I was pretty much set that I wasn’t going to do another internship for my senior year.  I figured The Temple News, freelancing, and school would give me all that I could handle.

But then an opportunity came along that was too good to pass up.  For the first time ever, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Philadelphia Daily News were offering a multimedia internship.  Usually I would have hit the delete button, but if you didn’t notice philly.com has been revamped and is on the up-and-up.  For the first time the Inky and the DN are promoting video and blogs.

So I hastily applied, and got the call late last week that I was in.  I can’t wait to help philly.com in its turnaround and hopefully they let me try some new things.

Now I just have to figure out a way to pay rent…

There was also an aspect of non-journalism related work such as coding, researching, and marketing that I didn’t ever imagine I’d have to do.

But here are a few tips I would give anybody going into their first newspaper internship:

1. Old media, in general, is in a pessimistic state of mind. This is not a bad thing. Use it to your advantage, and bring fresh ideas to the table. Use the fact that you are an outsider as a positive and suggest new ways of telling stories. But don’t be a pushy know-it-all either.
2. Learn or die. If you know soundslides, HTML/CSS, video or audio editing you are in great shape. Show off your “mojo” skills as much as possible, even when you are not asked (like this intern). You might be a stark contrast to the “normal” reporter and thus make an editor who is transitioning to the digital newsroom consider you.
3. Editors=friends. The most important people to get to know are your editors. They have the ability to hire (and fire) you. They have combed through the resumes, and have read thousands of stories. Ask them what you stink at. Pry their brain on the industry, what makes a good reporter, and their best dinner recipe.
4. Hang out with your fellow interns outside of the office at least once.
5. Pitch stories outside of your section. Chance is, the newsroom is understaffed. Take advantage of this by giving editors what is essentially free labor. Get some diversity in your clips while establishing new professional relationships. You may even be able to swing some freelance work after you leave.

5a. For the love of god, stay out of office gossip.

(thanks to Joe for the above link.)

I will have an wrap up of what I learned soon though, promise.

The results were interesting, but mostly along with what I expected. As with anytime I design a Web site (or write an article, or cook a meal…) I am aware of things I wish I did but just didn’t have the time or capability to do so.

For example ,many complained over the buggy-ness of the Flash slideshow. The slideshow was a cheap tool that I purchased because I did not have the expertise to code it myself. But a quick run down of the complaints and what we are doing to change them.

• Right rail navigation is poor, roll overs shouldn’t be a way to navigate to articles
• There is no indication that this is a Delaware related page
• The video player is not very inviting
• Our “stories we wish we wrote” is the only text on home page, and it misleads users to believe that its our main content
• We are having major IE7 problems due to the JS-Kit comment system. This is not to say that s the fault of the script, but it may not be playing nice with whatever other scripts we have going.
• There is no real “information hierarchy” to our site. This is because 1. There is no CMS, and 2. We are only putting out one article a day.
• People clicked on videos
• Our learn/connect/multimedia box was confusing as it was before the article

I’m at work with some changes, but this test essentially proved to me:

• Videos are the next big thing for news, but they have to be presented inline with the article
• The image first mindset doesn’t exist. People want to be able to digest information quickly by skimming and text allows that
• You need a CMS, without question
• People still like to browse by categories, date, and topics
• Users aren’t that impressed by links to other related Web sites
• The cleaner, the better.

The old design (left) vs the new (right):

Remember back when when I said I wasnt getting that Web site I hoped for?

I was only half right. To recap, me and three other interns were in charge of building a Web site. We had a grand scheme for all kind of features that basically boiled down to two catagories: Networking (user profies, comments, etc) and presentation (layout, images, etc).

We sought to build the site on some sort of Content Management System and we evaluated our options which all fell through. This when I made the aforementioned post. After licking our wounds we decided to just suck it up and do it ourselves.

From there I took designs given to me by one of the other interns and hand coded an entire news site from scratch. CMS be damned.

Thus Unami was born

What is so diferent about Unami?

Mainly the article page. Take a look below (you might have to click):

As you can see the article page allows for several layers of digesting the story. The top layer allows the reader to skim just the hed, sub hed, and the story highlights. If that interests the reader they can continue down into the article page.

The box next to the art lists all aspects of the story upfront. The multimedia is listed in bullet points so if the reader is not in the mood to read, they can cherry pick the video. There are also relevant links, because after all, this IS the internet.

The article is separated into tabs so the reader can pick and choose the part of the article they feel is the most interesting/relevant. Of course, at the bottom of each tab there is navigation so if the reader wants to read it in the traditional fashion they can. Within the article we also inked via lightbox the videos and pictures so the reader is not interrupted when they read the story (Warning: the video lightbox seems not to work on Firefox Macs…Im working on it.)

