“Training the next generation of reporters is not just a mandate, it’s an honor”
Helping educate young reporters and giving them some practical experience in their chosen field has long been one of our core missions at the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism—right up there with producing investigative journalism and advocating for our profession in the halls of power. It’s something we are really passionate about. Despite the fact that there are fewer and fewer reporting jobs in the US with each passing year.
Our democracy depends on good journalism. And there are still people like us who are willing to step up … sacrificing better-paying career tracks for the satisfaction of helping provide quality news covering issues of the day in the public interest. Getting our audience information they can use to make rational decisions on matters affecting their daily lives. Being “tribunes of the people” and “voices of the voiceless.” So it’s absolutely critical that we go the extra mile to pass the torch to journalism students dedicated enough to want to pursue this important calling.
This attitude and the solid articles we’ve produced for almost 10 years go part of the way toward explaining why an organization as small as BINJ—with just three full-time staff, one quarter-timer, and a pool of a dozen freelancers—has attracted 12-19 interns in each of three cohorts every year. Which works out to 25-40 interns annually, allowing for the fact that about a fourth of each cohort sticks around for the next trimester because they are really committed to what we’re doing.
But, for real, why do we get so many interns? Well, where else are they going to go as news outlets continue downsizing and too often collapsing nationwide? There are about a dozen different structural reasons for this, which my BINJ colleagues and I have written about repeatedly since our inception. Among other things, there aren’t as many internship programs for young journalists as there used to be in Massachusetts or basically anywhere else. And there are no other internship programs like ours that treat their interns as “equals with less experience” and give them the freedom to write stories they really want to write at their own pace—when they can squeeze it in between school and the jobs virtually all of them have to work to be able to afford it.
And who are these interns? Well, meet three from our fall cohort:
- Madison Lucchesi is a journalism student at Emerson College with a minor in history. She enjoys business, travel, and memoir writing, to name a few. From Revere, Mass., she considers herself an unofficial Greater Boston tour guide.
- Abigail Meyers is a junior journalism and political science major at Simmons University, passionate about all things public policy, arts, entertainment, and culture. She enjoys the excitement and urgency of breaking news and investigative reporting.
- Emma Siebold is a second-year journalism student at Emerson College. She enjoys writing about health & wellness, and politics. Emma is also an executive producer for WEBN-TV Boston and contributes to the opinion and news sections of the Berkeley Beacon, Emerson’s student-run newspaper.
All our interns are strong students, ace reporters, and very hard workers. As recently as a decade ago, they would all have been snapped up after graduation by professional news organizations around the region, nation, and even the world. Today, it’s not like that. There are no guarantees that any of them will get jobs in journalism, perhaps having to settle for “journalism adjacent” gigs like marketing. Such a waste of talent in an era where truth-telling is desperately needed.
Yet, to their credit, knowing that, they continue coming to us in hopes of honing their craft and upping their game. For the hundred bucks a story we’re currently able to pay them. And we want to keep BINJ going in no small part to continue to give them a place to ply their trade-to-be in a convivial environment while learning hard truths about the very tough situation that trade is in. The better to figure out how to surmount the many obstacles in their path and getting, or creating (as we have done at BINJ), the reporting jobs they really deserve.
So, I’m asking BINJ supporters to dig extra deep this week, as we enter the last days of our annual year-end fundraiser, and donate to support our organization in general, yes, but our internship program in particular. If we do even a bit better than usual this holiday season, we’ll raise our intern rate up to our lowest professional rate: $150 per short feature article (700-1200 words). Which, sadly, is better than some major news outlets around town pay their freelance pros for similar work.
On a happy note, every dollar you donate will be matched three times–since the Barr Foundation just offered to match the next $2,000 (up to $1,000 from each individual donor) we raise on top of the up to $15,000 already getting matched by NewsMatch (same terms) and the $50,000 in a local challenge match we got from an anonymous donor (no individual limit on that one).
Training the next generation of reporters is not just our mandate. It’s an honor. Thanks in advance for anything you can do to help us build the future of independent journalism.
