Magazine career opportunities include assistant positions, contributor jobs, design and layout work, and editing. Assistants can use the positions as a launching pad for more advanced magazines. Contributing writers may be full-time employees or independent experts. Graphic designers help create images and design the layout. Entry-level editorial jobs are aimed at young writers or journalists, while the editor-in-chief is a highly experienced professional.
Career opportunities at the magazine require a wide range of training, talent and interests. Whether a person is skilled in writing, graphic design or business, the magazine industry can be an exciting and adventurous place to find jobs. Some of the most common career opportunities in magazines include assistant positions, contributor jobs, design and layout work, and editing.
Many people interested in becoming future journalists or editors start by taking advantage of the magazine’s career opportunities at the assistant level. Editorial or graphic assistants tend to perform secretarial work and may even be placed on duty running errands for their bosses. While these positions can be a good way to learn about the magazine trade early on and can provide great opportunities to make professional contacts, they are often thankless jobs that don’t pay very well. Assistants often use these positions as a launching pad for career opportunities at more advanced magazines.
Contributing writers provide written content for a magazine. These writers can be full-time employees of the publication or independent experts hired to write about a specific subject. Contributing writers may have a degree in journalism or may be published authors or well-known bloggers. Working as a writer for a magazine may include writing a monthly or weekly column on a specific subject, or it may be based around specific assignments for the magazine. Sometimes photographers are also hired as contributing professionals and may be tasked with providing certain required footage or performing a task to capture the events of a specific story.
Magazines require a keen artistic touch to keep eyes interested and create total visual appeal. Graphic designers help create images for each piece, size the text and choose the font, and design the magazine’s layout page by page. Magazine career opportunities in the visual arts often require a degree in graphic design, production design, or photojournalism. Graphic artists must be extremely computer savvy, as much of magazine design is done with computer software.
The editorial department can be a vast source of magazine career opportunities. Entry-level jobs in this field are often aimed at young writers or journalists, especially those with strong proofreading skills. Copy editors are responsible for ensuring that the final journal text is error-free and fact-checked. The editor-in-chief, also called the creative director, is responsible for the vision, style and content of each issue of the magazine. This prestigious job is only available to highly experienced professionals and can take many years to achieve.
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