Emily Dowdell(Marietta, Georgia)
As a student at a large university, I knew there were aspects of the University of Alabama that I had no clue existed, and I could only hope to discover those aspects before graduation. One such aspect was Alabama Heritage, something I fortunately heard about from a friend my junior year. That friend, a journalism student, had just finished up an internship at the magazine, and knowing that I wanted to go into publishing and internship experience means everything in that industry, she suggested that I apply. While Alabama Heritage was a magazine and I wanted to go into book publishing, I hoped that I would get something useful out of the experience, if only another thing to list on my resume. Now, on my last day, I can say I wound up getting so much more out of it than that.
As an intern, most of what I did this semester fell into one of two categories: proofing/copyediting and fact-checking. The proofing and copyediting I knew how to do, and knew that more experience in those skills would serve me well. There’s still something incredibly satisfying about going after someone else’s work with a red pen. Usually by the time it got to me, most of the errors had been caught, which made finding one and using that red pen even better. The fact-checking, however, I had never done before, but it became one of my favorite parts of the job. A Georgia native who had never really been to Alabama until I got to college, I wasn’t expecting much out of the history that I knew was the focus of the magazine – probably some Civil War articles about obscure battles and Civil Rights essays about violence that still makes me sick even after years of history classes learning about it. My expectations were correct, but only partially. Because in addition to the Civil War and Civil Rights, I fact-checked articles about everything from the social lives of students at the University in the 1910s to the unique experience of residents of Gee’s Bend, an isolated community formed by former slaves and their descendants that attracted the attention of sociologists and was spotlighted on the national stage for its Freedom Quilting Bee and part in Alabama’s Civil Rights Movement. In order to fact-check these articles, I got to look through digital scans of old newspapers and pictures and often primary sources like field journals and personal diaries of the subjects of the pieces – which was both incredibly cool and a testament to the wonders of technology and the library systems of cities, states, and universities. I got to look at actual pages from a diary housed in a Birmingham library without ever having to leave Tuscaloosa, or even the Alabama Heritage office. Every now and then, in addition to my proofing and fact-checking duties, I’d get to do something different, like participating in a staff meeting on my first day, and working on the magazine’s social media presence, composing tweets for it’s 67 Counties initiative and partnership with the Encyclopedia of Alabama. It was fun to look for obscure facts about places I’ve never been to (DeKalb County – home of the Fiddler’s Convention, anyone?) that all seem to have some little part of Alabama’s history that they claim.
One thing I can say about my experience here is that every day I learned something new. Not just about the publishing industry, or how a magazine runs, but little nuggets of interesting history I would never have heard anywhere else. I suppose because of the nature of the magazine and it’s historical content, I should have expected it, but instead of being the boring material I thought I would read, all of the magazine’s content took history, something I’d never been particularly interested or disinterested in, and made it into something enjoyable. On one of my last days, I looked over the galley proofs for the winter issue, and it was incredibly satisfying to see the articles I had looked at while still in rough, Microsoft Word format laid out, ready for the pictures that will complete them, and even more satisfying, I’ll get to see my name in the Winter issue that I got to help put together.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Emily is now in New York City, completing the Columbia Publishing Course.
One thing I can say about my experience here is that every day I learned something new. Not just about the publishing industry, or how a magazine runs, but little nuggets of interesting history I would never have heard anywhere else. I suppose because of the nature of the magazine and it’s historical content, I should have expected it, but instead of being the boring material I thought I would read, all of the magazine’s content took history, something I’d never been particularly interested or disinterested in, and made it into something enjoyable. On one of my last days, I looked over the galley proofs for the winter issue, and it was incredibly satisfying to see the articles I had looked at while still in rough, Microsoft Word format laid out, ready for the pictures that will complete them, and even more satisfying, I’ll get to see my name in the Winter issue that I got to help put together.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Emily is now in New York City, completing the Columbia Publishing Course.
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