It’s lovely to meet you… I’m the new Hack

Well hello…

I’m Alice Vincent, a.k.a The Maverick and newbie Wannabe Hack.

More specifically, a Wannabe magazine Hack. Starting at the lowest rung of a publication I intend to gain my trade the old school way: hands on, learning from my mistakes and being in the right place at the right time.

I’ve spent the past three months being the new girl in town, in New York so being the rookie in Wannabe Hacks feels like an excellent next step – except here my Home Counties accent is unlikely to get me into as many parties. On the flipside, I won’t have to talk as much about the Royal Wedding, either.

When I was a 16 year old kitchen monkey in my village pub the chef said, ‘you should be a music journalist’. In hindsight, taking advice to commence a rocky career path from someone who stuck a picture of his Weimaraner above the stove maybe wasn’t the best idea. But here I am – I’ve been writing solidly for three years, working in publications when I wasn’t studying and received less cash than the tips I did as a teenager for it.

So you want to be a journalist? In response to Martin King

This isn’t intended as a direct response to Martin’s article in the Independent’s blog section…

… but I am using it as a jumping off point.

Photo courtesy of greeblie

Martin’s article ‘So you want to be a journalist?‘ provides pointers on some of the key skills ‘wannabe’ journalists will need to be in a position to get themselves a job. What struck me about his approach was the way he divided up the skills. ‘Writing has got two subsections: ‘Spelling and Grammar’ and ‘Shorthand and Touch Typing’, yet, what Martin referred to as ‘Technical‘ was just one broad paragraph on such a wide range of skills I wonder if people have a true appreciation of what is involved.

Debate: social media – friend or foe?

This week, The Student and The Intern went to a digital technology workshop run by Crossover Labs in London, where an interesting discussion was had about the impact of digital technology on society. In Wannabe Hacks’ first debate post, the two go head-to-head about the pros and cons of social media:

AGAINST: The Student

The problem of social media, from my point of view, has been neatly summed up in the past hour. A whole 60 minutes ago I sat down to write this blog post, only to satisfy my technological nervous tick by checking Twitter. This led to me read several articles linked by people on my feed, visit numerous websites and to generally tweet a bit myself. All the while, said blog post remains unwritten.

Social media (I can only claim to properly use Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, WordPress and occasionally StumbleUpon on a regular basis) is the most productive way of being unproductive. Even when you think you’re doing something useful, chances are you are, in fact, not doing something else more pressing. I do it myself all the time.