Pros
Full time work as a reporter, well known brand name on the cv. Quite flash canary wharf office. Some of the editors/reporters were lovely, funny, clever people. Acceptable pay for a juniorish reporter in London (£35k)
Cons
Didn't enjoy working here. Highly pressured environment. You have to write four stories a day every day. Many of them assigned by editors are just stories already being covered by other outlets (often local news sites) which newsweek copies to try and ride/hijack the seo wave created by the work of those outlets. There is very little emphasis on original reporting. I did not feel that newsweek had a coherent brand identity, in that it seems to want to be a prestige brand covering big stories (like the NYT or something), but they're more than happy to publish a massive bulk of very low-brow, low effort articles about controversial tweets, meme round ups, and traffic/weather announcements. Most reporters have a very broad beat rather than a specific, deep beat. Speed is always pushed over quality/thoroughness but you always get pulled up if your stories aren't perfect for the subeditors, even with very high pressure deadlines (in an 8 hour day, with a one hour lunch break it's less than 2 hours per story every story). Reporters are in a panopticon situation where they are in a group chat with a team of 5+ other editors but no other reporters. In that chat, reporters pitch, are assigned stories, and contact editors for help. It means that you don't really know what other reporters are up to and it made me feel constantly watched and anxious, without solidarity with my colleagues. There is one weekly all-hands meeting with over 100 staff, and other than that you never really meet with the team to discuss strategy/ideas, which made me feel isolated and it felt like quite a barren ideas-scape. Other reporters are usually too stressed and pushed for time to discuss stories, and editors often are too busy as well. Most of the time, stories that take longer than two hours to complete are a non-starter, and you would certainly need lots of pushing for a story that would take a few days. I also found the UK hours brutal. Starting at 7am every day, submitting first story by 9, and you would regularly have to skip lunch and stay late in order to meet quota. The person you had to contact to book leave would often reject requests or would be unresponsive for weeks at a time. Very little flexibility. If you worked weekends (I worked every weekend), they always wanted you to take two isolated days off (eg a random Tuesday and Thursday) rather than getting two consecutive days off. When I hung out with other reporters at after work drinks we were often feeling stressed and burned out. Very high turnover. There was also a huge emphasis on very demanding kpis which would be ruthlessly grilled at monthly one on one meetings with a manager, even if you were far exceeding quota in four but a little short in one.