Three Daily editors land ’09 Wall Street Journal internships
Philip Nussel
Board for Student Publications
It’s a great accomplishment whenever a collegiate journalism program can boast placing a student into an internship at The Wall Street Journal.
This summer, The Michigan Daily — without the benefit of a well-financed journalism department or full-time faculty advisers — is sending three of its 2008 staff members to the world’s top business newspaper. They are:
- Kim Chou, who held several Daily posts including Associate Arts Editor, will be working for the media and tech group at the Journal in New York. The assignment “will give me an opportunity to combine the two fields I'm most interested in — features/entertainment and business,” she says. Chou is graduating in May with concentrations in English and Political Science.
- Andrew Grossman, Editor in Chief of the Daily in 2008, will be staying close to Ann Arbor when he interns for the Journal’s bureau in Southfield, Mich. This bureau spearheads the paper’s coverage of the auto industry. Grossman hails from suburban Boston and is graduating from Michigan in May with a History major. (Disclosure: Grossman interned for this author last summer at Automotive News in Detroit. He was one of the best interns we’ve ever had. The Journal obviously noticed.)
- Chris Herring, a Chicago native who is a Senior Sports Editor and a former Managing News Editor at the Daily, will serve as the Journal's legal affairs intern in New York. He will graduate from Michigan in May with a Political Science degree.
Like several fellow members of the staff, these students finished their Daily careers with tremendous accomplishments, both inside and outside the newsroom. They also landed previous summer internships at other prominent news organizations over the last few years.
Neither the Daily nor the Journal keep records that would show whether the Daily — or any other school newspaper — has ever placed three staff members at the Journal in the same year, but it’s a good bet this is a first.
“Maybe Harvard and Yale together have had three in one year, but I don’t know,” Cathy Panagoulias, Deputy Managing Editor and chief recruiter for the Journal, said during a Feb. 10 interview.
The key factor: working for a quality daily college newspaper.
“Basically, we prefer students that work at a daily newspaper and U-M has a very good daily newspaper,” Panagoulias said. “We’re looking for students with a well-rounded experience.”
The Daily carries a lot of credibility at the Journal, dating back to the 1995 hiring of Rebecca Blumenstein, a 1989 Daily alum. Blumenstein, who started out covering General Motors for the paper before she turned 30, is now the Journal’s China Bureau Chief.
Panagoulias said the Journal picked the three Daily interns from an initial field of about 400 applicants that was boiled down to 30 finalists.
It would be tempting for the Daily and the Board for Student Publications to take credit for such an accomplishment. But in reality, these students earned these internships on their own.
And that’s the point: the Daily and the board provide the opportunities for students to succeed on their own. Media industry recruiters like Panagoulias value this approach, too. When you hire talent from the Daily, you already know the following about your prospect:
- They know how to solve their own problems. They’ve learned good journalism from their own trial and error.
- They know how to think critically. They come from a collegiate newspaper culture where students question authority and challenge the prevailing wisdom.
- They are self-motivated. Students can’t thrive at the Daily unless they are completely self-motivated. Few people are going to tell them to work hard there.
- They know how to work with other journalists in a professional manner. Daily editors get elected, so it’s difficult to rise to a position of authority without learning how to cooperate with others under pressure.
There is no question that most prestigious journalism schools do a great job training students. They produce a lot of outstanding professional journalists.
But as we’ve seen with these three members of our class of 2009, the Daily can produce as much or more elite talent than any full-fledged collegiate journalism program.
The board is proud of these three seniors and all the talented students who work at our student publications. We’re confident that our publications will continue to produce quality professionals -- in journalism and other fields.
Nussel is a fifth-year member of the University of Michigan Board for Student Publications and is Managing Editor — Online for Automotive News in Detroit.