Vol. 7 No. 2
Winter, 2004
|
|
Newsletter Vol. 7 No. 2 Winter, 2004 |
||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||
|
Past Issues |
|
||||||||||||||||
|
Taking
care of Business
The Atlanta experience reminded me of how journalism and mass communication faculty members often juggle many balls while sometimes wearing the multiple academic hats of adviser, committee member, researcher, grant writer and colleague. Somewhere in the mix, we do the important work of coordinating internships. Every school has its own unique route to making connections between students, schools and internship employers. Every internship cycle has unexpected challenges. Making better use of the available technology may make the job of managing interns a bit easier. In the last issue, I described how an informational internship website can be useful for your prospective and current interns, as well as future employers. I have also utilized internship listservs as a communication tool to relay important information regarding the internship class. Listservs can lead to meaningful discussions between students who may meet each other only a few times, if at all, during the semester at the internship class meetings. Here’s a sample of a discussion starter I used recently and some of the dialog it generated: INTERNSHIP LISTSERV DISCUSSION # 1 Learning how to fit into the culture of your internship organization can be a delicate process. How have you been able to show your internship employer that you are capable of contributing? Offer your best tips on successful ways to fit into the culture of your organization. Your response to this query can be based on the outcome of a problem you overcame at your internship site. Broadcast news major: "It's taken me three weeks to finally understand how things work around here. I wish I had listened to your advice to us to stay out of office politics. It has come back to haunt me. It all started . . . " Electronic media production major: "I have learned a lot by just observing what others do. I believe my willingness to stay beyond the assigned internship hours and taking on new jobs has paid off." Broadcast news major: "Everyone at ___________ (TV- station) is expected to know how to do more than one job. I think I have impressed people by being able to work on several assignments at the same time. They actually took one of my story ideas and gave me a lot of compliments." Sometimes, especially with students, listservs may have a tendency to degenerate into inappropriate chat room like discussions. To maintain the academic integrity of the communication tool, establishing some rules of the road may be appropriate. Of course, there are uniform guidelines for posting to listservs such as the all important, "how to send messages to individuals without replying to the entire list." Here are other general guidelines used for internship listservs:
Listservs have received a bad rep of late. If not managed properly they can, unfortunately, clutter your email box with useless personal exchanges or apologies for misdirected mail. However, when managed for business communication, listservs can work. They are fast and efficient ways to text message interns located at far flung locations within your state and across the country. Ultimately, a listserv is just one more tool in the shed to help internship directors and coordinators take care of business. Marian Azzaro, ICIG
Vice-Head & Program Chair
Rosanne Pagano, Research
Chair
Has this happened to you? The day’s mail brings yet another invitation to nominate your best for a nationally competitive internship. An undergraduate immediately comes to mind—let’s say she’s not only bright but has amassed a pretty good portfolio. Her dream is to be a visual journalist, combining her interest in news with her love of graphics and design. You encourage her to pursue this big chance and soon you’re suggesting final edits to her application essay. A few months go by. Then the student sends an e-mail, and the subject line tells everything you need to know: "I GOT IT!!!" Another sparkling success story, right? Not necessarily. Turns out, this internship—like most—requires students to move away and to provide their own housing and car. After talking over finances with her family, and balancing the internship stipend against the cost of moving to Florida, my student reluctantly turned this prestigious internship down. When I first began teaching five years ago, I was convinced that Alaska’s distance from the rest of the country put students at a unique disadvantage as they chased nationally ranked internships. But the more I talk with other ICIG members, the more I realize that plenty of promising students across the country don’t pursue internships because sacrifices in time or money don’t seem worth it. I’ll leave the hand wringing about today’s college students to someone else: Yes, they can be over-committed and over-coddled. Too many of them are rearing children, working full time, going to school full time—and expecting nothing short of exemplary grades. If you’ve found a way to get through to this crowd, please let me know. In the meantime, I believe in internships. For students who demonstrate eagerness to learn and desire to improve, who amass clips and see the connection between coursework and the work world, an internship is the academic capstone. Studies consistently show that successful interns move from potential to professional far faster than peers who rely on classroom learning alone. Good programs always strive to produce students who can compete nationally. But I believe we also have a duty to include promising students for whom an out-of-state internship is out of the question. To help them, I’ve focused on developing local, and especially summertime, internships across the media. I urge you to do the same. Local projects do double-duty: They put internships within the grasp of more students while introducing your program to area employers, one competent student ambassador at a time. No matter how new you are to your campus, you can recruit internship mentors by turning to local practitioners whose work and professionalism you admire. Does your TV news anchor always seem to read from a polished script? Chances are he’s the one writing it, and he could well prove to be a good internship mentor. Consider the big nonprofits in your town—United Way or Red Cross, for example, or perhaps the local hospitals. Each of these, as well as the local school district, has proved to be a good match for interns in photography, public relations or graphics and design. I recently added the state humanities forum to our internship roster when I happened to see its newsletter and was impressed by its scope. I’m always on the watch for local internships and my colleagues know it. They’re good at turning their own professional contacts and memberships into recommendations for me to pursue as internship director. Adjunct instructors, who typically teach part-time while holding down media jobs, are excellent sources of local leads as well. And don’t overlook your graduates: A few years back, I oversaw an internship for a public relations student who was hired into an executive job after her internship was done. She eventually mentored two other interns. At my school, carefully managed, homegrown internships have expanded our students’ chances to gain pre-professional training that can make the difference as they try for first jobs. When matching students with internships, I encourage you to think globally—and locally, too. Reminder! The postmark date for ICIG research paper
