Your pep talk for January job searching 🌿
Hey y'all!
As longtime readers of the newsletter know, I’m a gardener. Which means I have a tough time in January. It’s too early to start my seeds for spring, most of my fall crops have been knocked out by the cold weather (especially this year) and there’s not much to do but plan.
Stay with me — I swear this has something to do with building a career in this industry! Since I can’t do much in the soil right now, I’m turning to my library of gardening books. Right now I’m reading Botany for Gardeners, and learning more deeply about how things grow.
There are many reasons to feel pessimistic about job hunting right now: January is a notoriously slow hiring month, NPR just canceled their summer internship program, and then there’s the potential of a recession. It definitely feels like the dead of winter.
If that’s how you’re feeling right now, let me share two things that I’ve learned about botany that I think apply to this moment.
Though twigs look bare and lifeless during wintertime, new growth is happening below the surface.. Which means that the moment the days get longer and temperatures start to rise fresh growth will burst out. I know it sounds corny, but it helps me to reframe moments of being “stuck” as moments of quietly building strength for the next good thing.
Plants have so many ingenious ways of growing to ensure that every leaf gets as much precious sunlight as possible. They can fan out around a stem, they grow on alternate or opposite sides. All connected to the same body, arranging themselves with the collective in mind. It’s solidarity in action. It’s tempting to go into scarcity mode, gathering all the sunlight and leaving others to fend for themselves. But (corny, again!) I really believe that we can make it through lean times while lifting others up.
Okay, I’m off my plant-covered soapbox. And I’m so excited for y’all to read this interview with James Kim. James is the full package: a writer of fiction and nonfiction, a producer, a composer, a generous and kind person. We talked about the price of hustling hard, what it takes to make a fiction podcast as an indie creator. I think you’re going to get a lot out of it.
Alice: How’d you get into radio and podcasts?
James: I fell into it by happenstance. I actually never listened to NPR -- didn't even know what it was until after college. In college I was studying documentary films. I was also doing anthropology and I was studying music and sound design. It was just a random mess of a thing. It's like going to a buffet and just putting everything on the plate. When I left, I thought I was going to do documentaries and that was the thing I was gravitating towards, and for various reasons it just wasn't for me. But one of the editors there -- they were the ones who introduced me to the public radio.
They were like: "Have you heard of this station out in LA called KPCC?" And I was like: "I have no idea what you're talking about, but the thing that I have heard is This American Life." And they were like: "Yeah, they have a local show once a week, and it is kind of like This American Life. It is slice of life stories."
I'm like, “I know what that is! Documentaries for the ear!" Luckily I applied and got that internship. And it was this “Ah-ha” moment where I'm like, “Holy crap! Now this thing that wasn't making any sense, it just completely makes sense." After doing my first pieces, I was hooked.
Alice: I really am a fan of your scoring. It’s so dreamy, it makes me feel like I’m back to being a teenager walking around my neighborhood aimlessly. I'm obviously not a music critic, but when I listen to it, that's how I feel.
James: That's amazing. I don't know where it came from, I will just say that [the] first time I knew how integral the score was to storytelling, it was in a movie called The Virgin Suicides. I was still in middle school at the time, but me and the video rental people were homies by then, so they were just like: "I don't care what you rent." It was rated R, and I was struck by the image on the VHS/DVD. The band Air, who did the score, is really the one who ushered me into thinking about music for film in a different way.
Resources for your New Year's resolutions
Learn a new DAW
How to Use REAPER for Radio and Podcasting
How to Make a Podcast in Adobe Audition
Experiment with new formats
This episode of Sound School on audio essays
Play with sound design
Grapple with power dynamics
The Ethics Of Trespassing And Secret Recordings
Navigating Tricky Story Dynamics
Walking In The Margins Of Journalism Ethics
Learn more about how podcasts get made
Getting Honest About the Relationship Between Producer and Editor
Here's What It Takes To Produce A Story At Any Level
How to Build Your Editorial Muscles
Classifieds
Internships
Spring Intern, Proximity Media, (No pay information shared)
Variety of internships, WJCT (No pay information shared)
Podcast Production Intern, WITF ($12/hr)
Associate/Assistant Producer
Associate Producer, (Part-time), The California Report, KQED (No pay information shared)
Associate Producer, (Part-time), Southern California Public Radio, American Public Media Group ($26.76-$33.85/hr)
Assistant Producer, AirTalk with Larry Mantle, APMG ($23.90/hr)
Associate Producer, Various roles, WBUR ($67,958/yr minimum)
Associate Producer, Faction Talk, Sirius XM ($40,000-$55,000/yr)
Associate Producer, (Part-time), MLB Network Radio, Sirius XM (No pay information shared)
Audio Production Assistant, Sirius XM, ($46,000-$70,000/yr)
Associate Producer, At Liberty, American Civil Liberties Union ($85,466/yr)
Other jobs and opportunities
Apply for the Next Generation Radio Project. And watch this video for extra tips on applying.
Operations and Executive Assistant, Slate ($48,000 - $55,000/yr)
The climate podcast Inherited is seeking pitches for their third season.
Snap Judgement is hiring story scouts for their spinoff show Spooked ($1,500/month retainer, plus bonuses for successful pitches).
If you are hiring interns, fellows or other entry level positions, send your job postings and rates to startingout [at] transom [dot] org and I’ll list them in the next issue. Please note that Starting Out features only paid opportunities.