Making the most of your summer internship

AAJA-LA’s annual intern mixer in June featured advice from a news executive, an editor, a reporter and newsletter writer

By Julie Patel

[ngg src=”galleries” ids=”71″ display=”basic_imagebrowser”]Be persistent, take the initiative, get the details right and keep working hard to improve. 

This was some of the advice provided at AAJA-LA’s first in-person event in more than one year. Before the main program started, about 30 attendees caught up over drinks and hors d’oeuvres — sushi, sliders, edamame and fresh fruit in the courtyard of the recently constructed Terasaki Budokan, a nonprofit multipurpose sports and activities center in Little Tokyo. AAJA-LA President Teresa Watanabe opened the event with welcoming remarks and attendees met the chapter’s new summer interns: Annakai Hayakawa Geshlider, who is at the Pasadena Star News, and Camryn Pak, who is at the Orange County Register.

Geshlider has covered community issues for The Rafu Shimpo and The Colton Courier. She is also managing editor for Kweli, an arts and literary journal. Pak, who is from Fullerton and attends Stanford University, is majoring in American Studies with an emphasis in Inequality, Media and the Law and is a news managing editor for The Stanford Daily. She has also hosted podcasts and written articles for GovSight, a non-profit civic information startup.

Panelists included Tom Bray, senior editor for Southern California News Group’s Los Angeles County properties; Cindy Chang, an editor at the Los Angeles Times and a former AAJA-LA board member; Matthew Ormseth, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times; and Jill Cowan, the New York Times’ California Today correspondent. Their advice for young journalists and those doing internships includes:

Dissect and learn from the advice

and edits you receive. Bray said to study those edits closely to maximize how much you learn from an internship or early career job. Chang said it’s frustrating for editors when a reporter repeats the same mistake in multiple stories; that means they didn’t learn from previous story edits.

Ask for help if you don’t understand something or you want to make sure you’re doing what is assigned. Cindy Chang said she can tell that an L.A. Times intern this summer, Chris Kuo, is eager to learn because he often has questions about what’s required. 

Find mentors and keep in touch with them. Ormseth’s mentor during his AAJA-LA/O.C. Register internship was Matt Stevens, an L.A. Times reporter who is now at the New York Times. Ormseth kept in touch with Stevens, who encouraged the young journalists to apply for a Metpro position at the L.A. Times and put in a good word for him.

Do your research when handed a beat you don’t know much about. What can help if you’re feeling intimidated or out of your comfort zone is reading stories about the issue or place in the newsroom’s archives, meet the key players and start assembling a list of story ideas.

Be persistent both in applying for jobs and in your reporting. Some people who got local internships only got them after applying multiple times. Similarly, when you’re looking for sources, get advice from your editors and keep making calls and reaching out to local groups for help.

Be open to unconventional newsroom jobs such as a web producer, copy editor or an audience engagement specialist.

The panelists advised attendees to be open to tackling new challenges. For instance, each speaker has held a variety of positions or covered different beats, and taken jobs outside of Los Angeles before landing here.

Bray started his career covering high school sports and has worked in newsrooms as a reporter, copy editor, section editor and page designer. Before joining SCNG, he was managing editor at The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, the News-Leader in Springfield, Missouri, the Sun in San Bernardino and the Times-Delta in Visalia.

Chang, an assistant city editor for the L.A. Times’ Metro section. joined the paper in 2012 and has covered immigration, ethnic communities, the L.A. County sheriff’s b

eat and LAPD. She previously worked at the New Orleans Times-Picayune and began her journalism career at the Pasadena Star-News.

Ormseth previously covered city news and state politics at the Hartford Courant.

Before joining the New York Times, Cowan covered the Texas economy for The Dallas Morning News; reported on sexual harassment at the Tennessee statehouse for The Tennessean; and wrote about a range of subjects for The Los Angeles Times and its community newspapers and for The Bakersfield Californian.

Past and present AAJA-LA board members also chimed in with tips, including L.A. Times weekend editor Ashley Dunn; L.A. Times aerospace and supply chains reporter Samantha Masunaga; O.C. Register cops and courts reporter Josh Cain; KNTV television news reporter Jeremy Chen; and Gita Amar, senior vice president of GCI Health.