Interns -- Where's the Line?

Once again... thank you Twitter. I found this article on MSNBC about summer interns. It got me thinking about my summer intern experience and the experience I had at the DNC. This talked about paid internships becoming unpaid internships because of the economy. They spoke mostly of PR and marketing firms, but as I started thinking... T.V. internships are NEVER paid.

I think that is one of the great things about our industry. It really separates the hard workers versus the people just working. I tried to take advantage of every opportunity when I interned in Detroit, and I learned the basics of television journalism, so when I had my first job at KOMU I was already ahead of the curve. I understood iNews, I understood basic editing techniques, I had already worked on a news website so the transition was simple and straightforward.

It's easy to want a paid internship, but can you get more out of an unpaid one? I think yes. I think the people who are willing to work unpaid, week, after week, are more likely to work hard and find the will to learn. I walked into the station everyday wanting to do more, learn more and understand more. And I did that everyday. Working alongside real news web professionals gave me such an insight to the ability of the communication through the web.

Besides... no one enters the journalism industry to make money, so why not start learning the lifestyle as an intern?

In addition, PR and marketing firms (as suggested by the article) are now looking at people willing to work for free. Once these businesses see it can get the same caliber, or better caliber interns for FREE, it'll never pay interns again. Extra money will get absorbed by another budget to make the business better. It's the same with cutbacks in the television industry. We continue to lay-off and cut back, and when the economy does turn around, we'll have already adapted with the lack of reporter, producer or production staffer. Then the extra money can be used in different ways.

*UPDATE*
Here's an old email I found to my parents over a similar article about unpaid interns. Think there are some good points from a Mizzou Journalism School perspective.

Anyway, since I have had the glamorous unpaid internship, the experience I got and connections I made was payment enough. Now, I got a lot out of my internship, probably more than most. I also knew that it didn't matter if I was getting paid or not, the fact that I'll have that on my resume will look golden.

Personally, and I'd think you'd agree here, the only thing I didn't like about my internship was that we essentially had to pay for it because I was required to get class credit. A credit hour that won't even count towards graduation might I add. That is the only flaw in the unpaid internship from my standpoint. I was also fortunate because we live in a big city and you guys were able to financially support me and I don't have to worry about making money for tuition so I got the experience at a big station without having to sacrifice making money. That could be an additional downside if that was something people needed to take into consideration.

Here is another reason why Mizzou's journalism program is steller. Although I am foregoing and internship this summer, I am actually working at a news station which is much better because I will have that actual work experience. How many interns get to anchor shows at big stations? None. How many will produce the show? None. How many will be able to leave school with a GOOD resume tape that has all the elements necessary (montage of best standups, LIVE shots, anchor spots, weather walls and onsets; best packages; etc.) to get a job? None. Internships don't give you those, that you just get by working and practicing your craft.

In broadcast, internships are actually more valuable to those who intern in smaller markets because they can actually do more work because there are no union contracts. At WJBK I would never have been allowed to even touch the prompter whereas here I run it.

Howard County Fire

I love the adrenaline rush of spot news. After starting my day at KOMU anchoring and writing some Today Show cutins at 6:15 and instead of getting in my mid-morning nap because of my over-achieving (love it) producing student, I opted to leave the station at 7 after finding a sub for the ten. Went out to dinner and when I was leaving got a call from a fellow reporter, "What is the fire in Howard County? I can see from my house!"

Sure enough I look up in the sky and you can see an orange glow... clear as day... right along the horizon. Immediately, Justin Redeker and I went off to the fire. I called the newsroom to let them know I was going and to see what they needed.

When we finally got on scene, we found Kyle Seever. Soon after we arrived, Ryan Takeo and Jill Glavan came in the live truck. I've worked with Jill before on the spot news -- you might remember the tornado in Kirskville with our obsessive twittering and tornado touchdown map -- so I knew this was going to be awesome.

Immediately we started setting up the live shot. Ryan and Jill assesed the scene, got the info ready for the hit. I was the direct link to the booth -- once we got the shot set, we called in right away to find out our hit. We were slightly irritating the state troopers because we refused to set the truck up in the first place they told us due to power lines, we were trying to get what we could hit, before and if they made us move after we compromised with us on a place to set the truck.

The Howard County Fireman who was our liasion to their command post was GREAT to work with. He was really open about information and not dancing around questions. If he didn't know he just said it, got us connected to the command center, just was one of the better officials I've worked with.

I've only field produced one time before... it was for an HFR -- I didn't like it as much. This, I LOVED. I loved helping get our station's information ready for air. I wanted to help and be that extra person to get the extra information.

Here's our coverage from KOMU.com -- check out the web extras!

Through Free Media... We WON Coverage

On May 13, tornadoes hit northern Missouri in Adair and Sullivan counties, including the city of Kirksville. I was covering Jennifer Kovaleski's shift that night, and was in full in summer mode, getting ready to check out for the weekend before summer school started Sunday night at 11 p.m. to start producing the morning show. About 30 minutes into my shift, we get a call about the tornadoes in Kirskville and if we were covering them. We typically cover large weather disasters across the state and sent a reporter and photographer to the scene.

Immediately we started twittering about the tornado and that we would have more at 10. People started tweeting us back and our reporter, Jessica Miller, got requests from FOX 4 in Kansas City, the Weather Channel, the AP, along with other stations across the state, to do phone interviews.

One of the things Jill Glavan and I started to do was build a uMapper map to illustrate where these tornadoes were touching down. At first we just highlighted where possible tornadoes had touched down, but once we checked the weather wire, we were able to update our map with information from the National Weather Service and where its trained spotters had seen tornadoes.

By searching the location on uMapper, we were able to pinpoint a location, then add a text balloon which described and distributed our information. The nice thing about uMapper is once we embeded the map into our website, every update we made to the map on uMapper (when we added information) it updated the map that was embedded automatically.

To view our tornado touchdown map, please click here.

What does the future hold?

With the majority of my broadcast friends from KOMU graduating and struggling to find jobs, it has me thinking, "One year from now, what's going to happen? Where will the industry be?"

I am amazed everyday with the resilience of local news and how we continue to try and be better than the competition, try and have our content posted to the web first and find ways to be more transparent and available to our viewers... but that's now, what's going to be the new thing a year from now? I think those easy, vauge questions will be around for a long time, but if you make those questions specific... it's a whole different ballgame.

Take for instance incorporating twitter and having reporters tweet about their stories during the day -- teasing them to attract viewers. That's a recent development in the past 6 months or so, but something ND's all over the country are pushing their reporters to do. But what happens after the twitter phase is over? Nielson released a report saying 60 percent of new twitter users eventually stop using the website after about a month. Are reporters suspectible to the same fate? Will twitter be the same in a year? Two years? Ten years? What will be the new twitter?

And as we continue to converge different mediums onto the web, what happens to the broadcast version of our story? If we've twittered and already written a small story for the web, how do we get our viewers to actually WATCH the story, which maybe burried in an A-block some where? I think these days we continue to emphasize web based publication to attract viewers, but what if by doing this we give them a reason not to watch?

I realize this post is vauge, but with my recent increase in twitter posts and some discussions in my Advanced Internet Class, it has me thinking more and more about the future of journalism.

Flashing Graphics

Talk about learning. I had an insane learning curve on Adobe Flash. I couldn't really remember how to make the interactive graphics when our professor Jen Reeves showed us earlier in the semester. Thankfully, some of my classmates were able to help me figure it out.

It's a completely repetitive process, so eventually I was able to get it together. I would just repeat the steps over and over out-loud... the newsroom must of thought I was crazy because I was just sitting at dotcom talking to myself, and every so often would holler or shreak because I would figure something out or make a mistake. I might add this was after the ten, so the few people in the newsroom were probably just as sleep deprived as me.

Finally, after about an hour of tinkering, I finally had a product, but I didn't like it. It was a standard flash rollover graphic and popped up boxes. It worked... it did the job... but it was BORING. So then for another hour and a half, I tinkered with a picture element that I added to the boxes. Eventually, I liked what I had, although I will say, I came back the next day and continued to tinker with it because I had some personal control issues with where the elements popped up.

Now I don't want to give away my surprise picture element, so go look at it! Visit KOMU.com by clicking here. It gives you a direct link to the graphic.