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Brian Mason ’08 (Manchester, Conn.) is an international affairs major. He spent his summer working as an intern at The Online NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. His internship was supported by the Class of 1974 Endowed Internship Fund. The following is a first-person account of his experiences.
On a July afternoon, a little after 2 p.m., the staff of the Online NewsHour with Jim Lehrer crowds around a conference table for their daily editorial meeting. During the next hour, the group debates which stories to publish, updates its production schedule, and clarifies a feature of its web production software. At first glance, everything seems in order in the newsroom. But there is something different about these editors.
The 17-person team works in the increasingly fast-paced world of online journalism, but their meeting focuses less on breaking news than on events several months away.
Instead of scouring the wires for the latest news from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, they plan an in-depth site to cover the 60th anniversary of the India-Pakistan partition almost a month away. And rather than go for broke covering the presidential primaries, they brainstorm features for an interactive election map to launch next year.
The Online NewsHour appears to have found a niche in the web’s evolving new media. While larger newspapers and television networks rush to update their sites as quickly and as frequently as possible, racing for coveted advertisers, the Online NewsHour holds back. As the companion site to Public Television’s nightly news program, it has gained an audience by offering comprehensive coverage on issues often overlooked by major news sources.
As an intern this summer, I was given the opportunity to immerse myself in the production of their website – thanks very much to a stipend from the Class of 1974. Because the staff was a relatively small, close-knit bunch, I was thrown right into the mix, writing, researching, and producing wherever the editors needed me.
I worked first-hand on two of the Online NewsHour’s in-depth packages, reporting on a story about presidential candidates and their use of the social networks Facebook and MySpace, and on another about the current state of relations between India, Pakistan, and Great Britain.
While the organization knows it will never rival the New York Times or CNN in terms of speed, it does refresh its site daily. Often, I would be asked to write an “update,” where a story came across the wire and I had to compile several different sources into the NewsHour’s own words. I learned the nuts and bolts of a news article, rewriting professional writing into a story that (hopefully) sounded just as smooth as the original versions.
I also wrote several articles for the Online NewsHour’s high school site, taking a current news story, reporting on the news like an update, and then diving in further to provide background information students are not assumed to know.
After writing these stories, I was taught how to produce articles on the web. I learned the ins and outs of servers, transferring files and making them “live” online.
But the best part of the summer was “blogging.” I helped launch the Online NewsHour’s election blog, which unlike many political blogs that mix opinion and news, provides unbiased, extensive coverage of each presidential candidate.
They use the instantaneous publishing platform to post weekly reports on each candidate, still carrying the organization’s dedication to depth.
I posted each new blog to the web after it underwent an editorial check, reported on Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., a candidate from my home state, and filled in writing if reporters were too swamped.
This summer greatly peaked my interest in journalism. Though I’m not 100 percent I will pursue this as a career, if I do follow this path, the writing experience and the understanding of the web will be invaluable. But I have a feeling it will be the NewsHour’s philosophy – that one thorough story is better than three incomplete ones – that will stick with me the most.