Placements - dreams where I pretend to be a professional

I wish I could be one of those interns with balls big enough so that after my placement was over, say I finished on Friday, that I could just turn up on Monday and carry on pretending that I was working there. Either I'd worked so seamlessly that people would just ignore me, or security would get called. It's been done before and Tom Meltzer also made the point that interns are like stooges and interlopers.

But as a way to get bylines, contacts and CV credentials, it's undoubtedly essential, now that the media industry resembles a 50p hole through which a waterfall of mice are trying to clamber. Competition is fierce and the pressure ferocious, jobs can be secured or elicited from placements but in the meritocracy that is journalism - it's a champions test of nerve and wit.

As previously mentioned, Catch22 has 15 media partners and we get a 4-week placement in one of the publications that these media partners run. The list of titles on the partners' books pretty much fills the shelves of all good news agents. Names like Heat, Daily Mail, Radio Times, Zoo, Vogue, Economist, Men's Health, Daily Mirror....and so on.

GQ: glamour and quality imo

3 places I'd like to go? 
Daily Mirror
GQ
Lonely Planet



Daily Mirror so I can learn to be ruthlessly efficient and on the ball, brush up on my reporting and develop my news sense.
GQ because it's the British equivalent of glamour behemoths Vanity Fair and prestige icon The New Yorker, whose quality of journalism, long-form and literary, is something to which I aspire.
Lonely Planet because I have a great interest in travel and travel writing, having tried to set up my own website - traveldeep.com (under construction).

OF those 3, perhaps the most beneficial would be The Daily Mirror, the UK's third largest selling newspaper. February circulation figures were 1,177,220, compared with its rival The Daily Mail's 2,070,625 for the same time period.
This left-wing tabloid is owned by Trinity Mirror which also own the Sunday Mirror, The People, as well as regional papers amongst others - being Britain's biggest newspaper group. Recently they acquired the Manchester Evening News, one of the most prominent regional names in the industry, plus 30 other regionals for the apparently small sum of £7.4m.
Having interned on a couple of local newspapers: The Hastings Observer and The Brighton Argus - they seem the perfect place to build a grounding in essential journalistic skills. Things like shorthand, accuracy and 'death-knocks' etc. Being on an NCTJ-accredited journalism degree, I have some sense of what it takes to be a diligent and, most of all, reliable local reporter. Using shorthand in a court-room is something that would challenge me - still need that 80wpm, let alone 120!

I have had original news stories published, and set-up interviews under my own initiative for those papers where I placement-ed, and to offer new ways of thinking whilst being fearlessly curious are things I hope will appeal.