Student newsroom internships

Funded: openDemocracy

openDemocracy is an independent website founded in 2000 that publishes articles under Creative Commons licensing as a counter to corporate media. It stimulates transnational inclusive debates and offers new ideas backed by sound research. openDemocracy is committed to defending human rights and civil liberties, to empowering marginalised voices and voicing criticism of vested interests, and to promoting global peace and reconciliation. It publishes thousands of authors from around the world, both well established and new, and makes them available to readers worldwide, including a significant number of opinion-makers. openDemocracy has millions of users from all continents. It has a federal structure, which includes self-funded and editorially independent sections.

Project

This project involved Open Democracy setting up and delivering a pilot project for a new student internship scheme. Open Democracy collaborated with Check Global in 2019 to launch a call targeting students at the Lebanese University, and the wider cohort of MA students studying journalism at the Lebanese University’s Faculty of Information and Communication (2019-2020), to apply for an internship program at Open Democracy. Open Democracy hen hosted and trained (February 2020) three students for a period of three months as part of this internship program. They participated in virtual trainings once a week, learning about media ethics, digital security, investigative journalism, and open-source investigations, in the lead-up to preparing their own piece. Each student will be expected to publish at least one investigative piece by the end of their internship. This internship has allowed participating students to be mentored by and work with a renowned media company thus gaining an understanding of the newsroom atmosphere as well as practical journalistic skills. The outbreak of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, has however forced these interns to go into self-quarantine in March 2020 while on their internship, as mandated by the Lebanese government. These safety precautions have put a damper on the students’ ability to work on their reports, prompting openDemocracy to extend their internship till June 2020 instead of May 2020.

Article published on Open Democracy

Article published on Open Democracy