Company Description
Founded in 1884 as the West Hillsborough Times, the Tampa Bay Times is Florida’s largest newspaper. It has chronicled the Tampa Bay region’s growth with outstanding journalism, winning 10 Pulitzers and numerous other awards along the way. Visit us online at www.tampabay.com.
Job Qualifications
Sophomores, juniors, seniors and graduate students interested in careers in the media/news & information are welcome to apply. Applicants must have at least one professional internship and experience at a college publication is a plus.
Paid or Credit Only
Paid. The pay for a summer internship is $450 for a 40-hour week. A six-month internship is $525 for a 40-hour week. A one-year internship is $625 for a 40-hour week. You will not be eligible to receive benefits.
Duration
Internships run 12 weeks, May-August. The News Photo department has 6-month internships: January-June and July-December. See the photo job description for more information. Six-month and year-long internships are determined on an individual basis, depending on needs in the newsroom. Contact Roy LeBlanc, assistant metro editor, at rleblanc@tampabay.com for more information.
Deadlines
Nov. 1 for newsroom positions. If you are seeking a photo internship, you should aim to meet the Nov. 1 deadline. For positions in all other departments, the deadline is Feb. 15. Our internships are competitive so you would be smart to apply well before the deadline. If you applied for the positions with a Nov. 1 deadline, you will receive an email by mid-January telling you whether or not you have been hired. If you applied for a position with a Feb. 15 deadline, you will hear by early April.
Location
West Coast of Florida / Tampa Bay. Intern reporters typically are placed in St. Petersburg, Clearwater, Tampa, Wesley Chapel and Brooksville. Business department internships are typically in the St. Petersburg or Tampa offices.
You must have a reliable, personal means of transportation that will allow you to travel within the Tampa Bay market as the work requires.
How to apply:
Fill out this application. If you have questions when filling out the form, email TBTimesInternship@tampabay.com.
Local News Reporter
Your job could include covering breaking and police news, general assignment, beats such as government, courts and schools and community news features. All local reporters file stories and regular updates for our website, tampabay.com, and take photos and videos. You also can develop enterprise stories. Your work will appear in local sections, the full-run Metro and A sections and online. You might work in any of our seven offices in four counties in the Tampa Bay area. If you are a one-year intern, you might work in more than one office, depending on available opportunities.
Skills required:
Previous reporting experience (professional internships covering local news preferred).
Good writing skills, including attention to accuracy, grammar and spelling.
Good news judgment.
Comfort with digital platforms and social media.
Pluses: Public records knowledge and foreign language skills.
For one-year applicants only: You should have your bachelor’s degree at the time you start, or be in a position to complete it remotely in the short term.
Business News Reporter
From tourism to housing development to the job market, business news is one of the most important topics for our readers. You will cover, for online and print, local and occasionally national business stories on topics including retail sales, real estate, banking, tourism, aviation and transportation, personal technology, utilities, local corporate headquarters and more. These internships are in our downtown St. Petersburg or downtown Tampa offices. Your work will appear on our website, tampabay.com, and throughout our paper, from 1A to the business section to local pages.
Skills required:
Previous reporting experience. (Previous experience covering business news is helpful. Previous professional internships preferred.)
Good writing skills, including attention to accuracy, grammar and spelling.
Good news judgment.
Comfort with digital platforms and social media.
Pluses: Knowledge of business and financial reports and public records.
For one-year applicants only: You should have your bachelor’s degree at the time you start, or be in a position to complete it remotely in the short term.
Copy Editor
The copy desk is one of the busiest staffs at the paper. You’ll edit staff and wire copy for all of our print and online editions. You’ll work with assigning editors or reporters to solve problems. In addition to writing captivating print headlines, you’ll write web headlines that will ensure good search results. Our web operations are integrated into every department, so you’ll also help create online photo galleries and promote our content through social media. You may also learn to update landing pages for our website using Autonomy CMS.
Skills required:
Excellent grasp of grammar, spelling, AP style.
Good news judgment with an ability to spot holes in stories and work with others to fix them.
