The Printer’s Devil

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It’s summer and odds are you now have or will get a journalism intern in your newsroom.

It’s a wonderful thing.

You get an enthusiastic staffer at low cost. Ironically, given the quality of the interns I’ve employed and worked with they’re likely to be better reporters and writers than the ones you have full-time.

You’re also educating a younger generation.

Many editors like to assign interns to longer-term projects that require some research and effort.

I preferred to have the interns to all the scut work — sitting in on meetings, doing cop stories and obituaries, wedding notices and 4-H and youth club precedes — the day-to-day routine that makes up most of the newspaper.

Normally, that goes against my usual management philosophy, which is put your people in their strongest positions.

But I figure that interns are interns because they want to experience newspapering and they want to be in the trenches, which is where the scut work is.

I also figure that my existing staff needs a break from the routine and most of them need a challenge. By having interns do their daily work, the regular staff get a chance to do those stories and series they’ve wanted to do or even kick back and relax during the summer.

Hanging on to your regular staffers and keeping them happy is critical to the success of your newsroom and newspaper. Interns go away at the end of the summer. You don’t want your staff to do the same.

A caveat

College students get a lot of pressure to intern at “real world” newspapers. It looks good on the resume and it’s probably some of the best training for journalism — and life — there is.

I’ve always been surprised by the quality of interns who have wanted to work in my newsrooms — I’ve had inquiries from students from the top journalism schools in the nation, including Columbia, Northwestern and Missouri, plus the schools with a regional reputation all the way down to the indifferent private schools.

I tend to pick locals or students who have relatives in the area. I’ve tended to work in smaller communities where rentals are hard to find and temporary accommodations are almost nonexistent and if they have family in the area, they have an easier time finding a summer, and I have an easier time imposing on them in the case of a big midnight fire.

Nevertheless, you need to explain constantly the facts of newspaper life to your publisher, who will most likely be what I call “stupid and busy.” (See my previous post.)

Your publisher will assume that because the paper gets interns of high quality that the paper will also be able to attract full-time staffers of similar high quality and your publisher will wonder why you aren’t.

But most interns have no intention of staying in the newspaper trade. They’re looking to move on to public relations, public information, advertising or other more renumerative trade in which it’s handy to tout “the real world journalism experience.”

Given the circumstances surrounding CorpsNews, reporting is a dead end job to be avoided.

I know of a few cases where interns have come back to a newspaper. It’s usually a matter of dumb luck and not because of anything the paper or management did. It’s wonderful when it happens. But they won’t stay long. Enjoy it while it lasts.