johnkeefe.net

The newsroom intern. Bright, eager, ambitious. Ready to learn. Ready to help.

And, all too often, working for free. An intern's compensation, the story goes, is experience, a resume entry, nearness to greatness ... and maybe, just maybe, a byline.

That's all wonderful except for two things:

1) You can't buy groceries with a byline.
2) It's bad for journalism.

Let me grab a sticky. Okaaay ... a quick tally reveals that roughly half of our newsroom and talk show staff started out as interns, fill-ins or temporary workers.

That means that if we are working to cover one of the most diverse, complex, and interesting cities in the world, we would be remiss in our hiring -- and our journalism -- if we drew interns only from the pool of people with enough cash to work full time for free.

Instead, we have a robust and successful internship program and a staff with a variety of backgrounds and skills.

(And, um, we don't pay our interns.)

Crafting a Successful Internship Program

So here are some key concepts I've collected from different programs at different companies in different cities.* They're based mainly on newsroom and media work, but could apply to pretty much any workplace. Mix and match as you see fit; adjust for altitude as necessary.

Pay your interns.

If you can't pay your interns, design the internship so they can earn money elsewhere. This may mean having two or three interns working two or three days a week, and being open to nontraditional start and end times. This is what we do in our newsroom. Covering basic transportation and meal costs helps, too, even if just $10 per day.

Build a process. Write a notice that welcomes applications and explains your intern program. Set application deadlines, selection dates, start dates and end dates. Pull this together into something schools and institutions can post, either online or on a wall.

Seek outside the box. Not enough Spanish speakers in your organization? Post in communities were people are fluent. Lacking in general math talent? Contact the university math department for prospects. Need more local expertise? Try a community college instead of the world-renowned graduate program. If your intern program becomes a good feeder for your staff (even years later), expose it to people with skills you lack.

Prototype prototype prototype. Ever wonder whether an epidemiologist would be a good reporter? I do!

Be clear on the responsibilities. Have an established list of intern duties. If they can change during the term, set out a schedule. Be sure to leave room for individual skills and talent.

Be clear on the future. In most cases, an internship does not a job become. Don't assume interns know this. Actually tell them there is no guarantee of a job afterward. Oh, and don't use the chance of a job to inspire good work. If you need that carrot, you've picked the wrong intern.

Be clear on the term. Confirm the start and end dates at the outset. When the end date arrives, thank them for their work and help and say goodbye. Thirteen weeks is a good length, and often corresponds with academic work.

Set limits. There are some things you probably don't want your interns doing, including representing your operation as staff when they are not. Be clear about those situations. At our shop, interns are not used on air and don't interview major newsmakers.

Don't use interns as substitutes. Or, rather, do use them if they're qualified, but only if you actually hire them for the gig. If they're doing the work of a fill-in, pay them as a fill-in.

Have interns write a letter to the next intern. Keep these in a folder, real or virtual, and let interns read them when they first arrive. It'll give them another sense of your place, and their place in it.

Keep in touch. This is super important. When an intern finishes their term, be sure you have a current email address and phone number, and implore them to keep you posted on their whereabouts. Put their information in a file or database with details on their performance, strengths and interests. Check in with them occasionally. And when a job opens or project develops, call them up. I've hired interns years later, even after they've landed other jobs.

I welcome input, thoughts and experiences you've had as an intern or as an intern manager. Just post a comment below.

[Photo by FredArmitage (cc)]

*As with everything on this site, these are my thoughts alone. They may or may not reflect the opinions or practices of my employers, except where explicitly noted.

Consider, for a moment, the location of your nearest fire extinguisher.

And just how well did you use it last time?

Right. Chances are you're not prepared to skillfully put out a fire where you are sitting. At least you're not practiced.

But what if you had a non-emergency reason to use a fire extinguisher every once in a while? Maybe to clean your desk. Or a spill. (Nearest paper towel, anyone?) Using it occasionally would help insure that in case of a fire, you would both a) actually use it and b) use it well.

To better prepare our on-air and online operations for major breaking news, I've been promoting a point of view that says we shouldn't put our emergency tools, systems and skills "behind glass." Instead, we should incorporate those efforts into our everyday work. (I even believe we shouldn't put our energy into efforts that can't be used on a regular basis because in a crisis, we won't use them anyway.)

The best example of this is the daily production of our national morning program, The Takeaway with John Hockenberry and Adaora Udoji. The show's staff may just be the best breaking-news response team in public radio -- because they make the show in real-time every day, incorporating fresh news as they go. When the news happens to be really big, they're not just prepared ... they're already there.

A few other examples:

Map maker, map maker
In case of a civil emergency in New York, we'd want to quickly map shelters, closed roads, danger zones, escape routes. Even locate our staff. But we weren't prepared to whip together those kinds of maps in mere minutes. Now we're honing those skills by incorporating such work into everyday projects.