Top-notch headline writing skills, including knowledge of how to apply SEO.
Comfort with digital platforms and social media.
Ability to edit in Adobe InCopy is a plus.
For one-year applicants only: You should have your bachelor’s degree at the time you start, or be in a position to complete it remotely in the short term.
Designer
This is a sample of what a design intern has done: created pages for our weekly entertainment and arts tab, helped with photo shoots, designed Sunday Business covers, produced weekly regional sections, created prototypes for new standing features, and designed the Sports sections on Monday and Tuesday nights. (Oh, and she won her first SND Award of Excellence.) You’ll find yourself just as busy. You’ll work side-by-side with editors, reporters and photographers producing weekly features and entertainment sections, regional sections, and three editions of the daily Metro, Business and A sections.
Skills required:
Excellent grasp of clean, thoughtful design.
Good news judgment to create proper hierarchy on a page.
Ability to juggle several tasks at once.
Comfort with digital platforms and social media.
Ability to design in Adobe InDesign is a plus.
Knowledge of Photoshop and Illustrator is a plus.
For one-year applicants only: You should have your bachelor’s degree at the time you start, or be in a position to complete it remotely in the short term.
Web Producer
This job offers opportunities to gain and polish skills in curating a website, creating web-exclusive content and assisting with social media campaigns that engage readers. On any given day, assignments might involve editing and updating the site, researching and building a photo gallery, rewriting a press release, brainstorming ideas for a video, researching and assisting with shareable graphics, reporting for quick-hit enterprise stories or assisting our social media team. At the end of your internship, you will have an array of digital and print work to enhance your portfolio.
Skills required:
Writing and editing in short forms: captions, summary graphs and web headlines with good SEO.
Idea-generator with ability to handle multiple assignments within a given time frame.
Social media skills and familiarity with best practices.
Self-starter who can work with minimal direction and pick up new computer programs quickly.
Strong journalism skills and news judgment.
Helpful but not mandatory: A smattering of html knowledge to troubleshoot situations.
Familiarity with Photoshop.
Experience with digital tools such as ScribbleLive.
For one-year applicants only: You should have your bachelor’s degree at the time you start, or be in a position to complete it remotely in the short term.
News Art
We often adapt our news art internship to match the skills of the right candidate. Are you an illustrator? We have plenty for you to do. Are you more into infographics and maps? That will work, too. Love to create interactive graphics for the web? We’d love to have you. We’re willing to work with your strengths and offer coaching in the areas where you need more experience. We involve our news artists in planning meetings to discuss potential graphics or illustrations and keep in touch throughout the process. The work can range from a locator map for a daily story to complex explainer graphics for a project. As much as possible, we encourage the artists to do their own reporting for their projects.
Skills required:
Excellent grasp of the concepts of good journalism.
Attention to accuracy.
Ability to juggle several tasks at once.
Skillful in the use of Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop.
Comfort with digital platforms.
Ability to design in Adobe InDesign is a plus.
For one-year applicants only: You should have your bachelor’s degree at the time you start, or be in a position to complete it remotely in the short term.
Web Designer
Being a web producer/designer on tampabay.com means wearing many hats. Sometimes we code while other times we produce graphics (interactive or static). Sometimes we collaborate with video productions, while other times we are involved with project solutions and strategy. Our collective mission is figuring out the best way to tell stories digitally. The Times is open to new ideas for presenting and communicating great stories. The folks you’ll work with here have deep knowledge and experience – from award winning writers and editors to renowned photographers, videographers and designers. If you can bring your “webby” skills and ideas to the table, we can make sure you’ll find engaging work.
Skills required:
Bachelor’s degree or degree that can be completed remotely during the course of your internship. (For one year interns). Degree or degree-seeking student for semester internships.
Excellent grasp of html/css.
Comfortable with js & jquery.
Good feel for information/data visualization and web-based tools for integration.
Good web design and UI/UX sense.
Comfortable with CMS environments.
Good news judgment and feel for display hierarchy.
