Newsweek in the Digital Archive
I’m set to graduate with my MA this May, and as such I’ve been updating my resume. Looking at my resume has spurred me to think about my time as a writer for Newsweek, the news publication. It was my first full-time job after college, and actually the first and only full-time job I’ve had in my life. I worked there when I was 22, from September 2019 to February 2020. My position, that of a “reporting fellow,” was either a stellar opportunity for young journalists to get their hands dirty by getting experience in the real world of journalism, or an excuse for Newsweek to exploit recent college grads by having them work full-time with zero benefits and minimum wage. Either way you look at it, this was my lived experience for about five months, and you can read all of the fruits of my labor here.
My page on Newsweek’s website showing the last couple of articles I wrote for the publication. (Spoiler alert: President Trump didn’t win Wisconsin on Election Day.)
Personally, I would really like to write you a cathartic tell-all about my experiences with Newsweek—but to be honest, I very likely signed some sort of non-disclosure agreement (NDA) and they could probably sue me if they got the chance! So, I’m gonna keep my mouth shut and say that I did not wish to continue working for the publication after my five months as a reporting fellow had come to an end. Luckily, they didn’t want to keep me there anyway, so we bid one another adieu. Then I started grad school and the rest is history.
So, I was interested in what, if anything, people on the HistoryMakers Digital Archive had to say about Newsweek. Suffice to say, I wasn’t disappointed.
I get the impression that when the people interviewed were working for Newsweek—the 60s, 70s, and 80s—it was quite a different publication than it is today. That is, Newsweek was something much more similar to TIME or The New York Times than it is today. Its staff was much bigger, and it had bureaus all over the country. By the time I worked there, I only ever heard about three bureaus—New York, D.C., and London. The publication was also waaay more focused on physical printed media, which makes sense because this was before the internet. When I worked there, they were mainly focused on publishing stories on the website, although they also did publish a magazine periodically.
I was delighted to see that the Digital Archive contained several interviews with Newsweek staff, who had a number of interesting things to say about their time with the publication.
For example, Samuel Yette was the first Black reporter for Newsweek and said in his interview that the Washington bureau chief for Newsweek refused to call him by his name. Then there was Vernon Smith, another Newsweek reporter who was instrumental behind the magazine’s first special report, “Charlie Company: What Vietnam Did to Us.”
But perhaps the most interesting interview for me, personally, was that of Sylvester Monroe, who was the youngest full-time correspondent Newsweek had ever hired when he joined the staff in the early 1970s. He describes how he covered the desegregation of schools in Boston (where I live!) which was very interesting. In order to skirt around a law that prevented reporters from entering schools at the time, Monroe posed as a student and rode the bus with Black students to get a sense of what it was like for them to be bused to desegregated schools far away from their own neighborhoods. Also, the clip “Sylvester Monroe describes changes in news media during the 1990s” was a great video to watch to understand how the publication changed to how I knew it. News media really went through a dramatic change with the advent of the internet, that’s for sure.
Anyway, even though I’m not a journalist right now, I still have a lot of respect for people of that profession because I think their work is essential to the upkeep of what passes for democracy in the United States. And although I have some criticism for Newsweek (as I do all for-profit news publications, to be fair), I too appreciate the work of its journalists in the past and present. If you’d like to see a compilation of some of the most interesting HistoryMakers Digital Archive clips about Newsweek I found, you can check them out here.
SBA Update
In terms of an update about my time as a Student Brand Ambassador, things are really heating up what with the semester coming to an end. I wrote another blog post for Northeastern’s library that will hopefully be up soon and be seen by a lot of students. I also had the pleasure of meeting some representatives from Bank of America on our weekly HistoryMakers Zoom meeting this past Friday. But, to be honest, that’s mostly it. I’m spending a lot of time focusing on finals and beyond that making sure everything is set up for the Black History Month contest next semester.