AudioShocker

I apologize. I haven't written anything of substance since May. There is really no excuse for that. Back in my heyday I used to crank out weeklies and make fun of Pete for posting columns biweekly.

So I suck. But for those of you who pay attention to the podcast, you know that I was working at Time Inc. More specifically at Entertainment Weekly, InStyle, and People in business operations (basically all things digital). I was probably the oldest intern in the corporate internship program, one of perhaps 5 pursuing an MBA, and certainly the only one with an engineering background.

When I got the job, Nick and I both cracked up. Why? Because I'm not exactly InStyle or People's demo, my official background is in mechanical engineering, and Nick and I have had poor luck with Time Warner companies in the past. Perhaps you've read Nick's Sneaking Into Comics series about his quest for a gig at DC Comics?

The point is - total long shot! Crazy, right? Maybe not. Time Inc. digs long shots. Grady Smith, an editorial intern, made waves on the interwebs earlier this year when he posted a video on YouTube petitioning EW for a summer internship. It was awkward, rushed, and a bit manic, but it worked! You can catch up on all of Grady's summer work right here.

So what did I do? Who did I meet? What great advice can I pass on to you? Well, without totally violating the covenant of "thou shalt not blog about your internship": Free magazines are sweet! I can now flip through and process an entire issue of People in 5 minutes.

But seriously, Entertainment Weekly is a remarkably forward thinking magazine. Cyndi Stivers, the Managing Editor of EW.com, was extremely gracious and allowed me to badger her for an entire hour about how EW was approaching social media, ePub, iPads, mobile apps, her experiences at other publishers, and even silly things like captchas for comments. She and everyone else I met was genuinely excited about -- rather than scared of -- digital. The folks in digital marketing and sales are doing big things too. It's all about "what can we do?" and not "this is what we do!" Coming from engineering, I found it remarkably refreshing.

And you know what else? I have never seen more efficient 'all-call' meetings. Every Monday at 10am, the publishing staff would corral into a small conference room, turn on the speakerphone, spend 2 minutes catching up and then spend the next 28 getting down. to. business. It is a well oiled machine. Numbers, charts, recognitions, goals, new opportunities, guest presenters - everything gets covered in those 28 minutes and everyone is jazzed about it too. Efficiency consultants (and engineers) could learn something from EW's Publisher Ray Chelstowski.

But back to me! I spent the summer doing research and benchmarking for future products, new tech, expansion opportunities, and potential acquisitions. Marketing, mobile websites, apps, ads --  I looked into a lot of stuff. I also got to help test the new EW Must List iPhone app before it launched in July. If you haven't taken a look at it, you really should. It is a great example of why EW and I were a good fit, we both believe in curation.

I wrote a big long thing about this in May, and no one read it - so I'll make this easy. Thanks to the Internet, we have access (free or paid) to an infinite amount of content. Of course, not all of it is good. In fact, separating the wheat from the chaff is probably the hardest part of getting your hands on good content, and that's why you need a curator. That's why you trust specific blogs, it's why you get excited about Netflix recommendations, and it's why you need EW to find & deliver to you the best wheat. More importantly, time is money. Curation is where the money is.

If there was anything that I was frustrated by, it was "scale." Scale was the kiss of death for most of my big ideas. "How come we aren't doing promotion X? It'd really appeal to our readers!" "We don't have the scale." Perhaps, scale is certainly an important consideration in cost/benefit analysis, but it reminds me of why I was dying to get out of engineering. I was tired of hearing "No, that just isn't done." Of course, I was an intern with limited knowledge of previous endeavors and research - so scale could very well have been that important. Bottom line, I don't like how quick people were to invoke it. If you never try anything new, you'll never achieve scale either!

Obviously I made PowerPoint decks, wrote reports, read reports, compiled spreadsheets, and did a lot of Googling. All interns do that. You are never going to get out of that no matter how creative you are. I invented scrollpop/AudioShocker Shoutouts ads in my freetime, but then I went right back to updating slides. But there are some really fun things like focus groups, lunch with the CEO, brownbags with other division heads, etc that you'd never get access to outside an internship program. A big firm offers you a lot of resources that you'd be crazy not to take advantage of. (Of course, it's also easy to become a number, so watch out for that)

Now you know what I was doing for the past 9 weeks. I'm actually a little sad that I couldn't stay longer and work on more stuff. Next up? I'd like to get more into marketing, maybe at an interactive agency. Any ideas?