Intern Spotlight: Brittany Batten

By Brittany Batten, FCRH '14 

It all started at the Internship Smarts for Liberal Arts Panel in October. Holly Rotchin (from Career Services) asked me to a part of what I thought was an all student panel and of course, I agreed. I began talking to one of the other panelists who was representing Hearst. I assumed she was an intern like me, until she gave me her card and told me to contact her if I was interested in future internships. Just two months later, I walked into the Hearst building for my first day as an editorial intern at Good Housekeeping Magazine. To my pleasant surprise, I was given my own desk, computer and even a Hearst email. Rachel, my supervisor and fellow panelist, introduced me to everyone in the office and gave me a brief overview of the various projects I would work on. Once I familiarized myself with the magazine, I got to work.

The majority of my work throughout this internship has consisted of researching and compiling pitches. I’ve worked on a variety of columns including Seal Star, Time Out, Ask Peggy (Etiquette Q&A) and Seven Years Younger. Seal Star highlights one woman each month who has done something good or made a difference in her community. On a normal day, I typically look for 5 local news articles and write short summaries for each to be sent to the editors. The Time Out page consists of excerpts from various social media forms, including Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and YouTube.  I look through each of these platforms and pull interesting posts. For example, I look for funny, relatable tweets from celebrities on Twitter as well as inspirational, creative quotes on Pinterest. The goal for each day is typically 30 tweets, 10 pins, 10 Instagrams and 3 videos. At the end of each month, I sit down with the Associate Editor to pull the best options from these findings and create a memo to be circulated amongst the Executive Editors. As for the Ask Peggy column, I typically brainstorm awkward situations where Peggy Post’s etiquette advice would be helpful. Finally, I organize research and observations from Seven Years Younger panelists regarding their time on the diet and send it to the publishers who are working on creating the Seven Years Younger Diet Plan Book.

This internship has allowed me to express my own creativity, hone my writing skills and explore the world of magazine journalism. It is awesome to see my work and research published in the magazine. It was frustrating in the beginning though, as I was researching and pitching constantly yet never saw where my work went. As later editions of the magazine came out, I saw different things that I pulled and realized that my work actually was worthwhile. Likewise, there were several parts of the Time Out page that were not getting raving reviews from the readers. I offered up the idea of including Instagram pictures and it is now a permanent part of the page.

Overall, my experience at Good Housekeeping has been great! While I have enjoyed my time at Hearst, I don’t think that the world of magazines is where I want to establish myself professionally. I have honed essential skills and enjoyed looking into different topics and social media forms. I hope to continue exploring and writing about these topics in a blog. This provides me an arena to keep doing what I love about this internship while exploring other options professionally. My time at Good Housekeeping has endowed me with new interests and skills that will help me in whatever path I take in the future.