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Today’s post isn’t about bagels or biscuits, but something very important to me (not that bagels or biscuits aren’t incredibly important):
Clearly Delicious’s Internship Program and our new interns:
Pictured: Spring 2013 Clearly Delicious Interns for Editorial / Writing. From Left to Right: Erica deVeer, Tara Hebert, Amy Laws, and Meredith Quinn.
At the end of January, I posted several online listings for our spring internship positions at Clearly Delicious: Craigslist, Good Food Jobs, and the LSU English Department’s listserv where I invited area students to apply for our programs in Editing & Writing or Marketing & PR. The response was pretty outstanding, and I could not have anticipated the number of e-mails from enthusiastic and ready-to-learn students within such a short period of time.
For me, these requests affirmed something I already knew: blogging and writing for the Internet are here to stay.
Or, more importantly,
Online Journalism, Digital Media, and Blogging Are Here to Stay (re: food).
Not that I was terribly surprised.
But, what did surprise me was the number of English, Communication, and Public Relations Majors at LSU that wrote in with a passion for online media. When I was receiving my Bachelor’s Degree in the early-to-mid 2000s, I could never have anticipated the role the Internet would one day play in conversations of food and culture. I thought about my major in terms of books, magazines, and newspapers, but never in the unknown, permeable boundaries of food writing on the Internet.
Today, I no longer think of the Internet as a place where I Google images hoping to find stock photos for last-minute PowerPoint presentations. Rather, I’ve begun to appreciate the Internet’s massiveness in which thousands of websites go up each day (and 72 hours of videos are uploaded to YouTube each minute). Certainly, there’s inexhaustible amounts of information out there (of which, we should be in awe given how unbelievably young this kind of technology actually is), and there’s a growing distinction in our field about what separates the “Internet” from the “web.”
Signe Rousseau points out that the “web” is just “one model for sharing information on that network [the Internet]” and what I do, and what my interns hope to join and continue, is the quality and community sharing of a specific kind of information. Today, at this blog, we’re concerned with matters of food–recipes, family stories, great places to eat–but tomorrow, one of these young ladies may very well become the great blogger of buttons, DIY ideas, or any number of Pinterest-loving possiblities.
As we begin the first weeks in our spring program, I keep thinking how today’s Internet is not my Internet: an Internet where I actually felt comfortable posting bathing-suit pictures on spring break and wrote openly about my life on my friends’ Myspace pages or Facebook walls (yes, remember that thing called Myspace?).
Pictured: a screen capture of my old (now defunct) Myspace page. Today, these pictures are almost 10 years old (insane and incredible to image), and I’m about 18. During this time, social media encouraged you to post whatever you wanted – here, a picture of me at a play, me with my favorite musician, David Mead, me and a few recipients of the Horatio Alger National Scholarship (yes, that’s Tom Selleck, and yes, he donated money to my college scholarship fund), and, last, somewhat ironically, me with my first PC laptop at my very first summer internship with Wally’s World of Entertainment in 2004. I actually remember saying to Wally Saukerson (the company’s owner), “HEY! We should get a Myspace page!”
During the days of “My Internet,” we had a presence (and somewhat of a voice), but no one outside of our immediate friends and family (seemed) to know who we were. Today, everyone everywhere is capable of accessing yours or my lives, and it’s especially important that we think before we post pictures and tweets. As Signe Rousseau cautiously advises in Food and Social Media: You Are What You Tweet (2012), we access, every day, a
“Sweet but Sticky Web.”*
Let me put it this way:
In ten years, I’ve seen wireless Internet become practically accessible anywhere (that’s right Linda, you know who you are) where wifi cards the size of Gameboys had to be jammed into our laptops and didn’t quite work. In truth, I had no idea what I was doing on the Internet in 2004 or 2005. Or even in 2008. I simply wrote, photographed, and published whatever I wanted, disseminating words and images as my current judgment saw fit. The Internet was just the Internet…no “web” here. I had no idea who might actually be reading my content, and no one ever told me a thing about photo editing or thinking twice about opinions and commas.
That was “my Internet,” and this is now.
As a teacher, I am proud to see a new generation of writers so quick and ready to join these larger publishing, thinking, and online community trends. As Serious Eats Founder, Ed Levine, famously vocalized (and I paraphrase):
“Twitter didn’t kill Gourmet. Gourmet simply couldn’t keep up.”
It is on Levine’s note that I introduce you to the new interns at Clearly Delicious and an overview of how we’ll be structuring our internship this spring (lots more information and posts coming). Each intern will work through the Clearly Delicious 6-month program learning important tips, tricks, and information about our field (whether print, online, or other) and contribute to the brand’s notes as they make their own personal discoveries and apply these skills.
It is my hope, as both a writer interested in online conversations of foodways and culture (as well as a teacher), that each student will find the program educational and informative. Look for their faces and contributions to the website over the next six months, but, for now, here’s a look at their program as they do the work towards becoming serious bloggers.
What You Need to Know about the Program:
– Consists of 2 tracks: Marketing / PR and Editorial / Writing
– Set over the course of 6 months (5 hours a week) with 3 stages. Each stage is meant to guide student interns as they work their way through a crash courses in blogging, editing, and writing basics both online and in print.
*Stage 1, “Basics & Foundations”
* Stage 1 introduces interns to the differences between writing and publishing for print media vs. online media (as with Clearly Delicious). This can be as wide as the ranges between the AP style guide to MLA to Chicago (and the similarities, values, and differences between them all).
-We also cover a list of productive food vocabulary, food vocabulary “no nos,” and things to look for in the Clearly Delicious writings specifically.
-Students gain access to WordPress basics, how to use front and back ends, and recipe writing as a genre and its stylistics.
*Stage 2, “Application, Application, Application”
* Stage 2 gives interns “hands on experience” in which they take their newfound knowledge from stage 1 and apply it independently to a variety of posts, pages, and articles. We meet at the beginning and end of each week to assess short-term goals and check in on the progress towards these goals. Interns also collaborate on posts together, comparing notes on how and why certain revisions or changes should be made.
*Stage 3, “Honing Your Edge”
* Stage 3 invites interns to “hone their edge,” or practice the areas of writing and editing they find most important to their future goals. Interested in copyediting? Food Writing? The AP wire? Huffington Post-like journalism? We’ve got plenty of that, and better yet, we invite our interns to author and publish their own posts for bylines, experience, and accreditations.
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Interested in meeting the new interns? Visit our About Page (scroll to the middle/bottom) and see who’ll be working with us for the next six months.
Welcome all! We’re so happy to have you!
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*page ix from Food and Social Media: You Are What You Tweet.
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Clearly Delicious Internship Program: What You Need to Know about Teaching the Next Generation of Bloggers,
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