When 21-year-old Laura Zaichkin received an e-mail about an internship she applied for this summer, she had a feeling it wasn't good news.
But the e-mail wasn't simply a rejection. It was a message that included these words: "... At this time it appears that we will not be hiring any interns for the summer of 2007."
Faced with tighter budgets, many newspapers are offering fewer internships this year than last. Interviews with 23 people including editors, recruiters, executives, news directors, career service directors and students indicate this year's applicants have entered one of the most challenging intern markets in recent memory.
The Sacramento (Calif.) Bee, the paper that sent the e-mail to Zaichkin, is just one of the newspapers making cuts. According to executive editor Rick Rodriguez, the paper has axed its usual six to eight summer interns as part of a hiring freeze that began in December.
"It's sad to see such a great paper lose their internship program," Zaichkin, a senior communication major at
Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., said. "That is a way for students like me to break into big newspapers like that."
Other papers cutting back on internships this year include the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, which will have nine interns this summer instead of 12 so it can save about $21,000, said newsroom recruiting manager Brenda Rotherham.
Donna Bains,
internship coordinator at
The Boston Globe, said the paper lost five internship slots this year because of budget cuts. That takes the paper's usual 16 interns down to 11. Four of the slots are for reporters and one is for a copy editor.
Randy Hagihara, senior editor for recruitment at the
Los Angeles Times, said the paper will have 10 interns again this summer, as it did in 2006, down from 14 in 2005 and 20 in 2004.
The News Tribune in Tacoma has suspended its internship program until editors and the publisher decide whether the paper can afford it, said executive editor David Zeeck.
The Oregonian used to fund about a dozen interns, paid more than $600 a week each, said George Rede, director of recruiting and training. Now the newspaper depends on stipends from outside organizations and offers internships for college credit and minimum wage.
Reggie Stuart, a corporate recruiting consultant for
The McClatchy Co., said he has seen a "slight but steady" decline in internships nationwide over the past five years. He previously recruited for Knight Ridder and has attended job fairs for 15 years.
"There's so much confusion in the business right now about the future of some companies -- who's going to own them -- that you're finding more and more people putting [internships] on hold or suspending them for a while," he said.
Zeeck, who is president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, said he and editors across the country are very concerned that papers are cutting their programs.
"This is something we talk about a lot," he said. "There's a squeeze at all levels."
What's Causing the Cuts
Scott Bosley, ASNE executive director, said newspapers typically cut internships when they need to save money. That's what happened during recessions, such as the economic downturn of 2001.
What makes this year unusual, said Howard Weaver, McClatchy vice president for news, is that the cuts reflect a changing industry.
In 2001, the reasons for budget constraints -- Sept. 11 and the dot-com bubble bursting, to name a couple -- could be pinpointed, he said. People knew, then, that the economy would eventually improve. Now, he said, it's going to take some time to figure out where newspapers are headed.
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"There aren't any, at the moment, hard and fast realities," Weaver said. "We're in a transition era. And we have to find out what that transition means."
Those changes are affecting metro papers the most, Weaver said. National advertising for such sectors as health care plans, cell phones and pharmaceuticals has dropped. Local advertising at smaller papers "tends to be holding up better," he said.
To deal with these losses, Weaver said, McClatchy has enforced a company-wide, indefinite, "dramatic slowdown in hiring." The company isn't filling anything except "essential" positions. And whether interns are essential is up to each newspaper to decide.
The News Tribune is grappling with that decision right now. Although the paper had a good year, it has to consider that many other McClatchy papers didn't, Zeeck said.
"The interns are just kind of held in the lurch until we get it figured out," he said.
The paper advertised a Dec. 1 deadline for interns and received more than 150 applications. Hunter George, internship co-coordinator and public life team leader at the paper, said he has several candidates he'd like the newspaper to hire. They would be paid $500 a week.
All that's left now, George said, is to wait while Zeeck and the publisher decide to keep or to cut.
"It's hard to keep all these people dangling," he said. "At some point, the good ones will start coming off the board."
