Journalism/Writing Internship -- OpEd News

Interns will have opportunities to engage in some of the following activities, with supervision and staff interaction. We seek candidates who are highly creative, resourceful, self-motivated and able to work with self direction. Responsibilities include:
            ● Researching articles, as well as research contact information, such as finding emails, phone numbers for legislators, celebrities, etc.
            ● Interviewing. Set up interviews for other staffers.
            ● Transcribing interviews, rewriting press releases as articles for publication, formatting and posting articles submitted by other writers.
            ● Writing articles. Analyzing news, doing research and putting it together with interviews, etc. into articles.
            ● Editing articles that have come in unsolicited.
            ●Interns can use their journalism skills in an editing capacity under the tutelage of experienced editors.  

Interns will be able to publish their own articles on the site.  They will also have the opportunity to be headlined. OpEdNews is one of only 4,500 media sites crawled by GOOGLE NEWS

Interns will Learn how to work with a sophisticated media content management system at various responsibility levels. . . . develop subject areas that are underdeveloped (women's rights, ecology, GLBT, prison, media criticism, energy, science, sports, religion, technology, trade, business, games, entertainment) . . . Search for articles to be reprinted . . . Search for and recruit writers to start  submitting to our site. . . . Develop relationships with  organizations in the community and recruit them to develop a relationship with you and OpEdNEws so they report news to you and post announcements and news to the site.  . . . Work on team projects-- bigger articles that involve research, interviews, digging, on site observation, photography, video. . . . Capture video for embeds . . . Help expand site multi-media social networking vision, functions. . . . Participate in planning and testing of new site feature-set functions, user interface, underlying algorithms, back panel controls, etc. . . .  Build relationships between members of congress and state legislators and federal agencies. . . . Cover live events-- debates, conferences, etc.
 
Interns will be provided press passes to cover events for OpEd News and are expected to report accurately on the events they attend within a specified period of time.

We expect 10-20 hours a week from interns and expect them to have regular access to the internet and cell phones for calling around the country. 

Interns, depending upon their interest, may be assigned to promotion/public relations and will:
             ● Promote the site: blogger outreach, media, PR, etc.
            ● Promote articles for pickup by other media, other sites.
            ● Work with other sites that use RSS feeds.
            ● Work with other sites to pick up our syndication system.

There will be twice weekly conference calls with all interns to discuss (as community) news items, slants, leads, etc. -- as well as individual counseling with experienced reporters and editors.

ABOUT OPED NEWS:   OpEdNews.com, one of the web’s best social issue and political newspapers with one of the higher traffic rates, is a non-profit, 501(C3) non-profit organization, founded in 2003. We reach 500,000-600,000+ unique visitors a month, serving 1.8-2.5 million page views and 40 million+ hits. We are read in 200 countries. Our average readers are  35+, with post graduate education. About 53% of readers are male.
            The site is a hybrid media/community blog/link aggregation site that publishes over 1,500 articles a month. We have 13,000 registered members, a professional staff of nine writer/editors, and more than 60 volunteer assignment writers. To get an idea of the caliber of our editors, check our masthead. 
            We use a custom designed and built content management system that includes features common to most CMSs and unique features not seen on any other site. Many of the special functions have been designed and built so OpEdNEws.com can be used not only as a media site but also as a tool for activism, advocacy and community building.
            Some of the unique features include:
            ● inside pages for every state, county and major metro area in the USA, with ability to add pages for any community, down to the development or high rise, plus pages for every nation, and every province in Canada and Australia.
            ●a tagging system and directory with auto sensing and suggestions for content, with any member able to add tags to the directory.
            ●Tag Cloud control panels, to analyze and display content for different date ranges and content categories.
            ● RSS feeds for all tag categories, members, directory levels and locales
            ●User created polls. Any member can create a poll, either freestanding or as part of an article. Poll results are matched to respondent demographic info, so the poll's crosstabs are also displayed.
            ● Custom action pages: If a writer wants to move a reader to action, our action pages enable the reader to take action. ! The writer easily creates an action page so the reader can easily contact and send a message to legislators and local daily papers. Then, the writer can see the last 25 responses the readers generated.
            ●Group support: Advocacy, non-profit and special interest groups can be created, so members can share information, use polls, post events, share a calendar for the group.
            ● Member pages. Like many social networking sites, each member gets his or her own member page, where articles, diaries, polls, comments posted are all archived.
 
TO APPLY: Contact Rob Kall, editor, at: rob@opednews.com   215 504 1700,   fax 215 860 5374   Include CV/resume and clips.