good experience - Intern - Hourly PSFK Employee Review

The editorial staff at PSFK is small, which allows for many opportunities for clips and for original pitches. Editorial interns are treated as members of the staff; this was very valuable for me as I was entering my final semester of journalism school. Going into my experience at PSFK, I knew I didn't want to be coddled as an intern and was ready to be treated as a professional. I got that professional experience from day one, as I was expected to jump in as a regular and efficient contributor to the site.

The time I spent at PSFK was a pivotal period of transition for the staff. When I started, I had three different editors than when I finished as an intern. This transition allowed for an occasional lack of communication among editorial staff members, particularly to me. Whereas I felt like very much a member of the editorial team the majority of the time, there was a large contrast during the beginning of this staff change. I was not aware of many of the staff changes until before they were going to occur. Because my experience of being a respected contributor at PSFK was exceptional to other internships, this lack of communication felt heightened.

- Young and vibrant office culture.

1. Low pay for the work you do ($5-6 per article). Which you are required to do in-depth research, source quotes, source photos (and resize them accordingly), incorporate SEO into the article, come up with a title that needs to be engaging but can only be written a certain way, create a tweet, write an excerpt that needs to be different to the headline (not repeating any of the words already used in the title), add tags, create shortened URL, and add categories. Oh, and you need to write 150-300 words for the article. The management team thinks this should take you 15-20 minutes. In the end, it usually took me an hour. 2. Piers Fawkes keeps changing the style guide of how things need to be written. However, instead of telling you that the style guide has changed, he will tell you that you've written something wrong. For example, a few of us got told off for using the word "smartphone" because one night he woke up and decided that "smartphone" is a stupid word, and requested us to edit the articles. 3. Piers and some of the senior editors have little respect for the writers. The way they address writing issues is to always talk down on the writers, although some of the employees probably have had more substantial writing experience than Piers and the Editor in Chief put together. That is why most great writers leave, and you're left with a bunch of interns.