Information integration
When news hits the fan, information flies everywhere. Consolidating that data is key ... and also happens to be handy in everyday work. In the course of discussing a Mumbai-like terror attack in NYC, we discovered that our news-editing software can also check a listener email box. That's one less window to watch.

Nobody move
We designed our newsroom so that in a crisis nobody needs to change seats, which would move them away from familiar surroundings. As a byproduct, when something doesn't flow quite right during daily work, I try to make sure we address it now so we don't get caught off guard later.

Expected events as prototypes
In planning for election night, and now for the inauguration, we developed tools and techniques that will serve us again in a major unexpected event. We now know how to quickly rip up our station's home page to focus on a single topic. And in order to provide real-time election-night returns, we found new ways to clear the information path between the editors and the home page.

Share and share again
We share a statehouse reporter with stations across our region. So when former governor Eliot Spitzer imploded in a prostitution scandal, we didn't have to think twice about how to move information and audio between stations. We just used the FTP site and email list we use every day.

I've long been a fan of drills, and there are many more of those in our future. But by incorporating a little drill into our regular routine, we're better prepared for situations that are anything but.

[Photo by IamSAM. Some rights reserved.]

Prototype. Prototype. Prototype.

It really saved us. Monday we had everyone sit in place for a talk-through drill and discovered issues that would have been problematic on election night. The only thing that didn't work (once) was a wireless microphone setup in the newsroom which, ahem, we hadn't tried before.

One interesting tidbit: Virginia didn't prove to be the early key we thought it might be. In fact, with the earlier-than-expected call of Ohio for Obama, we knew he had won even before Virginia went his way.

And in a departure from many networks, we actually took our newsroom conversation to the air as early as 10:20 p.m.: Our host was honest about how we expected Obama to be called as President at 11 p.m., straight up, when the California, Washington and Oregon were declared his. As it then happened.

We're conducting a full internal critique Monday at Noon -- using the d.school's "I Wish, I Liked, How To" format.

Details to follow.

In our old building I had an office with a window onto the newsroom. Above the window, on the newsroom side, three TVs fed a steady stream of cable news to the producers and reporters.

Sitting at my desk, I knew instantly when something big was happening because people would stop what they were doing and gaze intently at the spot over my window. I sensed their alarm before even they could articulate, or know, what was going on.

So in our new newsroom, we intentionally positioned the newsroom TVs over the studio windows. The hope was that hosts working inside the studios would get that same early warning from the body language of producers in the newsroom.

Tonight I was routing cool information onto one of those monitors (more on that soon), and was gazing up to evaluate and adjust the display. David Garland, a music host who was on the air at the time, came out of the studio and into the newsroom.

"Is something going on?" he said. "You keep looking up at the TVs."

Our newsroom works. Which is news.

For three years, we tried to design, from scratch, the best radio and online news facility possible. We moved in this summer, and the recent debates and breaking financial news suggest we got pretty darn close.

The key, I believe, was our central point of view:

In a breaking news situation, nobody should need to move.

A simple concept, with several implications:

-- During the most confused, stressful, and destabilizing moments, everyone is grounded in the familiar -- logins, phone lists, audio systems, etc. This allows the staff to sort out the fast-moving story, not rarely-used protocols

-- Routine, hourly news is produced with the benefit of communications and production systems robust enough for breaking news

-- Training people in daily news production automatically prepares them to handle the unexpected

-- On-air producers work amid the reporters and editors, not in a separate control room, so they are closer to the facts

-- On-air hosts can look look left to see the producer (and the rest of the newsroom), and right to see the audio engineer

-- Those sightlines allow for peripheral visual cues, such as concern on a reporter's face, or people intensely watching TV monitors

-- The News Hub is a technical extension of the studio complex, and has the intercom system used to talk directly with hosts and engineers; conversely, the hosts can address the entire newsroom through the News Hub monitor speakers to request facts, pronouncers, even water.

-- A web producer seated at the News Hub is integrated into the editorial system and instantly privy to all plans and decisions

It's not perfect. We produce two news shows on two different frequencies in the morning, and have trouble monitoring both at the News Hub. And our beautiful sightlines become tough brightlines as the sun sets beyond our western windows.

But those panes do provide an unexpected feature for hosts and the entire newsroom: ambient warning of approaching storms.

Really interesting conference shaping up about how to reimagine newsrooms in the digital age. What works? What doesn't?

Everything from how to shape a newsroom, how to reconsider management of news folks, and even whether a physical newsroom is necessary.

The second half of the conference is being shaped by a make-your-own workshop wiki page. Should be cool to see what emerges.