The Monday after learning of the layoffs at ForbesTraveler.com, I walked into an empty office. There is nothing sadder than cleaned out cubicles that used to exude the relaxed pose of job security. There is nothing stranger than learning of forty-hour weeks that must be reinvented, of lives that must be reshuffled all at once and all on their own. It is frightening to realize so much of us are expendable.
And strangely enough, I -the unpaid intern- become more valuable. Without a staff, the two editors left to run an online magazine had only the interns to rely on. Short of folding, the only staff left were the managing editor and the editor-in-chief. There were suddenly more interns than paid staff, and the bare minimum to run a website such as Forbes Traveler required a photo editor and a web producer, both of whom were laid off. “We need you now more than ever,” they said to us.
It’s true that we could have left. After all, nothing had been promised to us, and suddenly we were tasked to take on bigger responsibilities –still as unpaid lackeys. But I stayed because I took a gamble. It was an opportunity to step up, to become more than an editorial intern, a position rotated every semester with a limitless pool of bright-eyed young writers willing to work for nothing two days a week. If I played my cards right, I thought, I could actually land a job as an editorial assistant. All the senior editors were gone, but there was still writing and editing to be done. So long as the magazine didn’t fold, I was convinced they’d hire from below, and what could possibly be lower on the totem pole than I?
I was ready and willing to be an essential part of a luxury travel magazine.
