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Art Fag City Seeks Fall Editorial and Administrative Interns!

by The AFC Staff on September 26, 2012 · 6 comments

Time to start pursuing that accolade of accolades: having Art Fag City branded on your CV for life. Are you a journalism student with a burning desire to edit everything in sight? Perhaps you love the accomplishment of creating a tidy Excel spreadsheet. Either way, you want this position. AFC is an award-winning publication that hosts some of the brightest critical minds working today. Send your application to internships@artfagcity.com by Friday, October 12, 2012 and nab the best internship ever.

If this is you, get in touch.

Art Fag City is seeking fall editorial and administrative interns. 

Ideal editorial candidates have a strong interest in visual art and digital media, are proficient in basic HTML, and possess excellent writing and editing skills. Applicants should also be extremely organized, self-motivated, and detail-oriented. Familiarity with AFC’s content is absolutely essential. If you love the Chicago Manual of Style and are familiar with the word “gerund,” then we want you.

Ideal administrative candidates have a strong interest in visual art and digital media, are proficient in Excel and Quickbooks, and possess excellent attention to detail. Applicants with an interest in special event planning and development will get extra points in our book.

Interns will work directly with the AFC staff to support all aspects of running an art blog, from content management to fundraising efforts. The position offers valuable hands-on experience in the fast-growing world of digital media, and in-depth insight into a prestigious online publication. Interns will also have the opportunity to attend private tours and panel discussions as well as contribute original content for the blog.

Our previous interns have gone on to full-time positions at ANIMAL, ArtINFO, Rhizome, Glide Magazine, and the Dia Foundation, among others. They were capable, motivated, often brilliant individuals who left AFC ready to make their mark on the art world. If you want to join them, get in touch.

Editorial Intern duties include:

  • Copyediting posts and columns.
  • Digital image management.
  • Project-based research.

Administrative Intern duties include:

For either position, familiarity with Javascript and PHP is a fantastic bonus.

Applicants should expect to make a minimum commitment of 2-3 days per week, although some work can be done remotely. You should live in New York—we’re based in Clinton Hill, and we’ll want to see your face regularly. Candidates who have or are working towards a degree in journalism, art history, or arts administration are preferred. As Art Fag City is a 501-c3 Sponsored Organization this position is an unpaid position.

If interested, please e-mail a cover letter, resume, availability, and, for the Editorial Intern, two clips of your writing, to internships@artfagcity.com with the job title you are applying for—either “Editorial Intern Application” or “Administrative Intern Application”—as the subject line. Application deadline: Friday, October 12, 2012.

Tagged as: Intern

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  • http://www.ianaleksanderadams.com/ Ian Aleksander Adams

    not paying them?

  • http://www.ianaleksanderadams.com/ Ian Aleksander Adams

    I hope this is a joke, paddy.

  • yumpopink

    1. The internship must be similar to training that would be given in an educational environment;

    2. The internship must be for the benefit of the intern;

    3. The intern does not displace regular employees;

    4. The employer derives no immediate advantage from the intern;

    5. The intern is not entitled to a job at the end of the internship; and

    6. The intern understands that he or she is not entitled to wages.

    I’m not sure this position fulfills half of these requirements.

  • http://www.ianaleksanderadams.com/ Ian Aleksander Adams

    In place of one liner comment before (apologize, perhaps), discussion below. Sure, I snark, but I actually think serious discussion of the phrasing and presentation here is warranted.

    http://www.facebook.com/ianaleksanderadams/posts/118561344961056

    Ian: “Maybe it’s technically legal but the wording is in line with a lot of illegal internships and it still sounds problematic to me. I never actually said that this internship is illegal, just that it “the practice of illegal internships”. And I think it does.

    I feel a lot of people landing at that page would be unfamiliar with AFC and thus critiquing it in a broader internship context is fair. As Cameron mentioned to me, if something is unpaid you should at least give them a good title.

    I want to say that I’m sure this experience would be highly useful to someone looking to get more knowledge of the New York art scene and electronic publications in general. I just have a lot of problems with the phrasing and presentation. If you’re looking for someone to volunteer and hang out around the office, well, I don’t blame you. This shit is work and I believe it’s worthwhile work, even the data entry. God knows (Jesus and the Whole Ghost even) I spent a good 8 months doing data entry for a comicbook website. These things ARE rewarding for many reasons.

    But a lot of the art industry is just that: Industry. And they use this same system and similar wording. Teenagers blow their savings moving to the big city for positions like this all the time and many of them grumble a fair amount later. Some of your wording in the posting indicates you know this, but a lot of it implies that you think Art Fag City Internship on a resume would help someone get a job down the line more than, say, spending 2-3 days a week on their own blog or business.”

    Paddy: “You give people a title that makes sense for their skill level. When we work with an intern we don’t know that the day they start. Typically, they end up with a better title by the end of internship. But none of this is relevant to a simple call.
    Now, Art Fag City interns have all gone on to paying jobs which make more than minimum wage. It seems like the question here is, why does ArtINFO pay its staff when AFC does not. Well, we’re a much smaller organization and don’t have that infrastructure built in to be able to do that yet. AFC is 7 years old, so not having those ducks in a row may sound little crazy, but keep in mind that as a Canadian citizen it takes an enormous amount of time to get the right work work authorization to even start a project like this. Greencards are not easy to come by, particularly when you’re trying to convince in immigration officer in the middle of nowhere that your blog named Art FAG City makes you a national asset.

    Finally, while I of course agree that unpaid internships and volunteer positions are a problem in the art world, I wish you’d taken a little more time to find out about what we do here and why a position like this might be valuable to someone. There are like, what, 20-25 paid art writers positions in NYC? 5 of our former interns have actual paid writing positions, and all but one have paid positions in the arts (the outlier got a job in advertising). I don’t know anyone else who has a placement rate that looks like that.”

    Ian: “Honestly, and with no sarcasm here, that’s wonderful. Those numbers ARE really inspiring. But why isn’t that, specifically, in your posting? I’ve been reading AFC since you started and had these misconceptions, do you expect people linked to this posting as their first visit to understand your entire context?

    I still, also, think that the title “intern” isn’t necessary for this position. Maybe you should indicate your malleability on that – if indeed they often are assigned more weighty titles after starting.”

    • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=28124954 Jennifer Chan

      Ian, i hate sounding capitalist but “we’ve all been there”. I think in this economy you just have to decide where to put your free labor.

      An intern is an intern–within the art world the name sounds like the unpaid position that it is, and that’s about as common as volunteerism in DIY art projects. I feel an intern is like a double-binded status signifier: you are aligned with an organization so there is a minimal degree of privilege but your labor is free and supposedly applied in exchange for experience.

      If you ideologically align yourself with the AFC crit style I think this is totally worth a shot.

      • Ian Aleksander Adams

        I think that working with AFC is 100% worth it. I think that people should apply for this. But I’m not sure that it needs to be called an internship to work successfully for all parties. As Paddy mentioned in the thread at facebook, Rhizome and other places have come up with alternative solutions to the stigma of the name.

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