The New Republic on the problems of internship in journalism:
[T]he internship culture … rewards young people who know exactly what they want to do and immediately begin strategizing about how to get there…
Selecting for such single-mindedness might make sense when seeking out, say, tomorrow’s astronauts or professional athletes. But is it sensible to, by default, select for those qualities in journalism, a field that requires its practitioners to observe and comment upon the world at large? Wouldn’t it make sense to do the exact opposite? That is, create incentives for people who have wider experience in the world?
There’s a social good problem at play when news is delivered by people who harbor such similar ambitions and come from such similar backgrounds, people who have spent their summers in the same cities and have worked at the same types of organizations. Naturally, they are likely to keep spotting and writing about the same types of issues — and keep missing different ones.
Same backgrounds? I disagree. I’ve met so many different types of people via internships. The industry must blame itself if it is annoyed by only rich kids doing the long internships. After all, only the rich can afford to work for months without pay. Shame on the magazines and newspapers that take advantage of that, I say.
I look at it this way: we’re in an industry that people have to REALLY want to be a part of to succeed. We WANT to be journalists. And, because of the shocking pay, it generally means we want to do it for all the right reasons.
That’s very healthy, if you ask me.
I think it’s a mixed bag. I wasn’t the most nontraditional intern when I went to the ABC News Washington Bureau, but neither was I the most conventional. I was a graduate student at the time, rather than an undergrad. I was fascinated by science journalism in particular, as opposed to mainstream political reporting. I found that because I had these different interests that people were very kind to me. The folks there lined me up with several job opportunities, and I ended up in New York within a few months working for a magazine. At the same time, because I wasn’t single-minded in my focus, I think I had more of an identity crisis in the process. I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do, and therefore didn’t take as great advantage of the opportunities as I might have. If I’d come in thinking I wanted to be a producer at WNT someday, I could potentially have used my time there to enter that career track. But I didn’t know that, and I still don’t know that I’d want to be a TV news producer. As it was, I had little idea what I wanted to do with myself, and ended up on a career odyssey that eventually took me back into academia. Which may be better for me. I dunno.
The fact is that we don’t know the social composition of journalists. And as journalism changes it’ll be even harder to know about ‘who’ they are. But it seems to me that highly competitive J-schools (like City) and the whole Intern process must make it harder to inject diversity and creativity. I think it leads to what I call a lack of ‘editorial diversity’ in mainstream media. Too many people doing what the guy before them did. Too many people sharing the same world-view. When was the last time you heard a fresh voice or read a genuinely novel point of view offline?
I’m a fan of Robert Krulwich’s stuff at ABC and NPR. Full disclosure, he’s an old mentor of mine. But he always dances to his own drummer, and some of his pieces are really different and original.
Certainly the UK ‘grammar school’ contingent has ceased to be…but I tend to think blogging offers the opportunities to hear new voices.
And if I had to say which new voice I most liked — Erwin James. He spent 20 yrs in prison, rather than interning tho’.
Re: Charlie Beckett’s comment, “we” have a pretty good idea about the social composition of journalists because people like Tony Delano and Ian Hargreaves have researched it – and it looks pretty uniform. However, I agree that it is dangerous to extrapolate from the type of student we see at Cardiff and City; you only have to look at Westminster’s intake to see a different demographic sample.
I also wonder whether it’s true that organisations (and other journalists) will only select those who look and think like themselves. It may take some time but once an organisation realises that it needs people with different skills if it is to change and survive then it will actively seek them out.
I agree with Charlie on this one. I think the problem is the institutional socialisation of news values. In order to move on in news organisations interns or students are called upon to internalise the news values of the existing senior staff. This leads to a uniformity in the selection of news. When selecting news, students have to learn what their news editor thinks is ‘a good idea’ for a news story. I know, because I’ve been there. You might think that this makes sense because the news editor has greater experience and often this is the case. I’m not for a moment suggesting that students know it all — they still obviously have a lot to learn. But we might well also ask how this very experience might hinder selection of stories that don’t fit with what the news editor has come to think of as ‘news’ — him– or herself a product of the organisational setting.
Apart from the obvious ‘wow’ stories, I think that if there is any method in story selection, it’s a learned institutional process, and at times there is a methodical non-method when selection of news is based on the availibility of resources, time pressure, the interests of a particular news editor, ease of access — ‘we’ll use PA/PR/wires’ etc. Some editors nevertheless continue to place faith in their ability to make what they see as objective news judgements — and they have to, in order to justify their editorial decisions.
We can only benefit from hearing stories and news selections from people who are outside of the ‘news factory’, which is why blogs are so important to the future of media and perhaps why, as a recently qualified MA journalism student, I’m already thinking about whether my future lies within a traditional news organisation.
Socialisation is part of story selection, but actually context is also really important. Journalists are also continually benchmarking their editorial judgments against more ‘successful’ competitors…