submissions From the No Pile to the Yes Pile Catherine Winter, ICIG
Teaching Chair
Even some very good students came in with resumes and cover letters that were destined for an editor’s "no" pile. One student had addressed his potential supervisor as "Mrs." ("I wasn’t sure if she was married," he said. "But then I found an article that referred to her husband." I congratulated him on his enterprise, but told him to refer to her as Jane Smith, not Mrs. Smith.) Another student had written her cover letter and resume in a flowery font more appropriate for a sympathy card. Other resumes had spelling or capitalization errors. But the most common problem was that the students had undersold their skills and experience. At 19 or 20, they don’t usually have a lot to brag about, and when they leave half of it out, the resume looks awfully thin. Now when students come in for help on resumes, I ask them these questions:
Frequently, the student will say, "Oh, can I put that on a resume?" Yes, you can. And run it through the spell checker, too, okay? You Be the
Intern
Jensch and the KBJR news team were open and friendly from the very first day. I was older than everyone in the newsroom with the exception of Jensch and one special projects reporter with a long history in Duluth. There were traditional (age and experience) interns already on board who were sent out my very first day there with photographers to grab information and interviews for VOs and VOSOTs. That was encouraging. I was happy to see that KBJR used the same newsroom software (NewsKing) I used back at the University of Memphis. This saved some real time on the learning curve. With one 10 minute coaching session with morning anchor Kim Kaiser and armed with a set of sample scripts, I was pretty much good-to-go on the computer. That was a relief. I spent that first day trying to take in as much as possible about the people I'd be working with and observe how they got about their normal routines. I read a lot of papers, the local and state wires, and tried to get up to speed on Duluth's upcoming major league marathon scheduled for that weekend. "Grandma's Marathon" attracts more than 9,000 runners to the Northland, making it the tenth largest marathon in the United States. Perhaps because I looked bored, maybe because I looked like I could make "good TV," or perhaps because he had an extra photographer that day, Jensch sent me out on day two of my Fellowship to turn a package. It was basic: profile a couple of marathon volunteers, part of the army of 3,000 who help make the race run. It took about ten seconds for the reporting instincts to come back to me. I wanted to leave the newsroom quickly. I wanted to grab sound soon. I wanted to get good visuals. I wanted to write in present tense and active voice. I wanted to be clear and clever. I wanted to tell a story. I wanted to do it all in plenty of time because most of all, I wanted to make deadline. Looking back on it, I wanted to be the student I love to have back in my Memphis classrooms. I wanted to practice what I preach. My photographer Sean Hagen was an all-star that day. He shot the hell out of the hospital loading dock where our first marathon volunteer was gathering first aid supplies to have along the race route. When we got to the home of a long-time husband and wife volunteer team, he got creative in pretty cramped quarters. Practicing one of those preaches I make in class, I turned to Sean when I was finished putting questions to each of the volunteers, and he came up with the question that resulted in the best sound bite of the day. Before I could even begin to think about shooting an interactive stand-up that would "wow" the students back in Memphis, the assignment editor called to report I was going live at five and six. Ah, day two on the "job." Designed to enhance the quality of broadcast journalism education and to strengthen the caliber of the future broadcast news workforce, my day two experience with KBJR drove home the lesson that we need to be teaching live reporting skills. In 22 days of reporting in and around Duluth, I went live 17 times. I did only four stand-ups. So much for the urgent need to capture a collection of interactive stand-ups to show at school. Instead, when back working with my students on our campus newscast, we swung a studio camera around to the interview set and tossed to reporters to introduce their own packages without script on the TelePrompTer. It was the best we could do at the University of Memphis. Going live is probably a large challenge if not a technical impossibility for most college newscasts, but with a little creativity and willingness to make-do, you can give your students the experience of ad-libing under pressure. It's a skill expected of on-air hires in Duluth, market #133. An important goal of the Educator in the Newsroom Fellowships is to improve communication among educators and electronic journalists and build important bridges between the two communities. I have remained in contact with several of my KBJR teammates, and I drafted colleagues there and at a station now lead by a former Duluth news manager to help judge the national student news competition for the Broadcast Education Association. That task puts samples of work from more than 30 colleges and universities under the noses of news directors and other ENG professionals in two markets where our students can compete for first jobs. Making that happen for your students is reason alone to brush up your own skills, get back into the "real world" of television news, and collect new experiences to energize your classrooms. You can find more information about the RTNDF Educator in the Newsroom Fellowship at http://www.rtndf.org/resources/excel.shtml or you can call project director Margaret Ershler at the Foundation offices to discuss applying for this coming summer. Using Advice From Experts to Help
Your Internship Program Run Smoothly Nancy M. Somerick, Ph.D., Professor and Director of Internship Program,
One suggestion is to ask the experts on your campus for input. Examples of experts that you may need to consult include:
The experts listed above are only some of the relevant resources that may be available to you on your campus. (Please note that, in situations when it is necessary to protect a student’s confidentiality, a scenario (without the student’s name) conveyed to the expert may be all that is needed to obtain the expert’s advice. If confidentiality is a concern, the campus attorney should be contacted to obtain guidance.) Because establishing a support system comprised of campus experts can be valuable when you need advice quickly, it may be helpful to cultivate these experts by informing them about your program before questions and concerns arise and by keeping the experts updated on a regular basis. Then, when you contact the experts, you won’t have to spend time unnecessarily by introducing yourself or by explaining your program. In summary, if you direct an internship program, you know that it can be a tremendous responsibility that is time consuming and that you won’t have all of the answers or solutions to every question or concern that can arise. Knowing who to contact on campus and how to obtain the advice you need can help your program run smoothly. This Is a
News Internship?