Zaichkin, who was told by The Sacramento Bee that it had no internship to offer her, is also one of the finalists at the Tribune.
"I'm running into the same financial matters -- whether they're hiring freezes or the budgets are changing as we speak because of the climate of newspapers," she said.
So is Katie Stuhldreher, a senior at the University of Notre Dame majoring in political science and Russian with a minor in journalism. The Boston Globe sent her an e-mail saying she would have been a finalist for its Washington bureau internship this summer, but the paper had to cut that slot.
"It's always a little discouraging ... to be told you would've been a finalist if this had worked out," she said.
Stuhldreher also received a letter from the Los Angeles Times in fall 2006 that said its internship program was under review.
"I think each year I've found there's less and less," she said.
Stuhldreher has accepted an eight-week reporting internship at The Philadelphia Inquirer for next summer that pays about $700 a week.
This is the second year that Zaichkin has waited while the Tribune decides how many interns it can afford. She applied last year and made it as a finalist. Then the newspaper told her that it could only hire one of its usual two reporting interns and that it would be selecting another candidate. So Zaichkin accepted an unpaid internship at The Ithaca (N.Y.) Journal.
That was only after she had also been disappointed by cuts at The Oregonian.
"They were at all the job and internship fairs last year," Zaichkin said. "Then all of a sudden, they didn't have an internship program any more."
How One Newspaper Adapted
Last summer, The Oregonian couldn't afford its usual dozen interns, said George Rede, director of recruiting and training.
It had only three, all funded by outside organizations: The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Scripps Howard Foundation and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
This year, the paper has contacted even more outside organizations to bolster its summer program to eight reporting interns and up to four in other departments. Rede said those organizations include the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism at Arizona State University and DePauw University in Indiana. The paper is also again working with students from the Kaiser and Scripps Howard foundations.
Included in the eight are several academic internships. The Oregonian usually runs these internships exclusively in the fall and spring semesters for Oregon college students. Now, they're available to anyone in the country, year-round.
One of the biggest differences between the internships the paper used to offer and the academic internships is pay.
Interns in past summers made $600 a week. Karen Johnson, who completed an
Oregonian academic internship in mid-November after finishing a
Poynter summer fellowship program, said she made minimum wage: in Oregon, it was $7.50 an hour in 2006. That totaled about $850 a month after taxes.
Johnson's parents paid her rent, about $600 each month, so she could afford food, gas and other expenses.
Rede said this tight financial situation has already caused a few of this summer's candidates to turn down offers in favor of papers that pay more.
"Each one has said, 'I'd love to come to the Oregonian, but my financial situation doesn't allow me to,' " he said.
That put the paper at a competitive disadvantage, Rede said, and changed the makeup of this year's interns.
"On the whole, they're a little bit less experienced than students we'd normally take," Rede said. They are people who "might otherwise be shut out of an opportunity if we were fully funded."
Some Interns Wanted More Than Others
Not all interns are facing the same cuts. Richard Holden, executive director for the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund, said he hasn't had trouble placing the program's editing interns this year.
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"That's always going to be in demand," he said. "Reporting interns are relatively easy to find. Copy editing interns are not."
This year the fund secured money from Yahoo to revive its online editing internships. The fund had offered the internships from 1996 to 2001, but shelved them when money got tight.
Now online editing is more important than ever, Holden said. "Obviously the Web has taken a much greater role in daily operations," he said.
Of the fund's 105 interns this summer, 12 are signed up for online editing.
Students and educators say they're noticing the demand for online and multimedia. And they're trying to adjust.
The Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University has shifted its focus to teach reporting across multiple platforms, said career services director Loraine Hasebe.
"The audiences are changing," Hasebe said. "The young audience receives their news in different formats."
Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism is discussing how to get students ready for cross-platform journalism without neglecting reporting fundamentals, said Ernest Sotomayor, director of career services.
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After seeing "hundreds and hundreds" of job cuts at newspapers for the past two years, Sotomayor said, he's encouraging students to get creative. Consider webzines, niche publications, community weeklies, he tells students.
"Employment at newspapers is not going [anywhere]," Sotomayor said. "And there is nothing to indicate to me that it's going to ever reverse."
