Sarah Bartlett is dean of the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in New York, which Knight Foundation supports to advance excellence in journalism and encourage newsroom diversity. 

When Founding Dean Stephen B. Shepard launched the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism in 2006, he was determined that one of our defining characteristics would be a commitment to pay a $3,000 stipend to any student whose summer internship (a required part of our program) was unpaid. In an industry where unpaid internships are all too common, he wanted there to be a level playing field for our economically diverse student body.

Related Link

“New diversity initiative offers paid New York internships to minority journalism students” – Press release (09/25/14)

Knight Foundation agreed to fund the internship program, a commitment that continued for three years. Since then, the school has raised money from private donors to ensure the program’s continuation. We believe no other graduate program has made that commitment to economic equity.

Today we are broadening the reach of our internship. Thanks to additional support from Knight, we are going to bring 20 rising seniors from historically black colleges, Hispanic-serving institutions and other organizations to New York for two months for an all-expenses paid summer internship. We’ll work with employers to identify great spots at both mainstream and startup media outlets and supplement that learning experience with instruction from our faculty. The top five students will then be offered full tuition to the CUNY Journalism School, if they choose to apply and are admitted. They’ll have two years to exercise that option, in case they would prefer to gain more work experience before attending graduate school.

The idea for internship program 2.0 grew out of a conversation I had last fall with Zita Arocha, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at El Paso. We were sharing details about our programs at a conference, and she expressed frustration at how few internship opportunities her students, most of whom are Latino, had in El Paso. I expressed frustration that we didn’t have more Latino applicants to our school. We fantasized about how wonderful it would be to bring students like hers to New York for paid summer internships. Having just been named the school’s next dean, I was also interested in acquainting them with our program in case they later became interested in graduate school.

A few months later, I had the opportunity to meet with Knight and the foundation embraced the idea with the same enthusiasm they had eight years earlier.  

We are blessed to have an ideal person on our staff to lead this new program. Joanna Hernandez, our director of career services, attended a similar internship program when she was new to the profession and remembers its transformative power. A former president of UNITY Journalists, Joanna is currently the National Association of Hispanic Journalists’ representative on the Accrediting Council on Education in Journalism and Mass Communications. Our new program has Knight funding for three years, and she is determined to make it such a success that it will become a permanent part of our mission, just as version 1.0 has become.