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A college degree is great but we all know the classroom can only go so far to prepare you for the real world.

Especially in our business, where being a great journalist requires a high level of critical thinking, the courage to ask tough questions, the ability to engage people with sharp writing and the need to just get out of the office and do some good old-fashioned shoe-leather reporting.

There’s no question that Hawaii needs more great journalists. So we’ve started a new highly structured and rigorous internship program to help train young journalists who are deeply committed to our craft and want to do the kind of work we value here at Civil Beat.

There are many journalism students in the state who each year participate in internship programs at newspapers, at broadcast outlets and at online sites. Those semester-long opportunities have been largely put together by the at the University of Hawaii. You may have even helped support the SPJ interns by attending the  political follies, the every-other-year musical production put on by local news outlets to raise money for the intern program.

But our internship is different — very different. And it’s not for the casual j-school student who is looking for an easy way to get a few credits to help them graduate.

A New Program For Hawaii

First off, it’s a year-long commitment. We are offering it to college seniors or recent grads who want to be journalists so badly that they are eager to spend 12 months working in our newsroom. We are paying them for that go-getter attitude, too — $15 an hour vs. the $9 an hour they’d earn with an SPJ internship.

In most newsrooms — and ours has been no different — interns function as what we call general assignment reporters. They are generally handed whatever story an editor thinks ought to be done that day.

So they have very little opportunity to develop the skills good reporters really need — building relationships with sources or gaining knowledge of a particular area, details that the best stories are built on. For journalists, it’s important to know enough about something or someone to be able to really think through critical concepts, like truth and relevance and meaning. We are not stenographers. Just because someone says something doesn’t mean it’s true or worth putting in a story.

To that end, we’ve put together a curriculum aimed at teaching young journalists how to report and write stories that are basic to any news operation anywhere. They’ll produce stories on local government, transportation, development, education, cops, courts, politics and elections, business and, perhaps most importantly, communities. They’ll learn social media and multimedia skills.

But the difference is we are asking them to do it in a very narrowly defined geographic area, a neighborhood or two that they will get to know very, very well over the course of a year. We’re calling it an “urban immersion” internship program and by the end of the year they should have produced stories that will help their communities understand themselves while teaching the rest of our readers about these special places.

By the end of the internship, our interns will have learned to:

• Develop good news judgment: Understand what makes news and how to develop and pitch strong story ideas.
• Understand the importance of accuracy and fairness: Understand standards for verifying information; be aware of preconceptions.
• Be resourceful and persistent: Get the story using good reporting and interviewing techniques, plus enterprise and initiative.
• Write clearly: Tell the story accurately and concisely by organizing material, understanding and explaining complex issues, and writing in a clear, colorful and compelling way.
• Write for readers: Understand how to take institutional news “out in the street” and make it relevant to readers.
• Be passionate and professional: Journalism is exciting, and it’s important to society. Interns will, through their work, better understand the role of reporters in society, the passion that drives them and the ethical guidelines that govern their work.

Meet Our New Crew

We’re kicking off the program this year with three young women who have already demonstrated a remarkable energy and enthusiasm for our business.

Noelle Fujii graduated in May from the UH where for the last year she was the editor-in-chief of Ka Leo, the university’s student newspaper. She has a degree in journalism with a minor in Japanese. She’s done previous internships at Hawaii Business magazine and the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

Noelle has recently returned from Las Vegas where she had a special assignment as part of the highly selective Asian American Journalists Association’s VOICES program. Noelle and about a dozen other journalists were assigned to cover the AAJA convention, producing multimedia reports relevant to the journalism industry .

Noelle will focus her coverage on Waikiki, downtown Honolulu and Kakaako, where most stories these days seem to center on homeless people or development and the next high rise that’s going up. We think Noelle will be able to bring a much broader perspective to these communities.

Please don’t hesitate to drop an email to noelle@civilbeat.org with story tips and suggestions, perhaps even an interesting neighborhood character who’d make an intriguing profile.

Natanya Friedheim grew up in Honolulu but left the islands for college. She graduated in May from Mills College in California where she earned her degree in literary and cultural studies with an emphasis in French language and post-colonial theory.

Natanya didn’t leave Hawaii behind in her time on the mainland; she wrote papers on Hawaiian immersion schools, the Hawaiian sovereignty movement and U.S. atomic testing in Micronesia, among other things.

Natanya returned to Honolulu after graduation and has spent the summer as an intern at Pacific Business News. She’s also taught civics classes in a California middle school and been a volunteer for the community health center, Kokua Kalihi Valley.

“I am particularly passionate about studying the role politics and culture play in public education,” Natanya says.

We’ve asked Natanya to cover Chinatown and Kalihi, two communities that have a rich history and culture as well as current economic challenges. Natanya has a bit of a head start with Chinatown in particular. She lives there and has contributed to a Pacific Business News special report on the community.

You can reach her at natanya@civilbeat.org and she would be thrilled to hear story ideas and suggestions about Kalihi and Chinatown.

Civil Beat readers are likely already familiar with our third intern — Courtney Teague.

Courtney has been our intern for the past six months, first through the UH English department where she is majoring in English and philosophy and then this past summer as an SPJ journalism intern.

Courtney is a senior at UH this year and expects to graduate in May. In addition to her internship with us, she has been working as the news editor for Ka Leo, helping direct student journalists on assignment and managing the newsroom.

Among other things, Courtney has been helping cover elections for Civil Beat, including writing profiles of candidates and races as well as helping with video and social media efforts. Earlier this year she was a regular presence at the Legislature, tracking a number of bills and issues. She’s also had an interest in university issues and politics and has produced stories looking at why it is so difficult to fix crumbling UH buildings,��problems at the UH lab�����Ի� energy use at the UH.

So it seems appropriate that Courtney will be covering Manoa and Kaimuki, two communities that have a lot to do with the University of Hawaii, university politics, the economic impact it has and the people who live and work at the college. But both neighborhoods are much deeper than just UH, of course — Kaimuki, for instance,��is experiencing a renaissance of sorts with new businesses and restaurants.

You can send story ideas and comments to courtney@civilbeat.org.

Behind The Program

A number of people are working behind the scenes to help make this new internship program a success.

At UH, journalism and communications department leaders Ann Auman, Brett Oppegaard and Kevin Kawamoto have worked with us to make sure that our program meets the requirements so current students, like Courtney, will get class credit for the internship. In 2017, we plan to open up the program to other universities and colleges in Hawaii, but thanks to UH for helping get this off the ground.

And we owe a big thank you to Dot Mason and the George Mason Fund, which was started by Dot’s late husband who was the founder of Pacific Business News. The Mason Fund, part of the Hawaii Community Foundation, has invested $10,000 in support of the internship program, one of the first grants we’ve received since becoming a nonprofit in June.

“I think about the types of projects that George would have supported, and I put my passion behind it,” Dot told us recently. “He graduated from high school in June of 1941, right before the world fell apart. He didn’t  go to journalism or business school, he boldly took on jobs and learned as he went along.”

Like Dot, we think this is exactly the kind of program George would have approved of. Please help us make it a success by embracing Courtney, Natanya and Noelle and their efforts to excel in this amazing business we’re in.