months, and move our interns to another area in the company if they'd like to try something new. These programs are practical training and not the online equivalent of licking stamps and fetching coffee. With the number of academics and teachers we have on staff, we strive to create an interactive education for our interns, with hands on work within the company.
I work with my editorial interns on a one to one basis. They have the opportunity acquistions (how to determine good submissions from bad), basic proofing/line editing, and content editing. Some of my interns work at Penumbra. There, they learn the processes from slush reading to article writing, editing and layout. Our first batch of interns put together our December issue as a result of this training; two more interns will be putting together two more issues of Penumbra in the next few months as the acting editor (under my supervision). Art interns learn to create covers and promotional art. IT interns learn to build our database and maintain our sites. Design interns learn to create and format books, both for print and digital release. Promotions and marketing interns help to create and execute our promotional campaigns for both Musa and Penumbra.
We use the internships to train our interns for jobs within the publishing industry. And we educate them about that industry. Our master classes programs have been very successful so far. We had two classes in January--including the Writer Beware presentation. Our next two classes are in March (since I'm out with surgery for the rest of the month) and include a class on character building by Sharon De Vita and a class on agents taught by Cherry Weiner. I have classes scheduled, two a month, through June.
Since a lot of publishers rely on unpaid slush readers, we wanted to create programs that went beyond that standard. We wanted to give our interns a real educational experience. So far, our interns have responded with enthusiasm to the programs, what they are asked to do, and what professional experience they gain. Our goal for each intern is to have them leave the program with the knowledge, education and experience to pursue employment in digital publishing--whether with Musa or not.