Skip to main content

Senior Shares Lessons Learned as a Young Woman Working in Journalism

Lauren Carroll, a Baldwin Scholar, has spent the summer working as a newsroom intern at The Tampa Bay Times

This summer, I've been working for The Tampa Bay Times – called The St. Petersburg Times until recently - as a newsroom intern at their main bureau in St. Petersburg, Florida. I'm lucky to be here; it’s a paper with a strong reputation, numerous Pulitzer Prize winners on staff, and optimism about the future of journalism. I'm learning so much about the field and what kind of journalist I want to be, and I'm realizing again and again with every story that this is the right career for me.

Even though The Tampa Bay Times is such a renowned news organization, the editors trust the interns with the same assignments they would give any full-time reporter. I started out chasing storms and writing articles about stingray safety, but lately I've been working on stories about the upcoming mayoral election and the complicated history of parole in Florida; I even got to meet the governor for an assignment.

Locally, the Times has an audience of about 1.7 million who still see the value in a local paper. But they often produce work that has national reach, sometimes in conjunction with well-respected national news organizations like CNN or the Center for Investigative Reporting. PolitiFact – the popular Pulitzer Prize-winning website that rates politicians' statements on a scale of "pants-on-fire" to "true" – was born in the Times newsroom.

There are also a lot of Duke connections at the Times. Tons of Blue Devils have made pit stops here during their journalism careers and there are several alumni on staff. The managing editor’s son will be a freshman at Duke this year, the founder of PolitiFact, Bill Adair, is now a professor, and a former publisher was a Duke trustee.

Any Baldwin Scholar would make a great reporter. Through the program, we learn how to avoid mistakes many women make in professional settings, like up-talking, over-apologizing, and using body language that makes you small. In journalism – still a male-dominated field – you have to be assertive in order to get the assignments you want and to pull information from tight-lipped sources. I often think back to Baldwin lessons when I'm competing with five other (older, male) reporters to catch a politician before he gets into his car or when I want my editor to know that I'm ready to take on more challenging stories.

The skills I'm learning this summer are applicable in any field. Beyond the obvious — writing and multimedia — journalism improves your critical thinking, researching, time management, and understanding about history and current events. It’s great to work in a newsroom where the staff — even if they don't know what the future holds for a physical paper — knows there will always be a need for good journalism. To prepare, they encourage reporters to make videos, take their own photos, use Twitter and explore any possible vehicle for getting a story to the public. I can't wait to bring the lessons I've learned at the Times back to The Chronicle this fall.

I've also been living with a Tar Heel this summer, which has forced me to learn a lot about tolerance.