Interns are the future – here’s how to make internships valuable for your newsroom and the next generation of journalists.
Interns are the future of journalism and we owe it to them to create internship programs where they learn the skills they need to fly and come back to our newsrooms someday. Newsrooms with strong internship programs foster better reporting, diverse voices and show that employers value the future of journalism. The industry needs more diversity — more than 75% of newsroom employees are white, according to American Community Survey data. So many newsrooms offer internships but these programs lack structure and diversity, and are more focused on what newsrooms can get out of interns than what both parties can learn from each other. Join this session to learn best practices for training interns and how to develop an internship program. Afterwards, we’ll have a Q&A discussion on how to tackle your organization’s challenges.
Editors and newsroom managers will benefit from learning how to better work with and mentor interns, helping newsrooms diversify their reporting and their staff. Journalism school instructors and people in underrepresented communities will benefit from learning what employers are looking for in an intern’s performance and how they can use their talents to educate the newsroom about what young, diverse audiences are interested in.
Suggested Speaker(s)
- Christina Zdanowicz
Senior Producer, Social Discovery, CNN