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Many students ask how many internships they should get.
Decent programs make an internship a requirement.
Better programs require more than one.
And the best require more than one and help their students line them up.
But even the best programs might discourage you from taking "too many" internships. They do that for two reasons. One is that they have a hard time getting multiple internships for all their students, so they may try to tamp down the demand so that junior and seniors are not crowded by competition from talented forst- and second-year students.
Another reason is that some programs have legitimate reservations about how well new students will perform and whether that will hurt the school's reputation.
Students, not their schools, should be in charge of careers.
Erin Hill, director of the high school journalism program at the Detroit Free Press, advises her students to get seven internships during college. How in the world could they do that?
She advises them to focus on their studies the first year and to then get one after each year of college. That's four. She also recommends that they get part-time school year internships with local media companies. That makes seven.
The most I've ever seen? A public relations student at Wayne State University who graduated with 10.
Last I heard, The Columbia School of Journalism was slammed for this Saturday's job fair, They were expecting 110 companies -- the most ever -- and 205 job-seekers.
That's a record for recruiting companies.
I don't know how they do it in this economy.
A key characteristic of a good career services department at a J-school is how many companies come on campus to recruit its students.
Can anyone else boast this many?
MediaStorm creator Brian Storm, returned to his old J-school at the University of Missouri at Columbia, and took the campus by -- no, I am not going to say that.
Let's just say he was water to a room full of students, thirsting for long-form, storytelling journalism in the digital future.
On its Facebook page, MediaStorm, founded in 2005, says its "principal aim is to usher in the next generation of multimedia
storytelling by publishing social documentary projects incorporating
photojournalism, interactivity, animation, audio and video for
distribution across multiple media."
Storm has built a platform-agnostic company that builds substantive stories that attract audience and sponsors. He time shifts by looking for an aggregation of readers over time and not all at the launch. In fact, he often finds that viewership starts slow until buzz causes it to spike on the Web and it then settles in at a new, higher plateau.
Here are some of Storm's nuggets. They are not in chronological order:
"The place that I hope we're moving to is a far more collaborative place."
"There is no magic bullet."
This time in journalism "is like being at the beginning of the industrial revolution."
"Storytelling is not new. It's that the tools are so affordable."
"If you're a journalist and you're not doing a long-term project, you're cheating yourself."
"I would love to see newspapers stay connected to the high end ... we have to do what we're best at, which is telling important stories."
"The gatekeeper role of ABC and CBS is coming to a close."
"Every time yo break to a chapter (in a video), you're begging me to go to Facebook."
"I'm a big believer in if yo build it they will come."
"It would make sense to have a business class inside the journalism school."
"I was at a photo service for a few years and I really missed publishing. Now I have a press (the Web)."
"The next hire we're goingto make is a composer because music is so important to what we do."
"I don't care if you watch it on an iPhone, but this is really cool to be here and do this with all of you in front of a 12-foot screen. This is a communal experience."
Ball State University professor Scott Reinardy has posted his study of burnout among newspaper journalists.
It is worth noting that he was once a newspaper reporter and editor.
From his conclusions:
"Copy editors/page designers report higher rates of cynicism than
executive/managing editors, and news editors and executive/managing
editors report higher levels of efficacy than reporters. Journalists at
small newspapers reported higher levels of exhaustion than those in the
largest group, and younger journalists reported higher levels of
exhaustion than older journalists. Additionally, journalists expressing
intentions to leave the profession had significantly higher rates of
burnout than those not intending to leave."
Certainly, college students are burdened with a lot of reading and not much can be done about that. But do they need to be overloaded with so many books?
I am attending the O'Reilly Tools of Change conference in New York City this week. The new tools are all about book publishing, an industry that is feeling some of the same pressures as the news media and music industry.
Neera Khosla, a board member at the Nueva School in Hillsborough, Calif., was describing the work of the K-12 Foundation in creating "Flexbooks" and used a child's backpack, filled with books, to illustrate her point.
Ebooks and devices like Kindle are one of the subjects under discussion here. While they might not lighten the reading load, they can certainly lighten some backpacks. The day is coming when all of your school books will fit into a digital tablet.
I'm not betting that the workload will go down -- or the price -- but at least students will be able to stand up straight.
A new twist for me today: I met with a bunch of advertising students at Michigan State University's State News.
Some sharp people there, who seem to prefer the face-to-face sales and client solutions that newspapers do so much better than highly automated things like Google and CareerBuilder.
As much as things are changing, though, it seems they aren't changing.
One of the ad-sales students joked lamely that they don't know many people who work in the newsroom because they "aren't allowed in there."
C'mon, people! Journalists need to maintain their autonomy and independence, but we can pick up a lot of leads from ad sales people who are beating the streets every day -- WITHOUT succumbing to advertorials.
I asked my journalism students to write about their media habits. These are answers from two poles-apart perspectives.
Prefers the Web: "There's something about the font and the paper quality that makes me dizzy. There is just so much information and clutter that it is difficult to comprehend."
Prefers paper: "I couldn't read a whole newspaper's worth of material on a computer screen without getting a splitting headache."
Not all college students think alike. But all get headaches.
In "Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow's Big Changes", Mark J. Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne note
the preponderance of women in journalism schools, law schools, public relations and marketing.
Lead author Penn is the chief adviser to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign. In fact, he mentions her in the "Wordy Women" chapter.
It says that the wordy professions are a place where women could compete on an even basis with men and that women can supply missing perspectives. The book describes a tipping point of sorts that saw most men leave teaching to women and says that the same thing may be happening now in public relations and TB journalism.
 The University of Missouri-Columbia is better known for journalism than football -- until quite recently.
