My experience as a high school journalist wasn’t entirely unique — I had classmates — but it was unusual.
Our adviser had been a reporter with the The Boston Globe, and his agreement with the principal was that the principal would not limit or restrict our coverage. He just wanted a copy of the paper delivered every two weeks.
We published stories on teenage drug use, academic honesty, sexuality and suicide. We reported how the soccer team was unscored-upon for the entire season until it lost, 1-0, in the state final (twice.) We quoted, accurately, the principal calling a couple of students “stupid,” and wrote nuanced opinions of the school musicals. In short, we did journalism.
This comes to mind because we have a high school intern in the newsroom until June. Ellie Ensign of Homer will spend between an hour and a lifetime with us each day. We’ve already given her a tour of the place and a description of how we work, and she’ll start by sitting with journalists at each major step in producing the newspaper: reporting, line editing and copy editing. We’ll have her sit in on an editorial board meeting to see how we craft opinions.
Eventually, I want her to move up to writing stories, producing pages, taking photos and all that other stuff — maybe even writing an opinion-page column on an issue of her choice. But there’s a long way to go before she gets there.
I don’t know much about Ellie; I may be the town’s biggest busybody, but I avoid asking too many personal questions. She’s a senior at Homer High School, ranked pretty high in her class. She’s applied to a number of schools in New York and the Northeast with good journalism programs. She has a twin, takes part in track and field, and her parents are both younger than me (which is increasingly common.)
She grew interested in journalism when as she spoke with her mother about how to craft a profession and a life and her mother noted she frequently points out interesting things in the news (a good start.)
The conundrum is what to teach. I’ve mentored dozens of interns, but most of them were college journalism majors, people who had already written a few dozen or maybe a hundred stories, or were editors or photographers. They had spent hundreds of hours training before they entered a professional newsroom. Ellie hadn’t stepped into any newsroom until the first hour of her internship, and the hundred-or-so hours we’ll have her will be her first in the industry.
For a college graduate with some exposure to news media, training can take 4,000 hours over the course of a couple of years, more if they lack that college experience. Think of it as a medical residency, and training people at that point in their careers has been the bread and butter of mine.
So the program isn’t simply about imparting skills: interview and research techniques, analytical techniques, storytelling and design techniques and how to present information to the public. We’re starting right at the beginning — how to think.
Thinking like a journalist is much like thinking like a scientist: observe, hypothesize, test, analyze, re-observe. Fact, logic and reason. Push opinions and personal values to the side and consider the data. Keep an open mind. If one must have opinions, hold them lightly and change them with each new fact. Then keep your mouth shut about your opinions.
Along the way, we’ll touch on ethics, and we’ll introduce Ellie to the constitutional principles that guide the way we think and work, and protect journalists’ ability to hold public entities (and even private ones) accountable for their actions.
That’s a lot. I have a degree and 40 years of experience, too much to impart in just a hundred hours. We have seven other journalists with between a year and 45 years of experience who can do the same.
So our goal is simply to introduce Ellie to the life we lead. The goals I set as part of the internship were concrete: a familiarity with how newspapers are published; an awareness of how journalists work; and an opportunity to begin building the skill sets.
The real goal, which only time can assess, is to reinforce our critical-thinking skills. If she has them, they’ll be an asset, regardless of whether she ever becomes a journalist.
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Todd R. McAdam is managing editor of the Cortland Standard. He can be reached at tmcadam@cortlandstandard.com.
