Paul Tael

Credentials: Condé Nast

Position title: Junior Video Editor

Major: Communication Arts

Certificates: Digital Studies, Computer Sciences, and Digital Cinema Production

Graduation Date: May 2019

How did you end up working at Condé Nast?

I was very lucky in my career. I went to high school in southern California and took some video production classes in 10th and 11th grade. In college, I was highly involved in Madison Misnomer, took some video editing classes, and produced videos with my friends, so by the time I graduated, I knew my most employable skill set was video editing.

After I graduated, I had the privilege of moving in with family in LA and sent out over 100 applications in my first month there, finally landing an internship at CollegeHumor as an assistant editor intern. In that role, I organized footage in Adobe and made the editor’s job as easy as possible. When the company collapsed shortly after the internship ended, the former director of post-production at CollegeHumor landed at Condé Nast and she needed to hire an assistant editor. I interviewed and was hired for a six week trial period. But three weeks into that Covid hit and we went remote – all of a sudden I was very hard to replace.

For a year and a half, I was permalancing as an assistant editor, meaning Condé Nast would book me for a month at a time and I would work 40 hours a week without benefits or PTO. Whenever the company filmed anything in LA, I was the guy they handed hard drives to, and I would bring that footage into our post production workflow.

When covid slowed, I visited Chicago and decided I just had to move there. I told Condé Nast that I’d love to keep my job, but they couldn’t guarantee my job, since they needed an LA-based assistant editor. As luck would have it, there was a video editing schedule snafu and my manager asked me to edit a rough cut. I saw this as an opportunity and stayed up the whole night to turn in something that really exceeded the expectations of a rough cut. The result of that effort was that I ended up cutting the entire video, was promoted to the role of Junior Video Editor, and was able to move to Chicago.

What does a typical day in the office look like for you?

I edit pretty neat videos from my home office! In a nutshell, people send me footage and I use the Adobe suite to turn that footage into the files that get posted on Tiktok or Youtube.

I work for a uniquely large video production operation across all of Condé Nast’s brands, making up over a dozen brands’ social media accounts and Youtube channels. The post production team is about 70 or 80 people, with assistant editors, junior editors, graphics specialists, coordinators, and managers.

Sometimes I do the entire edit, sometimes I do just the first pass or just the final pass, sometimes I do just the graphics, it really depends. But I get booked in 2, 4, or 8 hour chunks on any given project. I’ve edited a few dozen videos entirely myself at this point. Here are a few of my favorite projects:

How has Digital Studies influenced your career path?

In the field of post production, “Digital Studies” is akin to literacy. It’s important for me to understand how computers work because they’re the things that export my videos. It’s important for me to understand how websites work because they’re the things that platform my videos. It’s important for me to understand how the internet functions as a megaphone in our society because it allows me to use my position to hold my publishers to higher standards of journalism.

Did you have a favorite Digital Studies class when you were a student?

I really enjoyed the capstone course, Com Arts 605, and the history of the internet course, Com Arts 346. There were two other courses that really stuck with me as the most impactful of my studies: Com Arts 465, the video editing class, and Com Arts 368, about the practice and theory of persuasion. Understanding how to effectively make your case is so important no matter what you do.

Do you have any advice for current students?

Take advantage of all the free things! Join a weird club about something you’ve never done (The Madison Misnomer was very good to me, if you’re taking recommendations)! Actively make friends now because it gets much harder once the social glue of going to college together comes to an end.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career thus far?

One moment really comes to mind. A little context: Shortly after moving to Chicago, I learned about an underground effort to unionize at Condé Nast. I was still not staff and had zero benefits. I saw the union as an opportunity to benefit my and my peers’ working conditions and I became an active member of the union (A steward, in formal terms). We organized over the course of years, and it was a bitter fight with the company, who had a tactic of laying off employees the day before they would become union eligible under NY state law.

When my union was at the absolute height of tensions in our contract negotiations with Condé Nast, we were threatening to strike at the Met Gala, our company’s biggest event of the year. We had a strike pledge we were collecting signatures for amongst our 500+ member union, and we could only go public once we got signatures from 70% of our union.

Going public with this strike pledge was pivotal because it provided leverage we could use to bargain for better working conditions. We fought very hard and hit 50% quickly. 60% came a little slower. 68% came very slowly and 70% felt out of reach in the final few days. But about three days before the strike threat would come to fruition, we were only 5 signatures away and could feel it coming.

I volunteered to make the announcement video. It was simple and I made it from scratch in Adobe Premiere in about 90 minutes. I brought my laptop with me to a party on a Saturday night because I had a feeling we’d hit 70% on the strike pledge and we’d need to go public THAT night, so that we could bargain with leverage on Sunday before potentially striking on Monday.

We hit 70% and I exported the video from my friend’s living room. My strike pledge announcement video was aired on my union’s social platforms, as well as on local news in New York City, where the Met would have been held.

We went public, we won a contract, and it was the proudest I’ve ever been in my career. I was made staff as a result of our union’s organizing, and am now receiving PTO and employer provided health insurance for the first time in my career.