01 Jul 08 Making the most of your internship

10,000 Words.Net has a great post about making the most of your journalism internship. With the volatile landscape of the journalism world these days it may be nerve-wracking for students and those just out of school to deal with an internship. Truth be told, if I were interning at a paper right now and saw the things happening around me, I’d be terrified.

All is not lost however. The best thing you can do at an internship is learn from everything that is happening around you, both good and bad. 10,000 Words offers these tips, but be sure to read the full post for the detailed descriptions of each tip.

1. Get paid
2. Speak up
3. Ask questions
4. Jump into multimedia
5. Fraternize with the staff
6. Get business cards
7. Make yourself indispensable

Obviously I couldn’t agree more with the tip regarding multimedia. Right now there is a big initiative to cross-train the journalists in the newsrooms and hey, if you can get some of that training for free then why not?

The Washington Post just made a big showing of how they recently finished training over 200 of their journalists on doing video for their stories. I know of several newsrooms (*wink wink*) that were doing this over six months ago. Imagine walking in the door for an interview and already having those skills. You are instantly a more viable candidate than the other guy, who doesn’t have those skills and the paper will have to spend time and money training, by taking the necessary steps.

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Tags: journalism, journalism education

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