Opportunities at The Philadelphia Inquirer: Internships and Journalism Student Programs
The Philadelphia Inquirer, a public benefit corporation owned by the nonprofit Lenfest Institute for Journalism, stands at the center of a critical mission: to create a lasting future for ambitious, engaging, and useful local journalism. The organization aims to deepen its connection with the communities it serves through its integrated digital and print platforms, which form the Philadelphia region's largest media network. Passionate about building a sustainable model for indispensable local journalism, The Inquirer prides itself on finding diverse, dynamic, and talented individuals to help push the team forward.
Journalism Student Job Description - Mapping News Project
The Philadelphia Inquirer, in partnership with the Brown Institute at Columbia Journalism School, has created a project titled "Developing machine learning applications that operationalize DEI best practices in local newsrooms". This project includes producing open-source methods and automated tools for news organizations to extract geographic data from news coverage for analysis and future product development, and builds upon existing work by the partnership.
Project Overview
The project aims to produce a well-documented, open-source toolset that any local newsroom with an API or access to machine-readable content can use.
Responsibilities
The student will work on phase one of the project, constructing a training set of tagged data to be used in future phases of the project. The student will also assist with community and stakeholder engagement efforts, produce written progress updates, and create documentation surrounding the project and its implementation.
Deliverables
The student will work among a team of researchers to produce a tagged training set of location data for the project. The student is expected to attend weekly meetings with the team and supervisors to review progress throughout the project. The key deliverable is a set of manually tagged locations found in local news stories from The Philadelphia Inquirer. Locations will be identified, tagged, and delivered in a format determined by the supervisor and larger research team.
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In addition to producing training data, the student will work with the team on their community and stakeholder engagement efforts. They will also couple this work with documentation about the progress of the project and its wider implementation outside the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Resources Provided
All work on the project will be conducted off-site on personal equipment. Data will be provided by The Philadelphia Inquirer. Computational resources, including servers, storage, and video meetings, will be provided by The Philadelphia Inquirer and the Brown Institute at Columbia Journalism School.
Final Product
The student (and team) will deliver a training set in a format supported (and requested) by the larger research team. The student will also submit written documents about the project and its community engagement efforts. No technical expertise is required to deliver this final product.
Compensation
The pay rate is \$25.00/hour.
Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
The Philadelphia Inquirer is committed to being a diverse, inclusive, equitable, and anti-racist organization in how it operates through its culture, coverage of the news, and service to the community. The Inquirer works to ensure equity is centered in how it approaches journalism.
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Inquirer for All (Inq4All)
The Inquirer for All (Inq4All) work began in 2020 with an acknowledgment that The Philadelphia Inquirer, in its coverage and in its Newsroom, has too often enabled and institutionalized systemic racism. Employees began convening through working groups and a Steering Committee aimed at transforming The Inquirer into an anti-racist organization.
Internship Programs
The Inquirer also hosts a select number of college students as interns across the Newsroom and other departments. The summer internship program is a nine-week opportunity for local 3rd and 4th-year journalism, product, engineering, and business students. The internship experience is focused on student career development.
Employee Resource Groups
- Kaleidoscope: An employee resource group focused on staff from BIPOC communities and individuals with multicultural identities.
- Prism: Provides resources and education to The Inquirer staff and broader LGBTQIA+ community and allies.
- Inquiring Women: Brings individuals together to support and empower women, including female journalists, inside and outside the organization.
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