Why am I doing all this?

I really do believe in high-effort applications. I believe in them the same way other people believe in prayer: in a cruel and uncaring job market, they’re the only thing which keeps me forging ahead.

Because of this, I’m trying my absolute hardest to secure this internship at the Spectator. In mathematical terms, this is wildly irrational behaviour. This year’s challenges haven’t been announced yet, so attempting to prepare for them will involve a lot of guessing. Between this scattershot approach and the internship’s short duration, I’ll likely spend more unpaid hours on my portfolio than I will in an office.

When considering my other options, though, the numbers don’t look all that bad. Hiring twelve applicants from of a pool of two hundred makes a roughly five per-cent acceptance rate, which is way higher than most entry level jobs right now. To contrast, the FT’s Paul McLean graduate scheme (which is, admittedly, better paying and orders of magnitude longer) only interviews five candidates per year, discarding hundreds and hundreds of applications.

The challenges themselves will be educational too, whether I secure the position or not. While working on a sample article for the Paul McLean scheme, for example, I learned a lot about financial journalism and pursuing sources. The challenge on which I’m currently most focussed is 2025’s Lunchtime Espresso snipe. By combing through the Spectator’s daily emails, I’m hoping to find out how the news team there approach newsfinding. As opinion writing is often downstream of ‘hard’ news, this should also help me prepare for wordier, more opinion-based tasks.

When I’ve collected enough data, I hope to use datawrapper to visualise my findings. These will be shared on this blog, and turned into a list of steps I can follow to produce my own daily news briefings.

I’ve also taught myself Hugo, a fast-deploying web development framework. Rewriting the site to build from Markdown files instead of raw HTML has made it way easier to do stuff like this, and the time savings down the line will be incalculable. I’m always looking for ways to optimise my process, or little changes I can make to improve my work.

Speak soon,

X.