USC Journalism Students Cover Democratic National Convention

Our journalism students were all over Charlotte during the Democratic National Convention last week. (The picture above shows Jamie Hicks in the AP skybox. She would later report from the convention floor after first lady Michelle Obama’s speech.)

Dean Charles Bierbauer and I began work late last year on an internship program tied to the convention. Nineteen senior journalism students interned with six news organizations — Associated Press, CNN, National Journal, The Charlotte Observer, Raycom, and Time Warner Cable’s News 14 Carolina. I want to give special thanks to the AP and The Charlotte Observer; both went out of their way to give their interns a substantive experience. As usual, the students rose to the occasion. More pictures and details here.

And now a bit of commentary: I always say internships are valuable because students can get an up-close look at the good — and the bad. They can learn from both. At the convention, they saw lots of great deadline political journalism from six news organizations that had developed smart coverage plans that fit the needs of their audiences. But the students saw some other, unnamed news organizations waste a lot of valuable resources. As a political communications guy, I occasionally find myself defending the news value of political conventions. They are not what they used to be, obviously, but there is some modest value in allowing the modern convention to serve as a curtain-raiser on the Fall campaign. Yet do conventions require the number of journalists who flooded into Charlotte? Hardly. News organizations that are struggling to define themselves in the digital age need to think harder about how to add value for their readers and viewers. Duplicating political convention coverage that is readily available elsewhere is not the way to do that.