By Stu Woo
The UNITY News

As newspapers struggle with a slumping economy and industry-wide declines in advertising revenue, some have already cut back on internship programs, leaving aspiring journalists worried about job prospects.

“If the economy continues to tailspin, then I think we’re going to be in big trouble next summer in terms of (offering) internships,” said Reginald Stuart, a corporate recruiting consultant for The McClatchy Co.

Newsroom recruiters said internships won’t disappear completely – they are, after all, valuable recruiting tools for newspapers, which sometimes treat them as try-outs for full-time positions. But if the industry’s financial woes continue, the summer internship landscape may drastically change in coming years.

Right now, students can expect fewer internship opportunities, Stuart said. Internship programs are often the first casualty of newsroom budget cuts, and many papers – from the Tribune Company’s Los Angeles Times to small-town McClatchy papers – have already downsized their programs, he said.

Joe Grimm, recruiter for the Detroit Free Press, said newspapers could emulate a practice more common in the magazine industry: unpaid internships. Sheila Solomon, recruiter for the Chicago Tribune, which has about 20 unpaid interns this summer, said such internships are important because there are many talented student journalists, but not enough money to pay them.

Grimm calls that practice “reprehensible” because it puts students who are financially strapped or those who live outside major media markets at a disadvantage.

Stuart said such a system would seriously hurt current efforts to diversify newsrooms. “There’s an ongoing debate in the industry whether it’s better to have internships that are unpaid or to have no internships at all.”

Another possibility is to find third-party organizations to fund internships. At the Oregonian, an increasing number of interns have been paid by organizations such as the Asian American Journalists Association or the Kaiser Family Foundation, said George Rede, the Oregonian’s Sunday opinion editor and former newsroom recruiter.

The dwindling of internship opportunities worries Amanda Dolasinski, an Ohio State senior who is currently interning at the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch.

“I’m nervous because I know there’s not going to be a lot of opportunities,” said Dolasinski, who dreams of working for a large paper in the Washington, D.C., area.

Newspaper recruiters have tips for students who will be seeking internships next summer, but the most popular piece of advice appears to be this: learn multimedia skills to improve versatility in the newsroom.

Students should “have as many strong storytelling skills that they can possibly amass,” Solomon said. “They need to be able to learn to tell stories online, in audio and video, and they will need to learn to tell stories in print.”

Other recruiters advise students to be flexible and to temper their expectations as newspapers struggle. “Be prepared to accept (an internship) that is a cut below where you would ideally like to be,” Rede said.

topic: Industry Issues
tags: budget cuts, internships, newspaper

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