Today is deadline day for Free Press internship applications.

Here is an e-mail exchange I had with a harried student who was rushing to make the deadline earlier this week.

Q: I am in my fourth year of the journalism program at Toronto's Ryerson University. I was wondering whether I can apply for the summer internship program at Detroit Free Press via e-mail instead of snail mail?

A: You may, if you don't send huge image files like PDF's.

Q: I only have PDFs; Is 1.52MB too big?

A: That would be three times larger than any other thing in my mailbox and is about the size of 500 e-mails like the one you just sent. If everyone did this at internship application time I would be, of course, buried alive.

Why don’t you send by regular mail?

(The next day, I received someone else's e-mailed application, with a cover letter dated nine days previously. It was just 136KB -- but prints at 21 pages.)