A dress rehearsal for a job

CLASS OF 2018 Graduates of the Inquirer Immersion Program hold their certificates of completion proudly. Mangaluz (right) delivers her speech at the culmination of the program. —CONTRIBUTED PHOTO

When she learned that she had been accepted as an intern at the Inquirer, Jeanella Mangaluz, a Grade 12 student at St. Theresa’s College, confessed that she “nearly jumped out of [her] skin.”

It may be a long commute from her home in Caloocan to the newspaper’s Makati office but here she was, taking the first step to fulfilling a lifetime dream that had often been met with incredulity and protest.

Like other kids, Mangaluz was often asked what she’d want to be when she grew up. Her answer—to be a journalist—was often greeted with something akin to disdain. “You’ll never get rich in that job.” “You’ll end up jobless.” Or worse, “Do you want to die doing your job?”

“It came to a point when I was filled with so much doubt that I was hesitant to put Journalism or Communication Arts [as my college course] as it would mean that my dreams would no longer be just dreams; they would become plans,” Mangaluz said.

Team-powered

Then along came the Inquirer Internship Program, which chooses fourth year college students in two batches of 20 for either April/May or June/July to be part of the daily’s Editorial or Business departments for one to two months. It changed Mangaluz’s narrative and gave her a broader perspective on her dream.

The program, started in 2017, hopes to give students direct exposure to the newsroom routine and the team-powered steps of putting out a daily newspaper.

“We started this in 2010, but on an informal basis, with students applying for internship at the Editorial department as part of their school requirement,” recalled Connie Kalagayan, Inquirer’s associate vice president for corporate affairs. Systems were put in place to make the program official and more methodical in 2017.

Fourth year college students can apply by submitting their resume and a cover letter, and can choose whether they’d like to be assigned to either the Editorial or Business group, Kalagayan explained. A counterpart Inquirer Immersion Program is also being offered to senior high school students, she added.

Internship applicants are screened based on their resume, the Inquirer official said. “We favor those with lots of experience, either from extracurricular activities or exposure to other companies, and those who expressed real interest and passion in working with the paper as gleaned from their cover letter. Finally, there’s the interview, where we gauge the ability of candidates to express themselves either through speech or writing skills.”

Real reward

They’re more lenient with applicants from provinces, Kalagayan said, “because we know they don’t get as many opportunities as their city cousins. ”

Successful candidates not only get to be part of the Inquirer for the 100 or 200 hours required of them by their academic institutions, they also get a daily allowance, she added.

For most applicants, however, the real reward is the prospect of getting a firsthand look into the otherwise guarded and competitive media industry.

“I was excited because I was about to get a good glimpse of what [newspapering] was really like. I’ve been part of the school publication since elementary and then here it is all of the sudden: the real thing,” the St. Theresa senior recalled of her 100-hour internship.

But then Mangaluz wondered: “Was I going to love the real thing? I have watched movies and shows with journalists being the voice of the underdogs, sticking it to the man and winning! But what if it wasn’t really like that in real life? What if it’s just an ordinary office job with boring paperwork? There wasn’t a lot of time for personal crisis though; we were already there. I found myself with a personal desk and a computer and everything was suddenly so frighteningly real,” she recounted.

Like other interns in the Editorial group, Mangaluz shadowed the reporter/mentor assigned her, wrote short features or contributed research assigned to her, and did proofreading and layouting as an editorial production assistant.

Dream and awakening

Her counterparts in the Business group meanwhile got to attend corporate events, plan strategies, and learn the workaday basics in the section they chose to be assigned to: Marketing, Advertising, Sales, Finance, Corporate Affairs and Accounting.

Recalling her experience of being assigned to the Research section, Mangaluz said: “Working [at the Inquirer] had somehow been both a dream and an awakening. I and my classmate Madeleine did end up doing office work. We photocopied stuff, a lot of it. We also had to sit down and do actual, physical research with corporeal books and papers. But surprisingly, it was actually really fun. We had something to do, a solid task that allowed us to contribute. ”

There was also the feeling of being part of a team and learning on the job.

“Our advisers were great. They really prepared for us, creating a complete schedule that allowed for one-on-one interviews with reporters, editors etc. It provided us with unique insights that we could never learn anywhere else. Our supervisors even gave us the chance to help update an ‘In the know’ article which provided background information on the International Criminal Court for a story,” Mangaluz said.

Then there’s the thrill of seeing one’s byline for the first time.

Eye-openers

“Seeing my name credited, even if it was just in tiny font at the end of the story, was surreal,” recalled this former intern. “I did not view it as an achievement by any means because I don’t believe that I have earned it yet. It was merely a taste of what I had always hoped for. Overall, it was an incredible way to learn about the trade. Every second felt like a step forward for me. It felt real.”

For Kalagayan, the rewards of the program are more strategic.

“Aside from helping in the paper’s daily routine, interns are expected to give us feedback to help improve our operations. The suggestions and ideas have proven to be real eye-openers,” she said.

Kalagayan recalled how an intern from Research suggested a concrete way to engage with millennials. “Why not ‘solution journalism,’ she said. The media always cover and write about problems. Isn’t it time that they also offer solutions? Why not a help button or window at the bottom of the page where young readers can check out ideas on how to tackle the problem? We can even sell the space to advertisers and turn these sponsors into partners in our advocacy.”

An Accounting intern meanwhile looked around at the sheer mountain of papers in the office and inside filing cabinets, and suggested digital documentation instead. “You can even store those digital files in the cloud so you don’t lose them should anything untoward happen in the office,” she said, Kalagayan recalled, adding that having an outsider’s more clinical and objective perspective really helps.

As for Corporate Affairs, an intern stressed just how powerful images are when she suggested that in the Inquirer’s periodic call for funding to help out disaster-stricken folk. “Use more visuals on social media to reach out to citizens from other countries who have more money to donate, the intern said, and she’s right,” Kalagayan said.

Moving forward, the Inquirer official said the internship program plans to expose interns to the business and editorial aspects of newspaper work at the same time.

Intensive, hands-on

“We’d like to offer a Management Trainee Program and maximize it by choosing only five of the best applicants and giving them cases from editorial and business for them to suggest solutions to. It would be intensive and hands-on,” Kalagayan said.

For most interns like Mangaluz who are expected to assess their experience at the interns’ graduation, the program has been both “joy and inspiration.”

Said Mangaluz in her 2018 graduation speech: “I realized that being a reporter isn’t dashing through the city with a pen in your hand and a camera on your hip. It isn’t digging for a single story that will overthrow the system. It takes time. It takes effort. It takes the right people. It’s real, actual work, with a real actual impact,” she said.

“Being there did not diminish my desire to be a journalist, it strengthened it. Yes it wasn’t what I expected it to be, but I still want to do it because I believe in everything that the Inquirer is doing. My fantasies stopped being fantasies. They turned into something that was undeniably real. The future stopped being distant and scary, it became reachable and exciting.”

In all, said Mangaluz, the experience wasn’t so much “a harsh slap of reality,” as it was a “reaffirmation of one’s dreams. ”