Jan Leach, a Kent State JMC professional-in-residence, remembers her first internship as “boring.” With a sheepish smile and a roll of the eyes, she said she covered city council and school board meetings in North Baltimore and Cygnet, Ohio, “teensy little towns south of Bowling Green,” as a beat reporter for the Bowling Green Sentinel-Tribune.

But the former editor of the Akron Beacon Journal said that internship and every job she’s had since have taught her about subjects ranging from politics to weather.

“I think of it as putting a new tool in my toolbox,” she said, later adding, “Every internship is a stepping stone to another job.”

She said college internships are invaluable for students because they must immerse themselves in the intense pace of professional newsrooms. At the Beacon, she said, interns learn quickly to report on a broad range of topics under strict deadlines for a daily audience of 140,000 people. That experience, she said, cannot be replicated at a campus newspaper.

Senior news major Nick Gehring said working for the Daily Kent Stater, the university newspaper, has provided good training but would always be limited in quality by the turnover of staff every semester. Gehring, who completed an 11-week summer internship at the Medina County Gazette, said filling in for reporters who’ve been covering the same beats for years allowed him to understand how professional journalists maintain contacts and understand complex issues.

“ I grew up in Medina County and spent most of my life making fun of the paper,” he said, noting the paper’s small staff and budget. “[But during the internship] I paid attention to the quality of writing and the caliber of people. They work with what they’ve got…. They’ve won awards. A lot of the people who worked at the Plain Dealer or the Beacon worked at Medina first.”

In addition to being thrown into the mix of professional journalists, some internships provide a mentorship experience in which reporters can learn from senior colleagues and editors.

Just days into a fall semester internship at the Canton Repository, senior news major Abby Slutsky said she’s being treated like a general assignment reporter on staff but can still take advantage of the coaching program available to interns there.

As a reporting intern at the Canton Repository, senior newspaper journalism major Abby Slutzky talks with Assistant City Editor Mark Phillips about story ideas.