Which Reminds Me

When I did a three- or four-month internship at a newspaper I was required to sign some type of contract giving them exclusive rights to whatever I might write for them. The only thing I wrote for them were about 10 articles and also some little short items and calendar entries. And that only means that I cannot send those articles to some other magazine pretending that those articles are not already copyrighted by someone else. I cannot offer the right of first publication on those particular items, not that it matters all that much. I could still use the information in the article and rewrite it some other way and offer first rights on that. I just would not be able to republish the article as originally published. I could use those 10 articles as clips attached to my resume if I wanted to but I am not sure that I would want an editor to think that all of those assigned and heavily edited articles actually represent what I would think of doing without a gang of editors over my head.