Essentially the crux of the storytelling is choice. The reader can chose what they want to read in a non-linear fashion. We try to visibly separate each aspect of the story much like a newspaper article would with sub heds within the story. We try to be very visual playing heavy on pictures and videos.

Is it perfect? No. But its a testing ground for some of the theories on young readers. Do they read long stories? Do they prefer a video to text? Do they just skim?

The Tech Side

While I have dabbled in HTML and CSS I have never done anything to this scale. I also know absolutely no javascript and only a little bit of Flash. I relied heavily on free tools such as Lightbox, Tabifier, and JS-kit comments. I can’t emphasize enough how grateful I am that these people put out their work for free. I also used the very cheap monoslideshow for the Flash rotator.

I took the easy route and did the whole site in tables. While I did have a working CSS-built article page, it rendered too differently in various browsers (Alas, my CSS skills are still a work in progress).

The worst part about the page is that I have to enter every article in by hand. I have to FTP all of the pictures and copy the URLS. It really makes you miss a Wordpress or a College Publisher.

That’s it!

So, there you have it. Be sure to let me know what you think in the comments. Constructive criticism encouraged! (Sorry for all the spelling errors, I typed this in a hurry)

For a multimedia package I was working on about restaurants, a partner and I filmed the chef of a local restaurant making some monkfish (“a poor man’s lobster”).  Afterward, at the very same place, I ordered a cheeseburger.  When it came time to pay, the chef who showed us the fish told me it was on the house.

My partner and I insisted we had to pay, otherwise it was accepting a gift.  The chef obliged, although I was concerned over whether I should leave a tip (I did).

Although I’m sure everything was A-OK, I stil feel like I made the wrong choice to even put myself int he position where, if I wasn’t paying attention,I could have gotten in a lot of trouble.

And besides, the burger stunk.

But the days of my college paper where we would readily take home the free CD’s or hang up the promo posters around the office are different than when you represent a large newspaper.  Lesson learned.

This June, I, along with 3 other interns, were invited to devolep a youth-driven Web site for Delawareonline.

My fellow interns and I did market research, scouted the competition, and developed a new way of delivering news that we felt would really click with the media savvy youth of America.

But instead of providing us with an outlet on testing every theory I have every had with young people and news, I got a lesson in the bureaucracy of corporate America.

Bottom line: no Web site.

To my frustration there was no local internship that paid the bills.  Speaking with some journalism students from other areas of the country raised the same point: why aren’t we getting paid?

Now aside from selfish reasons, I do have several reasons interns should be paid:

• Otherwise the only journalists being groomed are ones from rich(er) families
• Those who are truly passionate are forced to: forget the internship (as I did that summer), work 1 job to support the other, or live on credit cards and borrowed money.
• Student Loans + living a summer on credit cards + entering a low paying field = a career change

This is in a field whose exact future is in doubt.   Where many (but not all) newspapers are being accused of being slow to move with the new technology.  Why wouldn’t one want some outside influence?

According to the Princeton review the average journalists salary after 10 to 15 years is $69,300.

The cost of paying 4 interns 10 bucks an hour for 10 weeks? $16,000. (4 * 10 * 40 (hrs a week) * 12).

But, It could be worse.

Ill be posting videos and photos as the day rolls on.  Check the Panel to Panel blog to see what I am up to.

Its tough.  I know some of you that already may be working in a newsroom may be thinking “dumb whippersnapper finally gets it”.  But I’m more referring to the multiple platforms each story must be published on.  Even a usually multimedia-friendly Editor confessed his frustration at the fragmentation of news delivery systems.  While I love online media, it made me jealous of the days when you could just worry abou tthe newspaper.  As a journalist that may be easier, but todays method is better for the consumer.  And thats what matters.

No one knows about young people’s online news habits.  As part of my team’s objective to learn what younger people want we hit the research archives, online articles, and even took to the street handing out surveys.   It is incrediably difficult to find any existing studies that say any more than “young people like the internet”.  People are also too quick to dismiss young people as Daily Show watching hippies who don’t care about the world.

Young people are all over the radar.  Some preliminary results from the research tell me maybe there is a good reason for all of ambiguity in young people’s news habits.  People in their early twenties are all over the place in what topics they read and habits they practice.  Its easy to just look at your friends (read: journalists) and draw a conclusion, but when you interview those not like you, the perspective changes drastically.

I’m impressed by the way an entire newsroom is adapting to online distribution.  Check out delawareonline.com and see the features like a video newscast and a constantly updating news feed.

Organization has a lot to do with any good idea that comes out of media.  Because the news environment favors a more niche approach, I am beginning to think that the smaller the team that works on an idea/project the better.  The more hurdles something has to go through the more watered down the idea will be.

I’ll be back with more observations as well as a break down on the upcoming Temple News revamp we’re planning.

…If my head doesn’t explode first.