Yes, there's hope for the future: Meet our interns
So, the golf buddies are walking toward their shots, shooting the breeze. One mentions someone's daughter is about to enter college, planning to study journalism.
"Oh, really," says one guy, a grizzled veteran of a major metropolitan newspaper. "Was the Latin program closed?"
That's the kind of graveyard humor that abounds in our industry today. And, yeah, it's been a rough ride recently as newsrooms have shrunk, newspaper circulation has declined and the very face our of industry is changing dramatically. But there are plenty of reasons to hope for the future of journalism.
Three of them are named Jessica Cilella, Sarah Horn and Jennifer Wheeler.
Perhaps you've seen their bylines recently; they are summer interns working in the DuPage County office of the Daily Herald. All three soon begin their final year of college, working on journalism degrees.
Jessica, of Homer Glen, will be a senior at Loyola University; Sarah, from Carol Stream, attends the University of Missouri, and Jennifer, who lives in Westmont, is at the University of Illinois.
And, yes, they're aware a tough job market awaits. But in many ways it doesn't matter; all three say they're doing something they love - meeting a wide array of people, telling stories, making a difference. "I see people in pre-med - and they hate it," Jessica says.
Sarah already has seen that her stories can inspire and make a difference, evidenced by her poignant profile of Naperville resident Jenna McKeown, who at the tender age of 18 already has been through 97 overnight hospital stays, 55 blood transfusions and a bone-marrow transplant to combat a rare form of leukemia. Jenna was a big reason the Naperville Exchange Club set up a booth at the city's Ribfest - to encourage people to sign the national bone marrow registry. That helps link donors with people who need transplants but don't have a match among family members and friends, as was the case with Jenna.
After her story ran, Sarah says she was told people stopped by to sign the bone marrow registry because they had read her story about Jenna.
Our internship program has its practical side. In the summer when scores of staffers are taking vacations and community events are in full swing, we can use the coverage help. So Jen, Jess and Sarah have spent a good amount of time advancing or covering things ranging from the county fair to an upcoming appearance at Cantigny in Wheaton of actor Gary Sinise's Lt. Dan Band to Sarah's story elsewhere on these pages about a man named Richard Duck who oversees, you guessed it, duck races.
That they'd be doing feature stories out of the gate was a bit of a surprise to our interns, as they're used to pursuing breaking news for their school newspapers. So, that forced them, as Jen puts it, "to step out of my comfort zone."
She did so in telling the story in Tuesday's Neighbor section of Brian Schnurstein, a star athlete at Wheaton Warrenville South High School, who now, at age 29, is battling Lou Gehrig's disease. Jen immersed herself in his story, interviewing nine other people. "I stressed over every detail."
Our interns surprised me a bit with their love of traditional community journalism and their hope that the print product survives the Internet's onslaught.
"People love to read about themselves, to see their picture in the newspaper," Sarah says.
So, yes, we've certainly gotten our money's worth from our interns. (That's a jest - like many internships, these are unpaid.) But because this is supposed to be a learning and nurturing environment for our future journalists, we take very seriously our responsibility to the interns. They work with top editors, such as City Editor Bob Smith, who gives them the insight of his 30-odd years in this business. They've shadowed and covered stories with senior writers Jake Griffin, who covers DuPage County government, and Christy Gutowski, our courts reporter.
Today, they'll be spending the day sitting in on news meetings, lunching with our top editors and touring our printing center. Before they're finished, I hope to work personally with each one of them on a bigger-picture story that'll crack the front page. It's a fair amount of work, but it's a labor of love for us. And it's the least we can do, because Jessica, Sarah and Jennifer are the future of journalism.
And I think the future is bright.
• jdavis@dailyherald.com