When we make our occasional entreaties for support from Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism readers, we often mention our “Intern Army.” We say that having dozens of reporting interns every year is one of the main ways we produce solid journalism about Boston and Massachusetts. We say that interns are our eyes and ears on the ground, as they’re super mobile and at the start of their careers and BINJ staff are older and have to spend more time keeping the organization going than doing field reporting. We say that they help keep our content fresh and keep us apprised of new trends in the many beats we cover.
But we don’t always talk much about how our intern program works—which in part is a discussion about why it works.
So here’s the deal: We’re at the point where we get a lot of applicants year round from colleges around the country whose students come from around the world. But the majority of our interns attend school in the Boston area. We interview the people that strike us as interesting and talented. We typically accept between one third and one half of the applicants for each of our three intern cohorts each year. Most of our interns do informal internships with us, a few in every cohort do formal internships for school credit (which is usually more work for them) … and we fill out whatever paperwork is necessary.
We ask new interns to start thinking about ideas for articles they want to do from the moment we accept them. We meet with interested interns once a week by video call. If individual interns want to meet with us, then they join us. If they need one-on-one meetings, we do that. If they decide to formally pitch us their ideas, they can do that in meetings or using any available communications platform to contact us. We work with interested interns on their ideas until we agree they’re ready for them to write up. If they move forward with their ideas, great. If they don’t, that’s fine, too. Same goes for staying on as an intern. If interns do, that’s cool. And if they don’t, that, too, is cool. Everything about our internship program is voluntary from start to finish.
We try to encounter each intern as the unique person that they are. We try to encourage them to do something that they couldn’t do in school—although we’ll accept work they did for school with some editing as long as we think it’s worth publishing. We take an extremely diverse array of people as interns because we think that’s how a publication gets the best journalism: by making sure that every person writing for a publication isn’t very similar to everyone else.
We work with each intern on article drafts through our editorial process. We try to have a light hand in editing to make sure that each person’s voice shines through in the finished product.
We publish each intern’s piece when it’s ready to be published. We then pay interns for completed work within 30 days.
If we’re late with anything on our end at any point in the production process, we always encourage interns to bug us. That admonition seems to work well (lol).
Currently, we’re only able to pay for one article per intern; so once they’ve published with us, we always try to follow through on the promise we make to all of them that publishing with us makes them “fam” (family) and once they achieve that lofty status, we’ll do whatever we can to help their careers. If they want us to recommend them for a higher degree program or for a job we’ll do it.
If they want to then stick around in our internship program for subsequent cohorts, we allow it, whether they’re still in school or not (we also accept new interns who’ve finished school, as a matter of course). And we always tell interns, “if you’ve got friends who’ve got game and are interested in an internship with us, send them our way.”
In this fashion, we’ve grown and maintained a robust internship program since June 2017. We’ve had the honor of working with well over 300 interns in those nine years. Most of them have succeeded in publishing with us and we’re proud of every one of them. We’re especially proud of those few interns that have gone on to get good jobs in journalism despite the news industry being in terminal collapse. If working with us has helped them succeed in any way, then we feel that the effort we put into the internship program has been worth it.
We hope that they feel the same way about their participation in our program.
Jason Pramas is editor-in-chief of BINJ.News and executive director of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism.
