My first week as an intern at Bonnier has just come to a close, and I couldn’t be happier.
Monday was a great introductory day. I met the whole team, including the editor-in-chief of the dive group, Patricia Wuest, and the managing editors of Sport Diver and Scuba Diving, Andy Zunz and Ashley Annin, respectively. I also saw Robby Myers, the 2015 OWUSS intern who currently works for the dive group. I had met him in New York during the OWUSS awards weekend in April, and it was great to see a familiar face in the office. One thing I was surprised to find out was that not everyone who works at these magazines is a diver. Impressively, even as non-divers they probably know more about the sport than half of the divers out there.
By Tuesday I already had assignments piling up: book reviews to write, articles to edit and web pages to create for Scuba Diving. I worked mainly on the reviews, skimming six books that ranged from an autobiography to several fish identification guides and writing short blurbs about their content. I also worked on one of Scuba Diving’s Ocean Action briefs. Ocean Action is the section in which they highlight a conservation effort and how readers can get involved. The brief I wrote was about International Coastal Cleanup, which is supported by the Ocean Conservancy and Project AWARE and aims to get people picking up trash on the shore and while diving.
Wednesday I got to help out on my first photo shoot. It was to shoot dive computers in Bonnier’s photo studio. I’d never been involved in something like this before, and it was really interesting to see what went into getting each shot perfect. Depending on the details of each computer, different props and stands had to be used. Also, the kind of lighting and positioning that worked for one computer was completely different from the next, so there were a lot of test shots to get the desired image for each piece of equipment.
Thursday morning I wrote my first piece that was published on Sport Diver’s website. It was a promotion for Shark Week on the Discovery Channel that included a few paragraphs of text and the schedule of what was airing when.
Thursday afternoon and nearly all of Friday I sat in on Sport Diver’s 2017 planning meeting. This is when they map out every issue of the year, come up with stories and flush out ideas for different features of each issue, such as best dive sites to see certain animals, good tips for divers and things of that sort. It was really cool to see how the team comes together to plan an entire year’s worth of content, and I’m glad I got to share that experience.
Can’t wait to see what the next week has in store!
