An internship seals the deal

By Rick Rojas
Special to chipsquinn.org

Posted: March 23, 2009

Rick Rojas

It was the morning of May 27, and I was scared.

At about 9 a.m., I was making the walk from my apartment on Third Street to the Courier-Journal, which was five blocks down on Broadway Street in Louisville, Ky.

I was scared because it was my first day as reporter-intern. I had never been an intern, never had to face such continuous deadlines, never really worked in a professional newsroom before. On top of it, I was 970 miles from home and knew only a few people whom I had connected with through the Chips Quinn Scholars program.

It nearly killed me: going through all the first-day paperwork, meeting the people I would be working with all summer, trying to gauge who might become my newsroom friends and mentors.

After the initial jitters passed, though, I found the newsroom to be my home for the summer.

The Courier-Journal is a unique paper in the newspaper industry. Before becoming part of Gannett in the 1980s, it was owned by a family — the Binghams — who spent lots of money on journalism, supporting special projects, investigative pieces and a massive staff for a regional paper.

Though a paper operated like that probably couldn’t survive in today’s economic times, its legacy was a great sense of pride and an even greater pool of experience and talent that I had the opportunity to tap.

There were Pulitzer Prize winners. Reporters who had done shoe-leather reporting for decades before becoming household-name columnists. And a team of young reporters who helped me navigate through my debut in professional newspaper journalism.

I spent my days discovering an unfamiliar community, meeting amazing people and telling their stories. I spent hours working the phones, trying to track people down. I sat at my desk, staring at a blank computer screen, trying to figure out how to piece together a story that accurately represented my day’s work.

People I meet tell me that I’m quite the storyteller. I have a knack for it, I suppose. But my internship added a new dimension to my storytelling skills.

I learned much not only by sitting down with my newsroom colleagues and asking for their guidance, but also by talking to people in the community, by being sent out with the mission to just have conversations with people.

How awesome is that? Being paid to talk to people and let the rest of the community know what they have to say.

I’ve always wanted to be a reporter, but the summer sealed the deal.

I worried constantly that I wasn’t doing a good job, that I was a terrible reporter who wasn’t meeting editors’ expectations — and worse, who was tarnishing the Chips Quinn name.

I asked my supervising editor during my final review if that was the case. He said no. I was green and young, he said, but I had some of the skills reporters need but can’t be taught: I was persistent, would ask anyone any question and he knew if he send me to cover something, I could come back with everything I needed.

I knew, for sure, that my being a reporter was no longer like the 5-year-old’s ambition to be an astronaut; I could do this, I might even be good at it.

When I made that walk down Broadway from the Courier-Journal to my apartment for the last time, I wasn’t scared. But I was just as emotional. I wanted to know: When can I do this again?

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