Some of these colleges, such as Arizona State, are not considered intensely selective in general as a four-year college in this analysis, although it is widely considered to have a good journalism program.

How journalism suffers without diversity

The diversity of an intern class can be important in the makeup of the newsroom. We found that at least 29% of the Journal’s summer 2018 interns got full-time jobs, based off on a LinkedIn analysis and a survey filled out by some of that year’s interns.

And when newsrooms aren’t diverse, journalism suffers. Stories are missed, communities are uncovered, scandals unbroken.

U.S. newsrooms have long been overwhelmingly white and unrepresentative of the nation’s increasing diversity.

A lack of diversity among journalists was a central reason why the news media failed in its job reporting on the underlying issues behind riots in the 1960s, the Kerner Commission, a presidential commission, found. Notably, the Los Angeles Times in 1965 had no black reporters when the Watts Riots began, and a black advertising salesman offered to go into the riot zone.

Voices, an independent student-run news project that publishes during the Asian American Journalists Association convention, has found that the leadership of the nation’s largest newspapers were still disproportionately white. Voices has also compared union studies of pay at seven U.S. newsrooms, and found that all of them alleged that men made more than women and that whites made more than people of color.

It’s important that interns be drawn from many parts of American society, said Savannah Eadens, a Columbia College Chicago student originally from central Iowa who interned at the Chicago Tribune last year.

The central Iowa native, who now interns at the Louisville Courier-Journal, said the town she grew up in had a population of 15,000, most of whom voted for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election.

Her perspective and nuanced understanding of that part of the country could be an asset to mainstream news organizations who overlooked regions of voters in the U.S. during election coverage, Eadens said.

Hiring managers should make an intentional move to hire from other schools, such as smaller, public and community colleges, said Adrienne Shih, an audience engagement intern at the Washington Post last year and a UC Berkeley alumna, and now an audience engagement editor at the Los Angeles Times’ Washington bureau. “It really widens reporting, angles and perspective.”

‘Creating a caste system’

The idea that the way you’re supposed to go into journalism — through a high-end journalism school — is “basically creating a caste system for young reporters,” Gustavo Arellano, a features writer at the Los Angeles Times and former editor of the OC Weekly, said.

“It discourages you.”

It’s not just The New York Times, he said. Other elite institutions, like his own Los Angeles Times, too often recruit journalists from the same schools and social milieu, he said, making the places a rarefied bubble.

When we spoke with last summer’s interns from the seven news organizations we examined, we asked if they heard about Kim’s tweet; almost all were aware of it.

Orla McCaffrey, a markets intern in the Wall Street Journal summer 2018 intern class, said she went to Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York because she feared the lack of a brand name for her undergraduate school, Binghamton University, would hurt her chances in the industry.

“It feels like we have had to work twice as hard to prove that we are good,” McCaffrey, now a business reporting intern at the Dallas Morning News, said of herself and her undergraduate classmates.

Laura Newberry found herself in a similar predicament when she graduated at the top of her class when she earned her bachelors in journalism at the University of Central Florida. While she was able to get a job post-grad, it was at a smaller paper.

While Newberry said there’s nothing wrong with working at a smaller paper, she felt like attending a more recognizable school would have secured her a position at a bigger paper.

“I would have been able to have skipped a step,” she said, and she would not have gone to grad school.

She took out student loans and earned a master’s in journalism at UC Berkeley, interned at the Los Angeles Times last summer and was subsequently hired full-time as a Metro reporter.

Some journalists familiar with Kim said they were surprised at the tweet.

“Something that he would always tell us during the internship program was — it really didn’t matter what school you went to, it really only mattered about the content that you produce,” said Adriana Lacy, an audience engagement intern at the New York Times last summer.

“It was definitely an uncharacteristic tweet, because we definitely didn't feel that way when we were interning,” said Lacy, an alumna of Penn State University who is now an audience engagement editor at the Los Angeles Times.

‘Certain schools might stand out’

Schools can help give students a boost.

Len Downie Jr., executive editor of the Washington Post between 1991 and 2008, said he got his first foot in the Post newsroom after he was picked by his Ohio State University journalism school administrator, George Kienzle, to shadow journalists there for that summer.

Kienzle had earlier secured an agreement with a Post senior editor for the position. Downie went on to write 13 stories that summer and was later hired. He remembers being the only intern that didn’t attend a school on the East Coast.

Helping Downie, he thought, was his experience and education at Ohio State. The student newspaper, The Lantern, was run like a professional daily newspaper, he said, and many of his journalism professors were working journalists.

But it wasn’t the schools that helped most other students get Post internships back then, he said.

“They weren’t picking them because of the schools, as far as I can tell. I was only an intern — so I’m guessing a lot of this from what I heard — but it seems that it was sons and daughters of friends of the editors, and so the school was secondary,” Downie said.

Downie wasn’t concerned at that time about whether the system of choosing interns was fair.

“I didn’t care. I got to be an intern, I did well, and I got a job,” Downie said. “And then it evolved into a very organized, meritorious, merit-based intern program over the years,” around the time Ben Bradlee became editor and Howard Simon became managing editor.

Today, Downie, professor of journalism at Arizona State and now writing a memoir of his career at the Post, thinks that a school someone attends does matter a little bit.

But when he headed the Post, hiring interns and reporters was not about a school’s reputation, or if someone went to a journalism school.

“What matters is the work,” he said. “You got to submit clips, or you got to submit photos, if you're looking for a photographer position. And over time you would see that if you selected people based on their work that certain schools might stand out as being the source of a lot of interns.”

Pay

In reporting this story, we also looked at whether a lack of adequate pay proved a barrier to interns. We asked interns for information on what they made, and this is what they told us: