Application deadline: July 15

Boston Review’s internship program offers immersive training in the fundamentals of editing and producing long-form, ideas-driven magazine writing for a general audience.

Interns are paid $15 per hour and work full time, five days (35 hours) a week, in person at our offices in Cambridge, MA. The internship runs from the beginning of September to late December, with some flexibility around exact start and end dates. We welcome applicants from all backgrounds, especially those not well-represented in journalism and the publishing industry.

Details

Interns work closely with Boston Review’s small team to gain hands-on experience with the nuts and bolts of editorial work. 

Most time during the internship is spent fact checking and proofreading articles for print and web publication, helping to evaluate submissions, and assisting with newsletter production. Other tasks may involve web production, art research, website and archive maintenance, and other administrative, marketing, or publicity duties.

Eligibility

A bachelor’s degree or equivalent relevant experience is required; currently enrolled students should not apply unless they will graduate before the program. Regrettably, we are not able to sponsor visas for applicants from outside the United States.

Prior editorial experience is less important than a strong interest in an editorial career and a commitment to learning the editorial craft that goes on behind the scenes of magazine publishing. We seek interns with exceptional attention to detail and facility with written language and a demonstrated interest in current political and intellectual debates. Interns should be open to feedback, willing to engage and evaluate alternative views, and comfortable discussing complex—and often very controversial—issues in a fast-paced, detail-oriented environment.

Perhaps most important, applicants should be familiar with magazine writing of the sort that Boston Review publishes: primarily ideas-driven feature essays, long-form nonfiction book reviews, political and social analysis, and ambitious literary and cultural criticism (as opposed to op-eds, personal essays, and reportage). Please note that the program does not provide training or mentorship in interns’ own writing projects.

About Us 

Boston Review is a web and print magazine of ideas, politics, and culture. Independent and nonprofit, animated by hope and committed to equality, we believe in the power of collective reasoning and imagination to create a more just world.

We are a small team with a big impact, reaching millions of readers each year. We take a special interest in matters of injustice—from war, human rights, and mass incarceration to poverty, inequality, and threats to democracy. We also take pride in introducing new voices to the public sphere and maintaining the tradition of rigorous editing long associated with the world of little magazines.

Interns are extremely valued members of the Boston Review team. Many have gone on to important positions in the publishing world, including at the New York Times, the New Yorker, NBC News, n+1, Jacobin, The Drift, and Boston Review itself.

How to Apply

Please submit the following materials in a single PDF file:

1. A cover letter of no more than one single-spaced page. This is by far the most important element of your application. Please give us some sense of the ideas and issues that are most important to you and your academic or research background.
2. A résumé or curriculum vitae detailing your educational and professional background, no more than two pages.
3. The names, phone numbers, and email addresses of two references. Please specify their relationships to you. We prefer that at least one reference be a past or current employer.
4. Responses to the following two questions:

• In no more than 300 words, comment on a magazine essay that was published in the last five years and that you found notable or interesting.
• In no more than 300 words, describe what you take to be the best possible objection to a view you are deeply committed to, and then defend your position by responding to the objection.

Thank you for your interest in writing for Boston Review! We welcome submissions of essays and book reviews of through this form.

Please note that we are a general interest magazine of ideas, politics, and culture with an international audience; we are not a local Boston news organization. We primarily publish long-form essays, substantial book reviews, political, cultural, and social analysis, and occasional reporting and commentary on current affairs. We do not publish op-eds or essays written in an op-ed style, and we do not accept unsolicited personal essays. Most essays we publish are longer than 3,000 words.

1. We consider drafts between 2,000 and 6,000 words subject to these limitations:

• We do not accept unsolicited memoirs or personal essays.
• We do not accept op-eds or pieces written in an op-ed style.

2. If you are submitting a pitch instead of a draft, please describe your vision for the essay in significant detail, on the order of one whole single-spaced page. Please provide enough substance to demonstrate your understanding of the subject matter, showcase your ability to write in an engaging style for a general audience, sketch the argument you intend to make, and convey the stakes of the issue for a broad readership. (Please do not simply list questions you want to explore; we want to know how you intend to answer them.)

3. We usually publish reviews only within six months of the publication or release date of the work under review. It is best to submit reviews as close as possible to the release date of the work under review, ideally in advance. By timing reviews in this way, we hope they have a chance to influence the terms of public debate and reach a very broad audience. But we make exceptions to this rule depending on the strength of a review and the amount and quality of coverage a work has already gotten.

4. If you have published work elsewhere, please include links to examples of your other writing.

5. Submissions perform much better when they show familiarity with work Boston Review has published. Please read a few of our essays before you submit to get a sense of the style and substance we are looking for.