Students are busy refocusing as well. Zaichkin, who has a print journalism emphasis, said she's marketing herself as a "communicator" this year instead of a print journalist as she's done in the past. She's building her multimedia experience and spent the last year immersed in online journalism as a new media intern at the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
"Having that experience that veteran reporters don't have is a major asset," Zaichkin said."I've definitely heard that reflected in the feedback I've gotten."
Zaichkin doesn't receive pay for the
Post-Intelligencer internship, but she does receive four college credits for it each semester through a class called Media Lab. She calls the Media Lab an "experimental" course that began this fall. It gives students time to interview for internships, talk about internship-searching and interview strategies, and learn multimedia skills.
"I think this [class] is just a response to the climate of newsrooms and newspapers, where it's hard to get an internship and you need experience to get one," Zaichkin said.
One of the class's projects is producing video and audio for
The News Tribune's Web site. George said two of his internship finalists, including Zaichkin, are involved in the Media Lab. It is their multimedia skills, he said, that made them standouts.
More Students Working for Less
Detroit Free Press recruiting and development editor
Joe Grimm, who also writes Poynter's
Ask the Recruiter column, said he's noticed a paradox with the recent cuts. At a time when it's "harder than ever to hire or place good people," enrollment seems to be up at communications programs, he wrote in an e-mail.
"This seems to me to be a tough time for big media companies," he said, "but a time of rapid growth for journalism."
The majority of those students filling up j-schools know they need experience to get a job. Many are willing to work a summer without pay for it, which has become a standard for broadcast internships.
Reggie Stuart, the McClatchy corporate recruiting consultant, has seen it over and over at the job fairs he attends.
"You would think people are at the ticket box for their favorite artist" for television stations' booths, he said. "You'd think they're at church for the newspaper line."
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Because stations usually don't pay interns, opportunities haven't decreased, said
Candy Altman, vice president of news at Hearst-Argyle Television and a member of Poynter's National Advisory Board.
Any budgetary constraint "really hasn't had any impact at all in broadcast," she said.
Student interest stayed the same at Time Warner's 24-hour News 8 in Austin, Texas, four years ago, when it axed its for-pay internship program because of budget cuts, news director Kevin Benz said.
The station has since expanded, he said, but hasn't brought back the pay.
"Most kids in communications understand," Benz said. "It's the internships and the contacts ... at those stations that get you jobs."
Stuart said he'll never understand not paying students for their work. He said McClatchy offers only paid internships.
"I don't understand what standards schools are telling people," he said. "Students need money to pay tuition, money to pay rent, money to buy clothes, pay for a car, money to pay off student loans to graduate."
Rede acknowledges that The Oregonian has significantly decreased its pay. But he said the paper stops there.
"We would never ask someone to work for free," he said. "That's our threshold."
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Yet Rede said he still worries he may be excluding students who can't afford it and is doing his best to prevent that.
Johnson, who just completed an academic internship at The Oregonian, said Rede helped her find a roommate who was another young reporter at the paper.
"When it came to my guidance and mentorship, they were great about that," she said. "They're aware of the constraints of the program."
Although there are students like Johnson who can make it work, Zeeck said he worries about the ones who can't.
He wonders: Are we excluding low-income students by relying more and more on unpaid and low-pay internships? Is that disproportionately affecting students who are members of minority groups?
ASNE data on the number of internships held by journalists who are members of minority groups shows a slight drop in 2006 from the year before -- but not to a number lower than other totals in recent years.
Johnson, who also worked for ASNE Reporter, the organization's annual convention newsletter, reported in April 2006 that editors and leaders of minority journalists' organizations were concerned about newsrooms cutting back on minority internship programs. Newsrooms making cuts at the time included The Seattle Times and The Oregonian.
There are barely enough minorities in newsrooms now, Zeeck said. How are you supposed to increase their presence when you're cutting programs or offering no pay?
"I'm concerned they don't have the learning opportunities and experience opportunities to get into the business," he said. "We want it to be an industry from all walks of life."
