Investing in an Internship

By Joseph Galante
May 2, 2008 06:59 PM

Like many young journalists, I was worried I might not find a job after graduation. Maybe I had absorbed some of the pessimism hanging over the industry. But I decided to stay positive, work hard and keep networking.

That determination paid off.

A few months after graduation, I landed a business reporting job at a time when much more qualified journalists were losing theirs.

I was lucky enough to have two post-graduate internships before Bloomberg News hired me in December. One was at Bloomberg covering retail companies in New York. The other was at The Philadelphia Inquirer as a Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism scholar. The Reynolds Center recently announced this year's seven internship recipients, who will soon report to their host papers around the country.

My advice for aspiring business journalists hoping to turn an internship into a job is limited. Heck, it's only happened to me once. But here's how I approached my reporting internships over the last few years. A few battle scars and a high byline count got me gainfully employed. Maybe it can do the same for you, too.

• Write your you-know-what off. My first two internships were at the 13,000-circulation Hays Daily News in Kansas. I volunteered to cover Main Street parades, abandoned kittens, Easter egg hunts, business openings and city commission meetings. I collected 140 bylines over two summers. When school started up again, I scrambled back and forth between the classroom and the newsroom. I tried to keep that intensity throughout my internships. One thing that always surprised me was seeing veteran reporters regularly taking three, four days or maybe an entire week to produce a story on their beat. Showing you can generate copy quickly is a good way to stand apart.
• Hustle. At The Philadelphia Inquirer, I always volunteered for news that broke during the day. I wanted to show my editors I could organize my day to align with whatever became the section's priority at a moment's notice. I think it's important to be committed to helping produce the section every day and not just committed to your own list of story ideas. With all the newsroom attrition, there are plenty of neglected beats that a motivated intern can volunteer for. Editors will remember that.
• Climb. Every summer, I tried to get a bigger internship than the last. Bigger internships are a gauge of how much your reporting skills are improving. They also show you have the ability to do higher-risk journalism. If your internship doesn't pan out one summer, don't stress. When I applied for my second summer internship in 2005, not one of the 50 papers on my list called me back. I saved every rejection letter and went back to building my clips.
• Ask for advice. You're an intern. You get a free pass to pick everyone's brain. Bill Marimow, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, is the executive editor at The Inquirer. I walked into his office as an intern and asked him how I could make my stories better. Let's face it, many graduates fresh out of college won't get the chance to interact with high-caliber journalists and editors until a ways down the career road. Why waste an opportunity to learn everything you can from them for the 10 short weeks you have?
• Stick around in the evenings. Sometimes news trickles in after most of the reporters have left and you're still at your desk reading Gawker...I mean, preparing for the next's day's work. I've picked up late-breaking stories this way both at Bloomberg and The Inquirer. As an intern, your only mission for the summer is to work. Take advantage of the fact that you don't have any reason to get home in the evenings and put in a few more hours than the rest of the herd.
• Bloomberg terminal. Every good business journalist should know how to use one. And I don't just say that because the billionaire New York mayor who created them pays my salary. These things are an inexhaustible source of financial data you can use in a story on local government debt, commercial loan delinquency rates in your area and comparing the health of companies in your city to that of a nearby area. Chances are, the business reporters in your newsroom know very little about Bloomberg terminals. If you can become semi-proficient on the Bloomberg and use it in your stories, you'll stand out in your department.

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Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism