Good Internship Opportunity in Jacksonville

2006 Summer Internship Program

The Florida Times-Union is soliciting applications from college students for its annual summer intern program. Internships may be offered in one or more of the following areas: copy editing/design, graphics, photography, reporting.

Applications for internships must be received by December 1, 2005. Interns who are selected will be notified on or before Jan. 1, 2006.

The intern program extends through the summer months, and exact dates of employment will be negotiated. Interns may expect to be in the program for about 12 weeks.

The salary scale is as follows:

• Completion of first year of college - $350 weekly.
• Completion of second year of college - $380 weekly.
• Completion of third year of college - $410 weekly.
• Completion of fourth year of college - $420 weekly.
• Completion of graduate school - $440 weekly.

Interns will draw a variety of assignments. Meetings will be held with various editors to discuss problems and progress. Every effort will be made to match summer work assignments with the interests of the interns selected to work on the staff of the Times-Union. Preference will be given to Individuals who have held summer internships with daily newspapers in the past and individuals proven interested in a career in print journalism.

Applications must be made in writing and should include grade point average, previous journalism experience and at least two references, one from within the academic community. Clips of past work should be included with application. It is not necessary for applicants to be majoring in journalism, but that is desirable. Interns must have their own vehicles.

We are a drug free workplace.

Send applications to:
Cindy Holifield
Newsroom Resources Coordinator
cindy.holifield@jacksonville.com

Mail:
Florida Times-Union
PO Box 1949
Jacksonville, FL 32231

Or for delivery requiring a street address:
Florida Times-Union
One Riverside Avenue
Jacksonville, FL 32202

New York Times merging newsrooms

I've also posted this on Common Sense Journalism, but I'm reposting it here for the consideration of students and others who may visit this blog:

One of the more significant items to drop into Jim Romenesko's inbox yesterday was the memo from Bill Keller and Martin Nisenholtz that the New York Times is merging its online and print newsrooms.

It seemed to me there were two very significant quotes:

The reporting and editing staff at the original newsroom is much more at ease with the Web, more eager to embrace it both as an opportunity for invention and an alternative way to reach our demanding audience.

and

The change embodied in this integration will be gradual but important. For quite a few years now, we've sworn allegiance to the modern-sounding doctrine of "platform neutrality" -- meaning we care only about our journalism, not about whether we transmit it to our audience on paper or via streams of electrons. But in practice most of us have been writing and editing newspaper articles, or taking pictures or making charts and graphs for the newspaper, while a few of us have been taking this work and adapting it for the Web.

By integrating the newsrooms we plan to diminish and eventually eliminate the difference between newspaper journalists and Web journalists -- to reorganize our structures and our minds to make Web journalism, in forms that are both familiar and yet-to-be-invented, as natural to us as writing and editing, and to do all of this without losing the essential qualities that make us The Times. Our readers are moving, and so are we.

Read that last one carefully. The debate still exists in some quarters as to whether journalists really need cross-media training. End of debate. If you want to work for the one of the premier news organizations, as Keller and Nisenholtz put it, you'd better start rorganizing your mind.

Intern's woes

A college student's column in a Massachusetts paper last week lamenting how she thought she was a shoo-in for an internship at Spin magazine -- only to be rejected -- has prompted some sharp responses on Romenesko's letters page.

My own take on this: She was just a little presumptuous to begin with. What do our bloggers think?

(On another matter: Thanks for the kind note, Ernie, but you've been a big part of this, too. Let's say we do it again next year and try to get the posts up.)

Thanks, Doug

Doug:

On behalf of all us bloggers who you worked tirelessly to shape into a new media community, I'd like to thank you for your energy and foresight. The leadership you've provided by creating and nurturing A J-School Year, and in innumerable ways for the J-School in general, have garnered major "props," as the kids say, for the students and the program. Thanks for inviting me along for the ride, pal. More to come?

Cheers,

Ernie

The Best of the Best

Bloggers:

The 2005 Pulitzer Prize winners have been announced: http://www.pulitzer.org/2005/2005.html. I would urge you to take a minute to read the citations for the winners and the finalists: note the newspapers that are represented (not just the elite press, mind you), the kinds of stories these journalists wrote and what the judges said about their work. You might also track down some of these pieces, take a look at the incredible service these serious journalists (the best of the best) have provided for their readers. I'm sure you'll find the work of the Pultizer winners not only instructive but inspirational.

Cheers,

Professor Wiggins

At least I didn't cry...

I thought the biggest feat for today would be getting through all the job fair interviews at the J-school; I was so wrong.

I was on my way to my first interview with The State, when one of the SJMC staff stopped me and said my story was in The Gamecock. I was suprised because the last story I submitted to the News editor wasn't even used. And when I looked, it was the last story I submitted.

It ran two days late and with a glaring error.

I wrote about I-Comm week at the J-school. Not the biggest breaking story ever, but one that mattered to me because this school matters to me and I knew how much time the professors put into the week-long event.

When I saw the error, I was horrified. The story listed an event that took place last year. How can people show up for an event that isn't even taking place? I was really angry, and the mistake has followed me all day.

Even Dean Bierbaurer has stopped me....and it is never good for a Dean to stop you and know your name because of an error.

I know the error was not part of my original story and it was inserted after the fact and out of my control. It just really hurts that my name ran beside a story that didn't even have basic facts correct.

In one interview, the editor asked me what was the biggest mistake I had ever made...and I just handed him the paper from today. It wasn't my mistake, but it did have my name beside of it. I can only laugh about it, and usually I cry when I get really upset. So I didn't cry, I learned that my writing will not always be my writing..even with my byline and that this is just a learning experience. It could be worse, I could have made the error on my own.

Convergence in Lawrence, KS

Bloggers,

National Public Radio broadcast on Morning Edition today (Wednesday, April 13) a report on the emergence of convergence in Lawrence, KS. Additional reports are scheduled for this week. Here's the NPR link: www.npr.org. Click on Morning Edition.

Cheers,

Professor Wiggins

Ethics in a blog world

There is an interesting post on the Mediacenter blog, Morph, in which Taran Rampersad puts a new twist on the ethics framework in which we operate.

Rampersad's take, briefly, is that our current media ethics framework evolved because media until now was largely a one-way relationship, and so society had a need to control the media and ensure its accuracy. But now, Rampersad says, that is shifting with the ever-easier ability to interact, criticize and fact-check journalism. Now, Rampersad writes, the onus is on us, society, to play an active role in shaping those ethics: "If you believe something is unethical, unleash your keyboard and say so. If you think something has to be written, write it. The time for blaming the traditional media for slanting the news is at an end. It's society's responsibility to challenge this new molecular media -- and this requires ethics, responsiblilty and accountability on the part of the reader more so than ever before."

I'd be interested in the reactions of those here at J-School Year to that. Are we, the readers up to the task? Is Rampersad being too nirvana -- does such criticism count if it is on a backwater blog somewhere read by three people and not easily discovered? Does his suggestion eveolve to be a cop-out by the media that says, well, someone else will catch it if anything's wrong?

Weigh in, please.