Recently I had an intern. He was a graduate student at a nearby university, planning to matriculate into a university teaching career. He came with me to college meetings, department meetings, committee meetings, campus events I attended and we talked (while preserving student anonymity) about handling students' problems when advising. I had never heard of that type of internship before, but I could see its value and it broadened my thinking about internships. Then I looked around. A lot of people are working in fields that aren't particularly related to their degrees. Just about every campus has professors teaching things in fields that are completely different from the ones in which they earned their degrees. I decided to quit arguing, teach them what a journalism had to offer and concentrate on the generalizable skills they learned in the journalism program. Then I sent them out beyond graduation with best wishes in their new careers. Before graduation, though, I'm starting to put these students into internships that get them going in the direction they want to go. So I now have a student interning at a public defender's office. Last semester a student who plans to work as a physician's assistant interned in a public health program. I'm also looking into lobbying firms, investing firms, video production companies, manufacturers and various communication jobs that have nothing to do with journalism. Just like the internships in news organizations, these will help students get their feet in the right doors. They will get the familiarity with their chosen professions that they need to hit the ground running after graduation, just like a news operation internship would do. They also find the ways they need to connect the things they learned in their journalism instruction with the new work they'll be doing. There is a lot of generalizable knowledge gained in a journalism program. Journalism students are often better than most folks at using technological devices in general - so much of journalism requires extensive use of technology now. Their grammar is better, they're sharper with breaking down complex things and making decisions about them, their people skills are good, and they can see ahead to a deadline and lay out work in a way that will meet the deadline. I'm sure you can come up with at least a dozen more items to add to this list. Some of the folks I call to talk about accepting a journalism student as an intern react somewhat skeptically. I just ask them to meet with the student and discuss the idea. They're receptive to that. I'm still new at this approach to internships, so I don't know how many rejections I'll get. Of course, students applying for news internships are rejected every day. Although I was very insecure, initially, about sending journalism students out to internships that weren't in news operations, I feel very good about the positive reaction I've received so far. I still consider this experimental, but I'm more confident about the benefits. The students get instruction and they learn to produce good journalistic work. They work in student news operations and hear from working news professionals who come and speak. They learn news, then they take the skills they developed doing that into a career they see as an intern. |
We convened in Atlanta during the first week of December
last year to get the work done of planning the 2004 AEJMC
convention. Some of us had survived multiple flight
cancellations, missed connections and rerouted luggage,
because of snow up North, but we made it. We were division,
interest group and program heads. At first, we were also a
somewhat weary bunch, on that Saturday night, but things
quickly livened up at the Sunday chips auction. I must say,
that even after two years in the convention programming
trenches, I am still amazed at the overall efficiency of the
chips auction process. It’s a testament to how effective
AEJMC is at taking care of business. You’ll
learn details about Toronto convention plans and how ICIG did
in the auction process in Marian Azzaro’s column.
Happy New Year!
A round of
internship deadlines came up in December and January, so I had a
lot of students in my office asking questions that surprised me
– questions such as, "What’s a cover letter?" 
As
students stream back into our classrooms this semester, we professors
all know it's not too early to discuss summer internships with them.
Some might even say, it's too late. Regardless, I'm writing to light
the proverbial fire under your backside to look for a summer experience that will challenge
your classroom experience, add to your skills inventory and invigorate
your career outlook. Yes, you can be the intern. I was last summer.
Questions and concerns can arise in even the most successful
internship programs. To avoid wasting time in deciding what to
do, focus on finding answers and solutions rather than on
problems. However, how do you determine the best answer or
solution if the question or concern is outside of your area of
expertise?
A large number of students in
journalism programs have ambitions to find employment outside
of journalism when they graduate. Others take introductory
journalism courses and are interested in making it their
major, but major in some other field because their ambitions
are targeted more in that direction. There was a time when I
argued with the majors who wanted to be general managers of
businesses, disc jockeys, film producers, or go to law school,
business graduate school and mass communication graduate
school. I tried to talk them into becoming journalists. They
did not appreciate that. They knew what they wanted and they
wanted to do it.