Social Journalism ’19 Summer Internships
We’re so excited for our awesome cohort this year! The social journalism class of 2019 at the Newmark Graduate of Journalism is the first one to have the opportunity to pursue full-time summer internships, thanks to a program timing change, and they’ve landed gigs at amazing news organizations. Take a look below to find out where they’ll be and what they’ll be covering.
Alexa Beyer is working at the Mott Haven Herald this summer, making a podcast for the South Bronx community. She’ll be building an audience and figuring out a format, structure, and delivery system that best serves the community. Topics will probably include housing and gentrification, NYCHA, and neighborhood change.
Ariam Alula is training as a Producer for BronxNet. She will work with hosts on concepts for stories and segments while developing the perfect angle to convey messages. She’ll serve as direct contact between the production team and guests by providing information about the time, location and length of the interview.
Beatrix Lockwood is spending the summer with The Marshall Project as an audience engagement intern. Lockwood will help launch a weekly newsletter and marketing for News Inside, a print publication that will be distributed in prisons and jails. She’ll also be working on a crowdsourcing project and diving into audience analytics.
This summer, Daniel Laplaza will be one of the two Social J interns with THE CITY, an independent, nonprofit news outlet serving New Yorkers. He’ll be working with their engagement director to manage their social media accounts, develop engagement campaigns and help facilitate an open newsroom project.
Diara J. Townes is interning with the CNN Headline News Specials Team. There, she’ll be supporting their documentary unit by gathering research, using social media to connect with sources, organizing news clips, transcribing audio/video and video editing. Townes will also shadow other divisions of CNN about once a week to further her knowledge and skill-set within the company.
Erica Anderson headed West to intern with Capital Public Radio, an NPR affiliate in Sacramento, CA. She will be working with them on their current year-long project about Meadowview, the neighborhood where Stephon Clark, a black man, was shot and killed by a white police officer. Anderson will help produce events that draw on and build skills in engaged journalism through research, writing, producing, reporting, video production, and social media.
Isadora Varejão has two internships! She is spending the summer working as Documented’s engagement reporter. Here, she will crowdsource stories and devise plans to engage with New York City’s immigrant communities through surveys, live events, and social media. Varejão will also publish her own stories.
She’s also a Newsy Academy student producer. After taking a 5-day video production workshop at Newsy’s headquarter in Columbia, Missouri, she is writing, anchoring and editing news stories about different topics, such as politics, science and international affairs. Newsy Academy is a Summer program for visiting students.
Kerem Inal is spending the summer researching, fact-checking and writing in Turkey as an intern with Teyit.org, the only non-profit fact-checking news organization in that country. Teyit currently has ongoing projects with Facebook, Poynter’s IFCN, FirstDraft.
Lakshmi Sivadas is an expansion planning intern with the One Small Step program at StoryCorps. She’ll be helping with research on diverse community organizations and will help to create partnerships for the program.
Lauren Costantino is an Engagement Intern at The 74, which is a non-profit, non-partisan news site covering education in America. She is joining the production team to experiment with new engagement techniques for the publication and help develop a reader survey. In addition to assisting with their social media strategy, she’ll be pitching and reporting out stories using crowdsourcing techniques to amplify the voices of underrepresented communities.
Fresh out of a spring internship with NBC’s Social Newsgathering team, Lena Camilletti is spending her summer in Vermont. She’ll be interning at Seven Days, an independent newspaper and website covering news, politics, food, arts, and culture. She will be contributing to “Hooked: Stories and Solutions from Vermont’s Opioid Crisis.” a series they recently launched that is dedicated to revealing the stories and faces of those affected by the epidemic in Vermont, and beyond.
Mekdela Maskal is spending the summer as a Community Engagement Fellow at THE CITY. She’ll be working closely with the engagement director to lead the open newsroom project aimed at creating space for open dialogue and constant feedback between New Yorkers and THE CITY. They’ll be partnering with Brooklyn Public Libraries to hold events for neighbors to communicate their information needs and most pressing issues.
Tiziana Rinaldi will be spending the summer working on an independent study project. She will be launching a series of dual-track workshops called The JobUp. The program will deliver both English as second language classes and professional integration resources for mal-employed immigrants, people who come into the U.S. with foreign educations but can’t place their skills in the job market.
Tori Hoffman is interning as the multimedia storytelling intern at PolicyLink, a national research and action institute advancing racial and economic equity. During the 10-week internship, she will be producing 4–5 multimedia packages on the people affected by the PolicyLink mission.
Zanna K. McKay will be interning with the podcast team at StoryCorps this summer. She’ll be honing her skills in pitching, cutting tape, and doing rough edits for the show in partnership with NPR.
