Newspaper Journalism
So today I’d like to present to you a little bit from my life: my newspaper internship. I intern at a local newspaper, The Signal, which is pretty local and has a pretty small circulation. The staff is small, but that also makes everyone relaxed and generally easy to become friends with; there isn’t any sense of corporate control or media manipulation from the top. The editor-in-chief, Lila, is actually a very cool person.
My job started out as a random-writing guy, doing briefs and shorts, and managing contact lists, etc. At least I wasn’t making coffee. But then I began to write stories, and that’s turned out pretty good. In fact, I take credit for another high school intern starting to work at The Signal, Emily Heckelman.
The job is probably better than most, but in reality, it’s the same as any other occupations: the same old, same old every single day. I guess that if you truly love journalism, you’d never get bored of it, but personally, many of the stories are simply the same, but replace the names, places, and things and you have the exact same thing. Especially because I usually do boring community stories. The trade-off: low-pay. Writing is a visual art, and arts jobs usually don’t pay well.
So the internship: interesting, but possibly better if I did the investigative sort.