I found this blog while researching to gain an understanding of internships as I am in need of content for my web sites.

I refuse to enter into any situation that is not a win win win situation for the student, consumer and me so I am doing my research in an effort to create that.

You all have valid points. However, some of your opinions are a bit short sited, the carpenter, mechanic plumber… that makes a nice hourly wage typically puts in 10-30 hours a week that is not on the clock. They also need to pay to learn.
For me I have invested over 17 months of my time in these web sites and paid for the opportunity. I have faith that it will be fruitful. It is where my heart is and I am willing to do it.

The catch 22 is not exclusive to your trade.

For the people that have never run a business you need to understand that not every business is capitalized well enough to pay to provide opportunity, in your case to be published.

Thank you again for the knowledge you have given me via this blog.

Have a great day and follow the path of your dreams with every conscionable means you discover.

PRESS ON
Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

Raymond

ken

As you know, I’m the editor of The High Springs Herald, a weekly newspaper just a half-hour away from the University of Florida. We use interns extensively, offering internships to five students or so each semester.

We have the good fortune of being driving distance from UF and working around students’ work and class schedules (within reason).

But for most weekly newspapers, interns are out of the question. Weekly newspaper — which often can provide a better internship than a daily because of the variety of work an intern will do — get by from week to week and can’t afford to pay an intern.

I always suggest to weeklies that they attend the University of Florida’s internship fair held twice each year and advertise they are looking for students whose hometown is the same as the newspaper’s. This way, students can live at home while getting a quality internship.

Heck, even the Florida Press Association comes to each internship fair and interviews students, then sends the results of those interviews to interested newspapers.

But weekly newspaper editors are so traditionaly overworked that they have little time to travel to UF for a daylong internship fair. But they need to make the time.

Quality interns can help free up some of the weekly’s overworked staffers to work on long-terms projects that you so rarely see in weeklies. And the interns get in-depth experience, covering everything from city commission meetings to birthdays of 100-year-olds.

Producing a quality internship is a lot of work. At The Herald, where we’ve had more than 75 interns in the past five years, we hold a staff meeting every Thursday at 9:30 a.m. In that staff meeting, we not only hand out the week’s stories but talk about challenges any of us may have faced. We also point out great writing and compare our stories with those of competitor’s.

Further, not a single intern’s story — not one — gets published in The High Springs Herald until it is edited by me WITH the intern. Sometimes the intern is actually present with me in the room. More often than not, the intern is one the phone with me (saving them gas money). They open up their story on their computer and follow along with me as I edit their story on my computer. This way, when they open the paper Thursday, there are NO surprises.

Further, I NEVER re-write anything. Yes, we do normal editing together, but if an intern turns in something so horrible that it needs to be rewritten, we talk about ways the story could be rewritten. Then I instruct the intern to begin that process and let me know once they have a new product.

This way, if an employer ever calls me down the road for a reference for a former intern and says, “How much of what they wrote is you rewriting their material,” I can say with certainty, “None of it.”

Because I’ve heard the complaint that journalism colleges graduate great feature writers but inexperienced news writers, every intern at The Herald is required to cover a selected city commission in concert with the full-time, professional reporter who normally covers that city.

This way, throughout the course of 3-4 months, the intern gets several, if not a dozen or more, city commission meetings under their belt. They learn how to take long, boring meetings and find the meat that is important to the readers. They learn the art of hard-core news writing.

Finally, as part of a personal philosophy I have, I try each semester to pick three highly experienced interns with great clips, plus two interns with no clips and no experience.

After all, if you can’t get your first experience at a weekly newspaper, where are you supposed to get experience? Yes, working with total novices can be tough, but the rewards are great when you seem them begin to mature and blossom.

I treasure our interns, and we even started a Facebook group where we keep in touch with our interns and follow them as they move forward in the professional world.

An excellent internship program, while a lot of work, can be something wonderful for both the newspaper and the student.

1. We’re not a top-tier j-school. My kids need to compete with students from those schools. They have to show they’ll jump higher, work harder and learn more. So I advise them to first take the no-pay, for-credit internships in town. If they can’t afford it during the summer, most of the media firms here will allow students to intern during the school year.

2. There’s lots of local opportunity. We’re in a town with 28 Gannett weeklies, one daily, and a lifestyle weekly; a growing newspaper web-only site that emerged when a competing daily’s JOA ended; three network TV stations and two independents; one alternative weekly; a monthly city magazine; and several smaller mags and e-zines. There’s also a smaller daily and some weeklies run by Cox not far away. My kids get the work by agreeing to the for-credit gig — often besting the more accomplished students from the better j-schools. Sometimes, they write internship proposals for editors — who love them — and get the internships that way.

3. After a year or two of unpaid work, armed with better clips or URLs, my students aim for the paid gigs. They usually get them. When the ygraduate, they usually have more outside journalism experience than those students from the j-schools. I am always complemented on my students’ work ethic. One editor said recently, “Your students don’t have any ‘attitude.’ I like that.”