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Meet the interns: 'A command of the language is always going to be important'
Published: 7/9/2012 3:08 PM
Last Modified: 7/9/2012 3:08 PM

One of the greatest things about summer is what you learn from the interns.

Back when I was an intern, we didn't have a lot of knowledge to share when we sat down with editors. They didn't ask us many questions. Now, thanks to an ever-changing world of media, as an editor I can't wait to find out what they know. As she always does, Managing Editor Susan Ellerbach picked some great ones this year.

Here's what I found out.

News intern Molly Bullock doesn't watch TV. When news broke that Osama bin Ladin had been killed, she found out after someone texted her. She quickly turned to her trusted news source: Facebook.

"I have a lot of well-informed friends and they give a lot of thought to what they put on Facebook," she told me. "They are responsible to do that."

At the University of Missouri, where she is in graduate school, she reads the New York Times in print each day. Not just because it's free to students and easily available in bins inside the school's building, but because she cares about what happens across the globe, not just in her own backyard. She got a sense of the world when she worked in China covering a tennis tournament and blogged about her time in Slovenia, where she visited while she attended Oklahoma State University for her undergraduate degree.

While a perception exists about the future business of informing Americans, Molly doesn't share it.

"I think newspapers will survive. They must," she said. "People like news. A command of the language is always going to be important."

Bullock said she is the most proud of a story she did on the Joplin tornado. It was a chance for her to tell a story through multimedia, something the school stresses to students no matter what form of journalism they study.

"Multimedia was the best way to tell this story," she said.

Before he came to Syracuse University, Sports intern Mark Cooper understood that the broadcasting school was well known thanks to its long list of famous alums. What he didn't know was that the sense of urgency that has lived in TV stations for decades would infiltrate every medium thanks to the Internet. "We spend a lot of time in the classroom talking about what we should and should not publish because of it," he said.

Cooper lived that as a Daily Orange reporter who wrote about the accusations of sexual abuse by a former Syracuse assistant basketball coach.

He shares Bullock's belief that journalism has a long life to live.

"Great stories? Newspapers and magazines produce those the most," he said.

He sees the role of social media to help spread those stories, not replace them. While he's not a heavy user of Facebook, he is all over Twitter. "Foursquare? It's kind of creepy I think," he said.

On Twitter, he likes that you can witness how a story develops and how people react to it. He loves that you can connect to people who he would never be able to sit with for a conversation. Before he ever stepped foot in the World newsroom, he had posted on Twitter about being excited about the opportunity and his thoughts as he made the drive from New York. Editors and reporters saw that and when he came around for the introductory handshakes, people already knew him.

News intern Chase Cook took me by surprise. You don't hear many 20-somethings talk about writer Gay Talese, much less explain how he changed their life.

Cook, who attends the University of Oklahoma, calls himself a curmudgeon. He's old school because he couldn't name a bunch of apps that help him navigate his life.

"I hated social media until Twitter came around," he said. "It allows you to get into conversations that you can't get into on Facebook."

But he certainly knows of ways technology can tell stories.

"I think a lot of things need to definitely change," he said. "We have a lot of data about our communities, but we don't always tell the stories those numbers can tell us. We have not nailed down the science of certain communities. You can't just interview three people and think the story is done. It's not. Not now. We have the ability to map our communities like we have never done before."

Chase proved that when, as the student government reporter for the OU Daily, he found that of all the bills that went through, only 15 percent had a direct impact on students. To do that story, he had to do a lot of something that many in the journalism profession confess they are not good at. Math.

"We can't shy away from math," he said. "Luckily, computers are built on math. Now, it's not a replacement for a well-told story, but it can be part of it."

He pointed to the Guardian's Data Blog as a source of inspiration, as well as Information is Beautiful, which has helped start a movement of complementing journalism with info-graphics.

"I think journalism is the most important thing in the world," Chase said. "People have to have information to survive. It lets us gain more control of what is happening around us. I'm excited to be in journalism right now. I can't think of a better time to be a part of it."

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Press Forward

The focus of this blog is to write about what we are doing at the Tulsa World to continue to serve readers in a digital age and how the Internet is changing journalism.

Jason Collington is the web editor at the Tulsa World, where he works on the company's digital products with a team of four web designers, two web production techs, a web content coordinator, a web advertising coordinator and nine web developers. Before moving to web editor in 2006, he was the web content coordinator for tulsaworld.com.

He also teaches a class at his alma mater, Oklahoma State University, called Internet Communications, where students learn to use online tools to create offline results.

Follow Jason Collington on Twitter

Contact by email: jason.collington@tulsaworld.com

What I read

Poynter Institute: Dedicated to teaching and inspiring journalists and media leaders

Gangrey: Great narrative journalism

Nieman Journalism Lab: Pushing to the future of journalism

David Carr: NY Times media columnist

Jim Romenesko: Latest media news

SmartBrief: Business of News

Reynold Journalism Institute: Ideas, experiments, research and solutions in journalism

Advertising Age: Ad and marketing news

Digital Desk: Everything you ever wanted to know about NewsOK.com

Freedom of Information Oklahoma: News about public records and opening meetings

The Daily O'Collegian: OSU's student newspaper

MediaStorm: Incredible videos

Fast Company: Design and tech

Inc Magazine: Tech advice

David Pogue: NY Times tech columnist

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