The Spectator’s 2025 no-CV internship scheme is now open

The Spectator runs the UK’s only double-blind internship scheme. We don’t ask for a CV, we don’t use your name. We don’t care where (or whether) you went to university, we anonymise your application. We give each applicant a city name, mark out of 100 and give offers to the best ones. You’ll come in for a week of your choosing in the summer. It’s a useful window into journalism and gives us the chance to meet new talent. When jobs come up, as they do in various fields, we look to hire past interns.

About a third of our editorial staff came through this way: online (Gus, John and Max), broadcast (Cindy and Oscar), management (Lukas), economics (Michael), Ukraine (Svitlana – we made a job for her), social (Margaret) and tech (Fabian). Full list below. No other publication goes to such lengths to find interns, which is perhaps why those who make it on our shortlist are often snapped up by other publications.

We anonymised after the best intern one year was Dan Hitchens. He is indeed son of, nephew of. But he is also a superb journalist, as is often the case with those with writers in the family – from Auberon Waugh to Dominic Lawson.

We don’t use CVs because we regard that means of recruitment as stale and unfair, reflecting not much more than whether you were good at exams aged 18. Many brilliant journalists did excel at school and university, but others – like Frank Johnson, a former Spectator editor – took different routes. Looking at The Spectator’s senior editors now, one left school aged 16 and another is an alumnus of Eton and Oxford. None of that stuff matters here. Only talent does.

We typically get 200 applications for about 12 places. So why apply against such odds? It’s fun, fair and genuinely open: Katherine Forster, a 48-year-old mum who had never had a full-time job, came through on our scheme and ended up at the Sunday Times and is now a television reporter. Fabian Carstairs was a chef before he joined our tech team. When Svitlana Morenets arrived, displaced by the war in Ukraine, she knew no one in Britain. She has since been awarded Young Journalist of the year at the UK Press Awards. Their breaking into UK journalism would only have been possible through the Spectator scheme, which is perhaps the most meritocratic of any publication.

If you have applied before, then please do so again: James Heale, now our deputy political editor, applied three times.

Email entries to internship@spectator.co.uk, deadline 30 April.

Choose a category (or more than one if you like) and for each one do the following:

Editorial

Do three or more of these tasks…

Suggest three articles that could run on Spectator Life. Write one of them (600 words).
Produce the news and analysis bullet points (the section at the top) of today’s Lunchtime Espresso email, making sure to match our style. Send your application in before midday, before the email is sent out.
Find three articles from foreign media (published within a fortnight of your application) that have not been picked up by the UK press and say how The Spectator could expand on them.
Turn Vladimir Putin’s 30-minute answer to Tucker Carlson on the history of Ukraine into a readable 1,000-word Spectator article. Transcript here.
Write a ‘Notes on’ (500 words).

Broadcast

Do one of the following…

Produce a short video (no more than five minutes) on a recent article you read in The Spectator.
Produce a short podcast (no more than five minutes) on the events of a recent Prime Minister’s Questions.
Produce three clips to promote a recent episode of Spectator TV.

Do at least three of the following…

List potential podcast guest line-ups for two stories in recent issues of The Spectator (one must be on current affairs). Briefly explain why you chose each guest.
Pitch a topic for Spectator TV’s cultural show, The View from 22. Suggest guests and write some questions for the host.
Point out two things we’re doing wrong with our current podcasts or Spectator TV.
How can we make our broadcasts more discoverable?
Suggest two ways in which we can improve our social media outreach for both podcasts and TV.

Steerpike Political Mischief

Do all of these…

Name five county councils to watch in the May local elections and explain why.
You’re on the political mischief internship and are told you need to find a Steerpike story. How do you spend the next 60 minutes?
Which member of Sir Keir Starmer’s cabinet has had the worst start to the job? Explain in 200 words.
How many MPs have family members in the Lords? Please provide a full list.
Suggest three FOI requests that could lead to a story.

Marketing

Do all of these…

Look at our current marketing campaign (the main offer on the site), tell us what you like – or don’t – and what would you change.
How would you sell The Spectator to students?
You’ve been given access to an entire university’s mailing list. How would you market The Spectator? (Include a summary of The Spectator and come up with five straplines.)
Write a letter to a former subscriber persuading them to resubscribe.

Data journalism and research

Do all of these…

Find two factual errors in the magazine from the last year (please do not report them to Ipso).
Write five questions for a Conservative or Labour party conference Spectator panel on energy policy.
How many people move off universal credit into work every quarter?
Suggest and build in datawrapper two graphs that could fit in this Coffee House article or another Spectator article of your choice (if you can, make them auto update using python).

Social media

Do all of these…

List ideas for how The Spectator can present its social media content to make it more attractive to readers under the age of 24.
Choose a carousel on our Instagram page that really grabbed your attention and made you want to read the full article and tell us why. Then choose a carousel on our Instagram page that you think people will swipe past and tell us why.
Develop a TikTok concept for The Spectator that maintains our intellectual rigour while adapting to the platform’s format and audience.
Propose a strategy for using our archive (we are the oldest continuously published magazine in the English language) in an innovative way on social media.

And for all applications…

Send a covering letter, saying why you’d like to apply. No coded references to where you went to uni please (i.e. ‘I edited my student newspaper, Cherwell’). If you have been accepted on a journalism postgrad (like City) or vocational course (such as the News Associates course), then do mention this. It shows commitment and any journalist will need plenty of that.

There is an advantage to sending your application in early as we start processing and even making offers quite early. The internship pays (although not very much). We do ask that you only apply if you’re available for employment in the next two years.

And some previous interns:

Currently at The Spectator…