News21 Internship Program

Summer 2008: $7,500 News21 Internships Available to Kennedy School Students

Introduction
The Carnegie Corporation and Knight Foundation joined together to create the Carnegie-Knight Initiative on the Future of Journalism Education.  Carnegie & Knight selected five of the top universities in the country to collaborate on this project:  Harvard University, Northwestern University, Columbia University, the University of Southern California, and the University of California, Berkeley. Four of the universities have journalism schools, and since Harvard does not have a journalism school, the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy was asked to participate.  

An important part of the Carnegie-Knight Initiative is the creation of a student internship program.  The program has two parts: a course in the spring semester, and a summer internship.  (For more information on News21, reporting done by News21 students this past summer, and the Initiative, please see http://www.newsinitiative.org)

Summer 2008 Internship
The journalism schools at Northwestern, Columbia, USC and UC/Berkeley are designing innovative, hands-on journalism study and practice programs.  The Harvard students will physically join the internship team in the summer.  The student news products will be experimental in substance and style.  Both mainstream and emerging news organizations are the target outlets for the student reports.  The broad theme for 2008 will be The 2008 Election: What’s at Stake, with each school addressing a different aspect of the story. 

Spring 2008 Course
At each of the four universities a group of ten students will be selected from the university’s journalism program and a special course will be created to prepare them for the summer internship.  In addition, four Kennedy School students will be selected, through a competitive application and interview process, to participate.  The KSG students will participate in both the spring course (not for credit) and the summer internship.  Each Harvard student will join one of the four programs and will be expected to participate, as much as possible, in the preparatory course.  Harvard students are expected to complete the course reading requirements, stay on top of the material, participate online, and attend at least one class at the host university during the spring semester.

The Shorenstein Center is looking for four Kennedy School students with experience, interest or specific knowledge about the subject to be investigated.  Journalistic experience is not a prerequisite.  The professors leading each internship program are especially interested in the added value KSG students with a strong public policy background will bring to their investigations.  This is your chance to deepen your perspective on an issue that you care about, while getting valuable hands-on experience about how journalism really works.  A deeper understanding of how the press grapples with an issue will help you in your career, whether you go into journalism or not.  The universities, their spring courses and summer internship plans are as follows:

• Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University, New York City
There will be three spring classes of National Affairs Reporting, taught by Professors Richard Wald, John Martin and Tom Edsall.  The Harvard student will be assigned to one of those classes.  The classes will run from Tuesday, January 29 until Tuesday, May 13.  Adam Glenn will be the coordinator for the summer internship session, Tuesday, May 27 through Friday, August 1.

• Medill School of Journalism, Northwestern University, Evanston, IllinoisMedill will focus on the planet and the place of environmental issues in the 2008 elections. Medill interns will produce innovative and in-depth reporting linking the political, environmental and research realms. They will look at:  

1. Earth as a planet and biosystem viewed through the prism of contemporary politics and election issues. 

2. Global warming and the power and impotence of international, national and local politics confronting it.

3. Can technology and public policy save us?  

4. An uplifting look at the earth’s planetary systems, both from a research perspective and from the point of view of naturalists and artists.

5. Watchdog and analytical reporting on the stands of presidential and selected congressional candidates on environmental and energy issues, presented in a highly accessible interactive format.

The News 21 seminar will be taught by Medill Lecturer Abigail Foerstner and held during Northwestern’s spring quarter, March 31-June 9. The 10-week summer internship will run from June 23-Aug. 31. Stories will include all media platforms and multiple story formats including print, photography, infographics, slideshows, video and online.

• Graduate School of Journalism, University of California, Berkeley
UC Berkeley will offer an advanced reporting class that explores What's At Stake in both the congressional and presidential elections, with some special emphasis on the view from the West. The class will begin in January and will be taught by Senior Lecturer Susan Rasky and Lecturer John Curley (former deputy editor of The San Francisco Chronicle). Class work includes heavy background reading on history, campaigning and policy issues, fieldwork around the country, guest lectures and regular reporting assignments for the News21 website. The News 21 project challenges us to experiment with story form, narrative style and media platform. The summer workshop for Fellows will run from May 24 to early August, 2008.

• Annenberg School of Journalism, University of Southern California, Los Angeles
USC will focus on the Southwestern/Mountain states region as an emerging key swing voting bloc in national elections. The voting in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Washington and Nevada could easily determine the outcome of the presidential election. All of these states have been trending away from "Red" and toward "Purplish" and "Blue" because of a combination of demographic factors including increased urbanization and suburbanization, immigration and ethnic composition.  USC will focus not just on the presidential race but also on the battle for the congressional majority. Again, the Southwest/Mountain region will be key.  USC will concentrate on bottom-up grassroots campaign organizing strategies. This implies reporting the campaigns primarily from the ground-level, bottom-up instead of vice versa and would include exploring the role of social media, technological innovation in GOTV strategies, voter-targeting software, use of social media etc. The News21 seminar course will be taught spring semester on Tuesdays (9 a.m. – 11:40 a.m.) January 15th – April 29th by USC Lecturer Marc Cooper and Associate Director of Journalism Pat Dean.  The ten-week summer internship begins Monday, May 19th and ends Friday, July 25th.  The goal is to produce stories for all media platforms, including print, broadcast and online. 
 
Four students from the Kennedy School will be selected; each will be paid a stipend of $7,500 for the 10-week internship.  The schools will assist students in securing housing.

Student interns from all of the News21 programs will be required to participate in a meeting at Harvard over a weekend in May 2008.  

Please send application to nancy_palmer@harvard.edu by December 7, 2007.