Invest in your paper's future:
Hire an intern

Tight budgets shouldn't squeeze out opportunities By Jan Larsen NINA President

The front desk called. A kid was up front. Probably home on college break. And he wanted to talk about internships. I grumbled about not having the time, but all the other editors were gone. So I strode across the building and up to the front.

There he was, in jeans. No appointment. No resume. No clips. But we chatted for a few moments. At least he took the time to try and see what could happen.

This time of year, we all get a lot of calls about internships. For some of us, the news is grim. Payroll can’t budge an inch. Some newspapers can’t even afford minimum wage for one extra person.
It used to be better. We used to hire interns every summer.

Sometimes, we’d hire for spring semester, too. The late, great Marx Gibson convinced us all of the need for intern here at The Herald News. Some interns were very bad. Some were brilliant. All were worth our time.

I started my career as an intern at The Daily Pantagraph in Bloomington. I beat out 18 other kids for the position, which as I remember paid a grand $1.25 an hour. It was just a few years after Watergate when we all wanted to be a Woodward or Bernstein and newsrooms were flooded with dreamers.

I got lucky that summer. I thanked my boss when he raised my pay 25 cents an hour. I thanked him again when he extended the summer internship into Saturdays all year round so I could finish up college and stick with the excitement. It beat any job I had ever had. Still does.

I told my journalism teachers they were jerks if they made fun of my hometown paper, calling it the Pantywaist. I didn’t see their bylines in it.

I’ll never forget the first day of that internship. I wasn’t really sure about journalism until that day. My acting dreams dashed, I was groping for SOME kind of reasonable career. "I love this!" I shouted to my parents. "I can’t believe they are PAYING me to do this! I would do it for free!

One kind man named Gene Smedley gave me a chance that summer. It was all I needed. Exactly one year later, another kind man, Marx Gibson, gave me another chance at The Herald News and I’ve been here ever since.

I’ll never forget The Pantagraph and what it did for my career. I learned to write that summer. I thought I knew how, but they broke me down, built me up again and they helped me become the writer I needed to be.

Of course, some internship requests are ridiculous. Hey, I had a grandfather call just yesterday to see if his grandson could get an internship at The Herald News. Turned out the kid is a high school junior who’s never written a word for his school newspaper, hasn’t taken a single journalism class, isn’t on our prestigious Teen Board and didn’t have the incentive to make the call himself.

I made it pretty clear to Grandpa that it would never happen. You have to crawl before you walk, I told him. He agreed. Like some kids today, this kid apparently thinks times are easy and plum jobs are within his grasp. Oh well, perhaps his first paying job will be at Newsweek as the bureau chief and he’ll prove me wrong.

Many of us will find some resonance in what I’m saying about interns. We want them. We want the best, kids who won’t waste our time and get us great stories and kids we can talk about one day because we’re proud we helped them way back when. Maybe they’ll remember us when they’re Newsweek bureau chief.

So here’s the pitch. If you can do it this summer, if you can do it any way possible, hire an intern. Tell him to wear nice pants and not those stupid jeans and tell him to grow up and tell him how to write.

Because somebody did it for me. And we have to pass on these favors.

Jan Larsen, NINA president, is Features Editor of The Herald News. Her Our Town sections have won first place in circulation
category for the state Associated Press features competition for the past three years.

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