When I stepped into the office for my internship with the Associated Press in Tel Aviv, Israel, my new bureau chief eyed me warily. The last intern who worked for him in Egypt, I was told, had to be bailed out of jail after a few very public bouts of public intoxication.
Wow, I thought, bad intern move. He was impressed when I handed him 15 story ideas. And his deputy was similarly pleased when he read the lead of my first feature story about a popular Israeli singer. But then he finished reading the story, and looked up. “You could at least,” he said, “spell Israel right.” I spelled it “Isreal” throughout the entire story.
Bad intern move.
Jail time notwithstanding, an internship, any internship, will be filled with triumphs, traumas and tests for the budding full-time worker. But in my case, the experience in the most unfamiliar locale was the most wretched and wonderful, and ultimately, the best.
I interned for three news organizations. I was a sportswriter in Jacksonville, Fla., a features writer for my hometown Cleveland newspaper, and a foreign correspondent for the Associated Press, when I wasn’t fetching mail, food or punching other people’s stories into a pre-computer-age dinosaur, the Telex machine.
The stories I punched in – slowly and painstakingly, as my typing skills had not yet, shall we say, peaked – went out over the AP wire the world over. And once, when I put out a little tongue-in-cheek reference to a small mistake in a story I had sent, I was told quite forcefully that I was never to do that again.
Nick, the bureau chief then, had no trouble giving direction. He was blustery and blunt, yelling at me frequently to hurry up, type faster. Once when he saw me miserably hunched over the keyboard after one of his tongue-lashings, he and his wife took me out to dinner. “You looked like you needed it,” he said.
I didn’t know enough about the Middle East, he said, shaking his head. I should be more plugged into the office routine. When I went with him and a photographer to Bethlehem to do the Christmas story, he got angry and worried when I got lost in the West Bank.
Nick could be a tyrant, a “benevolent despot,” was how one of the AP writers put it, but he knew his stuff. I went with him to interview the mayor of Bethlehem and when he started asking questions, my jaw dropped. He asked without notes and with a precision that showed a mastery of the hideously complicated Middle East situation; even the local politics. I was impressed.
Nick wasn’t the only strong personality in the office. There was the photographer who swore prodigiously and smoked fat, smelly French cigarettes, and Marcus, the editor from South Africa who spent too many holidays in bomb shelters and told me that if I wanted to cover a “nice” Christmas, I should go back to “Oatmeal” or whatever pristine little burg I had come from. But he also fed me story ideas and spent considerable time going over my copy, despite the frantic pace of the office.
Several of my students tell me they take internships to help them decide whether their chosen profession is for them. Internships definitely serve that purpose, but that wasn’t my issue. I knew I wanted to work at a mid-sized daily newspaper. What my internships did for me was smooth over my very rough edges. The Israel bureau did the best job; this crew had the Lebanon War to get through and no time for niceties or equivocation. But help me they did.
I returned to Ohio with a severe case of culture shock and an unfriendly job market. On one particularly low day, after having just been turned down for a job in Indiana, I received a package. In it was a small pile of clippings from U.S. papers which ran the AP stories I wrote during my internship.
There was my Israeli singer story, with Israel spelled correctly, in the New York Times. There would be more wretched learning curves to come, but none with the demoralizing lows, and soaring highs, of work in that distant bureau.
Barbara Kinglsey is the internship coordinator in the department of journalism and adviser for the Daily Forty-Niner.