With the football team riding high and in position to play for the national title, 1968 Missouri J-school grad and ESPN Executive Editor John A. Walsh told the New York Times that the football team's No. 1 ranking is just "a publicity stunt to help the journalism school to draw attention to its 100th anniversary next fall."
A student asked me last week how important a person's journalim school is to a person's career.
I gave have my standard answer: I can find average candidates at great universities and great candidates at average universities.
The secret for students is to get into the best school they can -- and to the work as hard as they can.
I was just talking with a friend of mine who teaches journalism within a communications department. They are looking at curricula and the classic debate of theory vs. practice.
It occurred to me that while most oxymorons, like army intelligence, are at least two words long, there is a candidate for one-word oxymoron.
It is "collegial."
On campus at the Medill School of Journalism last week, I ran into two young friends. They are first-year students.
She asked him how hard his schedule is.
He said it is easier now that he has dropped his hardest class.
Later, we saw the professor in that class running on campus. The student said that the professor is good and that he was the only reason that the student almost stuck with it.
I wish he had.
I care more for people who work hard -- even if it hurts their grades. And truly good professors are golden.
Have you noticed how universities all over have eliminated one of our seasons?
The cold one.
Schools everywhere list three terms: fall, spring and summer.
It seems like a widespread case of wishful thinking.
We are right in the middle of what should be your busiest month for internship applications. The first deadlines will be Nov. 1, believe it or not.
I applaud journalism schools that make internships a requirement of graduating. I do not, however, approve of programs that do little to help students get them, prepare for them or evaluate them. Nor do I like program that tell students they don't need to chase internships until they are juniors or senikors.
Students should get as much experience as they can and schools should earn the tuition moneythey collect by helping with that.
The University of Missouri School of Journalism's Honor Medals went to an interesting group of people Tuesday.
They included a photojournalist, a couple of broadcasters, a citizen journalist, marketers and a food writer.
Each was scheduled to give a master class on campus.
Attention collegiate copy editors: The deadline for winning $1,000 or $2,500 in the American Copy Editors Society headline writing contest is Oct. 15. Go to www.copydesk.org.
Who knows? Your pay per word could putyo at the top of the journalism game.
I don't like ratings of academic programs.
After more than 15 years of interviewing on college campuses, I am convinced that rankings mean very 
little. Wonderful talent has come from no-name schools and great programs have produced duds. Far more important than your program's reputation or ranking is your individual effort/
So, I read with interest the Michigan Daily article by Daniel Strauss that the Ross School of Business' MBA program has slips in The Wall Street Journal rankings from first to seventh.
The WSJ ranking is based on reports from 4,430 business company recruiters, who seem to have felt that the UM students were arrogant. Dean Robert Dolan said it might just be that the students received so many offers they turned down a lot of the recruiters. Well, that culd be. But he added, "I will be in touch with the people who did the survey and ask them for information on what we're doing and what we need to do."
Good, non-defensive response. But still dont like ratings.
(Michigan Daily photo by Shay Spaniola)
One career service staffer's favorite statement of the fall: "I don't know why they have to judge me by their standards."
Response Option 1: "Did you hear what you just said?"
Response Option 2: "If this is going to be a venting session, just blog about it and I'll ready it later."
The Medill School has to be the most talked-about journalism school in the country theses days.
John Levine's full-speed-ahead plan to integrate journalism, marketing and technology has ruffled students and alumni alike.
The latest examination is in this month's issue of ChicagoMag.com. Both sides of the debate seem to be calling the focus of Medill teaching a moral issue.
A fresh batch of students will be arriving in a little more than two weeks. They will be the first to go through the new program, start to finish.
Hats off to the students and instructors in the National Journalism Institute at Northwestern University.
The 88 high school students who attended the summer camp collaborated on some really great multi-media material. They're just what we need. But do we have to wait until they graduate?
Check out their work.
Nicole Wong, who will join the Boston Globe on Sept. 17, was politely holding off on spreading the news until her new employer could announce it.
But her borther broke the news first -- on his Facebook account. Who would have thought ... ?
But we do now. Another sign of the times.
You can just about feel the vibrations. Journalism classes are starting to resume (we just heard from a new student at the University of Miccouri-Columbia) and journalism students across this great land will soon be cracking the books again. (Well, the ones at Medill still have to wait a few weeks.)
Good luck to all!
The parade of professionals joining the faculty at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Commnication keeps growing.
Former CNN anchor Aaron Brown will become a permanent faculty member in January.
According to the Phoenix Business Journal, Brown is the 12th professor to join the school in two years. Other big names include former Minneapolis Star Tribune Editor Tim McGuire, BET Vice President Retha Hill and former Akron Beacon Journal Publisher Jim Crutchfield.
Credit Dean Christopher Callahan, who joined the program from the University of Maryland in 2005.
You can practically feel the brainwaves.
Seven journalism programs are meeting this month at Ithaca College to hash out ideas for new methods for teaching digital journalism. They are supposed to offer their ideas at the Online News Association conference in Toronto in October.
The seven schools are Ithaca College, Michigan State University, the University of Nevada at Las Vegas, the University of Kansas, Kansas State, Western Kentucky University and St. Michael's College.
These seven were chosen to share in a Knight Foundation News Challenge grant of $230,000 to create 'incubators' to foster creative thinking about solutions to digital news problems.
ADDITIONAL NOTE: If you're not Canadian but plan to go to the Online News Association conference in Toronto, make sure your passport is up to date. The rules are getting tighter and the lines are getting longer.
This week I met with the Free Press apprentices, 10 people heading off to nine schools. (Two are going into the Medill School at Northwestern University.
They asked what I will be looking for when I visit campuses in the fall.
I advised them to learn as much as they can about journalistic fundamentals, using new tools and developing audiences.
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