You don't have to move to Brooklyn to have a career
Hey y'all!
Welcome back to Starting Out, from Transom and me.
My friends in high school were pretty competitive. Every quarter, the class rankings would come out and we’d silently note which friends were ahead of us in GPA. Everyone humble bragged about their AP classes and extracurriculars. Maybe you had a similar experience. When the stakes feel so high (“get into the “right” college or your life will come crumbling down!”), it’s hard not to get into that mindset.
It’s why, early in high school, I stopped sharing my grades with anyone but my family. Test scores, essays, SATs, everything. Once I started telling people that I didn’t like to share my grades they eventually stopped asking, and I got out of that cycle of comparison and bad feeling. I was just competing against myself.
I thought I’d learned my lesson. Years later, early into a “fancy” internship at a podcast I’d been listening to for years, I broke down crying in the empty office next door and called my dad. The intern who’d been there before me got a whole story on the show, millions of people heard his reporting. Meanwhile my pitches weren’t up to par and the social media copy I wrote was edited until it was unrecognizable. Why couldn’t I be as good as the intern before? What was wrong with me?
“You’re not going to do the same things as the person before you because you’re a different person,” my dad told me. “And you’ll do things that they didn’t do.” It wasn’t that the other intern was better than me. We were coming in with different experience levels, with different identities. It would be absurd if I had the same experience as him. My job was to figure out what I wanted to get out of the internship, and work with my manager to try and make that happen.
“Just don’t compare yourself to others” is easier said than done, believe me. But learning to recognize those thought patterns, acknowledge them, and let them pass, is liberating beyond belief. It allows you to have friendships that aren’t about comparing test scores or resumes. You can collaborate and share skills without fear that it might give somebody else an edge over you. Getting your foot in the door is hard enough, why not tackle problems with friends instead of worrying about competitors?
Anna Sale is the host and managing editor of WNYC's Death, Sex & Money.
Alice: You started your career in public radio, how did that impact your career trajectory?
Anna: I think because I started in a small member station I got to learn how to do everything, from spot news to making television documentaries. There was a lot of room to run. And it also made me very skeptical about graduate school, ‘cause I was like, “Wait, I'm being paid and have benefits. Why would I ever pay to get taught?” West Virginia Public Radio was an incredible place to start out. [Sale later noted that conditions have changed since she last worked at WVPR, due to interference from the West Virginia Governor, Jim Justice.]
I'm in Wyoming now. And I listened to what people are able to make at Wyoming Public Radio, news reporters who are also making longform podcasts. If living in a super big city isn’t essential for you when you’re starting out, and you’re interested in news, I feel like member stations are really incredible places to work.
AW: I love that, because I feel like there's so much pressure of getting a “name brand” internship early on. If you have friends who are also interested in journalism it's like, “Oh my God, everyone's interning at The Washington Post or CNN, like, will I ever be successful?”
AS: Yeah, it's funny because I came at journalism in a totally opposite way. I knew after college I was feeling pulled back home to West Virginia. And so it was more place-based as opposed to journalism for journalism's sake. And I feel really glad about that because when, at the very earliest stages of your career, you land at a really big place for an internship you have a narrower band of tasks than you would in a place that’s smaller. But I really liked just being kind of thrown in and trying everything.
Resources
In the first issue of Starting Out, I wrote about Pro Tools, a kind of software commonly used in our industry. It has a ton of features, many of which aren’t really needed for day to day tape cutting. But it’s not the only option.
Meet Hindenburg. It’s a bit more bare bones and intuitive to use. And it doesn’t cost hundreds of dollars to own. So if you don’t have experience with audio editing, learning Hindenburg is a great place to start.
How to get Hindenburg for cheap
If you’re a student or educator you can get a Hindenburg Journalist license for $85, which is pretty reasonable compared to Pro Tools which will run you hundreds.
You can also get a 30-day free trial to figure out whether you like the program.
How to learn Hindenburg
I learned Hindenburg via the Transom guide, which I recommend reading through as soon as you download the program.
One of the toughest parts of switching between programs for me is getting used to a whole new set of keyboard shortcuts. If you’re switching to Hindenburg, you might want to write these down.
Hindenburg also has a resource center with guides to most of the software’s features.
And if you like to learn by following along with a video, Hindenburg has a great YouTube series called “The Hindenburg Academy” to teach you the basics.
Classifieds
Internships
Death, Sex, and Money, New York Public Radio ($15/hr)
Neon Hum, Sony Music ($15/hr)
99% Invisible Sirius XM ($15/hr)
Korva Coleman Internship KMUW ($5,000 stipend, with free room and board)
Reporting Intern The Chronicle of Higher Education ($700/wk)
Source Tracking Intern, KPCC ($15/hr)
Product & Engineering Intern, KPCC ($15/hr)
Compensation Intern KPCC ($15/hr)
Social Video Intern for Marketplace KPCC ($15/hr)
Marketplace Intern KPCC ($15/hr)
Marketplace Morning Report Intern KPCC ($15/hr)
Marketplace Digital Intern KPCC ($15/hr)
This is Uncomfortable Intern KPCC ($15/hr)
Marketplace Podcast Intern KPCC ($15/hr)
Fellowships
Community Engagement & Impact Fellow, KPCC ($16-$20/hr)
Associate/Assistant Producer:
Assistant Podcast Producer, The University of Chicago
Associate Producer The Lost Women of Science ($50,000-$60,000)
Production Assistant The Lost Women of Science ($40,000-$45,000)
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.
Anna recommends...
Great Grief, North Carolina Public Radio
It goes between a storytelling voice of host Nnenna Freelon talking and then she just breaks out into singing and then goes back to talking. It just feels like, ‘Oh my gosh, you're not making something that sounds like every other produced narrative podcast. Like, you're surprising me. I really liked that.’
I Respectfully Disagree, Wyoming Public Radio
Melodie Edwards is a reporter in Wyoming and she's interviewing people who have really different positions on public policy stuff. The one I listened to was about a proposed wind development outside of Laramie. This seems like an old form that used to be on public radio, but I haven't heard it at length in a long time. And I appreciated it because you just don't hear people talking at length civilly who live in the same community.
Written Off, Lemonada Media
This show features the writing of currently or formerly incarcerated youth and the writing is performed by celebrities, and then after they do the reading they interview the writer. So it's a little Hollywood. And then you also have a moment of having their story told. It’s really smart.
I found this podcast because it's hosted by a woman I interviewed for my book, who works at Sacramento State and does a lot of counseling of first-generation college students, many of whom are immigrants. So she started this podcast with another friend of hers. The hosts are anonymous, they’re both Mexican American and it’s a mental health podcast geared toward that audience. They switch between Spanish and English and I’m not totally fluent in Spanish but I like it.