COM grad moves up in Entertainment Weekly
Interview by David Harris

Eileen Clarke, senior associate editor at Entertainment Weekly, recently talked about life after graduating from COM’s print journalism program in 1988. General-interest writing has always fascinated Clarke, who lives in Long Beach, N.Y., with her husband, Jerry Ambroise (SMG ‘88), and three-year-old son Dylan. After leaving COM, Clarke wrote for a horse racing daily and New York magazine, did some freelancing and was hired by Entertainment Weekly six years ago.

Did you focus on journalism when you started at COM?

I did pretty much know that I wanted to do journalism. I went to high school in New York and they had a little television studio in it. We had a lot of guest speakers come and talk to us about broadcast journalism. But I really loved writing. I remember taking one basic broadcast class and I remember thinking, ‘Well you really don’t do a whole lot of writing there.’ So I concentrated on print. That’s where I’ve stayed now for 12 years.

How did COM help you after graduating?

The courses that helped me the most were the ones that Nancy Day taught–copy editing and feature writing. Wherever you go in print journalism, no matter what level, basic grammar tools are vital. That’s something that’s never wasted. I obviously use those skills everyday. But those classes I really loved.

So you were interested in feature writing from the very start?

Pretty much. What I do now is basically editing, but I do a little bit of writing–mainly reviews of either books or videos. Feature writing is the most basic art of storytelling. If you can master that, you can pretty much write about anything.

What was your career path after you graduated?

For my first job, believe it or not, I had answered an ad in The New York Times. It just said, ‘Editorial assistant at daily newspaper.’ And the job market was really, really tight back then, so I answered the ad and went on the interview that was in SoHo. It was for a daily horse racing newspaper, which I know nothing about. Of course, when the editor asked, ‘Are you interested?’ I said ‘Oh, yeah. I’m fascinated by horses.’ I thought that working at a daily paper no matter what it covered would be pretty cool. It turned out to be a great experience. I wrote a story every week, I did copyediting there, I went to the track once a week. I basically was writing for the layperson, so I interviewed jockeys, old-time trainers. So with basic journalism skills, you can go into any area of journalism.

After the horse racing writing job, where did you go from there?

I stayed there for about a year. Actually that paper was sold to the Daily Racing Form. They wanted to hire me, but I didn’t want to go where they wanted me to go. I wanted to try something else. So I got a job at New York magazine as an editorial assistant and I stayed there for four years. I did a little theater column, a little activities-for-children column and the junior staffers were encouraged to do a lot of writing. I did little profiles on New Yorkers. I got a lot of clips out of that job. Then I freelanced for a couple of years and then in 1996, I started at EW.

Give us a day in the life of Eileen Clarke.

I work two full days now because I have a child and another one on the way. I work probably 24 hours within two days–Mondays and Tuesdays, which are primarily the days that our features close. Tuesday night we close the issue and Wednesday morning we’re on the press. Basically what I’ll do is come in Monday when we have a 10:30 meeting. We talk about anything that happened over the weekend and we have a run-sheet on which each associate editor works on a particular story.

So basically what I do is work as a liaison between all the different departments. A story will come in and either I will read it or a senior editor will read it and do a first edit. I work basically in Quark, after the story’s been edited. I pour the story into Quark, make it fit, I write headlines, captions. I’ll put in photo credits. I coordinate with the fact-checking department. The story has three rounds to it. We call it copy research one, two and three–I’m basically pushing the story through each cycle. So there are three different levels of editing going on. It all filters down through me.

Did you always want to be involved in entertainment writing?

Not really. I’m more of a general-interest person. I like reading celebrity news, but I don’t live and die by it. Just by the nature of the game, I have to keep up with what’s going on.

What's the most fascinating aspect to your job?

We get to see movies earlier than everybody else. We know what not to see (laughs). We get a lot of free stuff–a lot of CDs, videos and those kinds of things. But what appeals to me the most is just doing something different every week. I think if I had a 9-to-5 job where I sold sweaters, it would just drive me completely crazy.

What advice would you give to somebody who's studying journalism right now?

I see a lot of interns come in and the ones who are the most successful are those who say ‘yes’ to anything. My best advice would be don’t have an attitude about anything. If someone asks you to photocopy something, do the best job possible. Little things like that might not seem so crucial, but editors notice if a person is detail-oriented, if they have a good attitude, if they’re willing to do what they are asked to do. You have to be eager, you have to be pleasant and you can’t think that anything is beneath you.