I started at Valigan Publishing in Dublin as a temp, but when they realised I had whole manufacturing sentences out of words thing down to an art form, they let me write gossip, more gossip and a little bit of advice for girls (well, YOU try getting a sample issue from them!).
OMFG (In Ireland that’s short for Oh Merciful Friggin Gorrah), they still do not have a website!
My interim assistant editor gig at Hotpress was, alas, the only job I’ve ever had that actually impressed people. The street cred associated with writing for an (or THE) Irish Music Magazine is really something else.
Writing live, album and singles reviews about real bands (rather than teenie-pop) and events features is apparently what it takes to be cool.
Oh, it was also great fun and I still write the occasional live review.
Some of the articles published in Hotpress are online, some more are here.
Continuing a tradition of being in the right place at the right time, I arrived at my first journalism job just as several others had left the magazine, meaning I got to do their jobs.
In the three months I worked for Sugar magazine, I was an intern by name, but Entertainment Editor might be a more apt description.
I wrote advice and entertainment features, selected films, tv shows and albums for reviews and wrote up all the monthly entertainment gossip.
I regularly prepared and conducted celebrity interviews with all the professional gravitas to be expected of a recent high school graduate. I even got to go to London to interview Atomic Kitten!
Also fun: O-Town, whose career trajectory makes me feel good about the way things have gone for me since this picture was taken.
My first job, straight out of school, was in PR. As jobs in PR go, it was pretty fantastic.
Munich Agency Eastside was still very young and small at the time, so the hierarchies were flat (VERY flat) and instead of making coffee and and stapling press packs, I got to write and translate press releases, select press samples and present our clients’ collections at trade fairs.
I did rather well, paving the way for a great career in PR I didn’t want.
No other PR job has ever lived up to the high expectations set up by my first baby steps in the working world.
