PRINCETON, N.J. — The Dow Jones News Fund is sponsoring three alumni of its college internship program to attend SRCCON in Portland, Oregon, Thursday and Friday this week.
Journalists Kaitlin Jansen, Ebony Martin and Zara Stone were selected through an essay competition for recent DJNF college interns. The News Fund made these scholarships available to recent graduates to better prepare them to face modern newsrooms challenges.
SRCCON is a conference produced by Knight-Mozilla OpenNews for developers, designers, and data analysts in newsrooms – and many others in allied roles.
Kaitlin Jansen, a reporter for The Herald-Sun in Durham, North Carolina, and a 2014 news editing intern at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, received a scholarship to ramp up her coding and data skills to bring back to her newsroom.
Jansen wrote in her essay, “I want to learn more ways to be innovative and catch us up to changes in the field.”
“I think the future is bright for media as a whole, and I want to learn more about web-based content and opportunities for the rest of my career.”
Ebony Martin, a Digital Content Specialist for the United Federation of Teachers in New York and a 2014 news editing intern at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, is attending SRCCON to find new ways to analyze data and report complex stories that impact education policy.
“I would like to learn about different tools and techniques journalists can use to become visual storytellers. I am also interested in discovering more about how programming can play a part in the process,” Martin wrote.
“My goal is to learn how to organize data in visual ways that appeal to readers on the Internet.”
Zara Stone is a freelance multimedia journalist based in San Francisco and a 2013 digital media intern at The Wall Street Journal. Zara is hoping to boost her data skills at SRCCON and learn new tips and digital tools that can augment her reporting.
Learning to mine the web for data on her own will add a missing layer to her freelance business, she wrote, “I’ve had so much information come to me through a FOIA that it was unusable as I didn’t know how to break it down.”
“As a freelancer I have to be self-sufficient and don’t have a team to work with, and data adds a level that’s often missing from freelance work.”
The News Fund plans to offer more opportunities for former and current interns to attend media technology conferences where they can upgrade their skills.