Proficiency with Adobe CS5 or 6 tools: Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver (or equivalent).
Video/audio editing capabilities a plus.
Data Reporter
The Tampa Bay Times data team is looking for fantastic data journalists, web designers and news-minded hackers to be interns or fellows with us.
Our seven-person team analyzes data to inform and improve the world. We also use web development to experiment with better ways to tell news stories online. And we write computer code that helps our traditional newsroom do impactful journalism in a digital era — in both how we find stories and how we present them.
Our interns tackle big, ambitious projects as full-fledged members of the team. The intern who started here in January spent the last 10 months analyzing data and building graphics to show what happened to black children when our schools resegregated. The intern who started in June has rewritten much of our longform-story infrastructure, learned to both analyze data and make d3 charts, and shared bylines on front-page stories about presidential fundraising.
Our next intern could be a great reporter who finds watchdog stories in spreadsheets. Or a web designer / graphics maven with innovative ideas about digital storytelling. Or a statistics / computer science student who wants to use those skills to inform the public. You don’t have to be a journalist right now. You do have to want to be one.
You must have skill at data reporting, web development, infographics or statistics. Aside from that, we have one main criteria: You’re already great at one thing. You want to be great at more.
Coming here means joining a newsroom filled with young talent and seasoned veterans willing to mentor. You get to live by the beach and cover Florida, America’s most divine state for news, where a mayoral race being decided with a deck of cards was the second-craziest thing that happened last week.
Sound like you? Send us:
A resume
A cover letter. Tell us what your dream internship on our team would look like. Then pick one thing from this list of projects our paper has done, and tell us how your skills could have helped make it better.
Clips/work samples. A clip could be a published story, a web page you built, a graphic you made or your GitHub account. It could be a crazy multitenancy Node.js app. It could be a really gripping flowchart. Show us your best work, whatever form it takes.
PolitiFact Researcher/Reporter
Wanted: Students who want to help sort out the truth in politics.
Caution: This isn’t an easy job!
PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning fact-checking website of the Tampa Bay Times, is looking for help fact-checking politicians and pundits. Our interns get their hands dirty. They help find facts to check, assist in the research and ultimately write their own fact-checks. Interns will develop a packet of clips that will show their reporting depth and writing skill.
Work is potentially Sunday-Thursday (we fact-check the Sunday morning news shows), but we can be flexible on that point.
We’re a small team, so we’re looking for someone who is ready to make an impact.
Qualifications: The ideal candidate will be passionate about the news and politics and have journalism experience. Communication skills are very important, as is the ability to work effectively as part of a team and independently. Background with using social media in a professional setting is a plus, as are any video editing skills or experience with data visualization.
The position may be based in St. Petersburg, Fla., or in our Washington, D.C., bureau depending on our needs.
News Photographer
As a news photo intern, you’ll have the same responsibilities as any other staffer using still photographs, video and social media to cover daily assignments, sports and spot news. Interns also will have the opportunity to work on longer term projects. We provide camera bodies, lenses, laptops and mileage reimbursement at .30 a mile. You will be based out of either the Tampa or St. Petersburg office. The ideal candidate has a strong visual eye, is adept at handling stills and video, is passionate about community journalism, can be put into any situation and adapt quickly and be a part of a strong team. Interns must have an understanding of social media as it relates to visual reporting. Candidates also will be expected to enterprise ideas that are both daily and long term and work with editors to see them through both online and in print. Interns must be proficient in PhotoShop, PhotoMechanic or equivalent, iMovie, Adobe Premiere and/or Final Cut. Interns must also understand how to send photos using FTP, along with writing clear and concise captions.
This is a paid six-month internship. Recent graduates or upper level undergraduates who are able to take six months away from classes should apply. Minimum requirement is at least one to two professional shooting internships with a newspaper or equivalent. Interns also must have a reliable vehicle and a valid U.S. driver’s license.
For more information about news photo internships, contact Skip O’Rourke, senior photo editor, at sorourke@tampabay.com or (813) 226-3364. A one-year internship also is available, with a start date of July. Contact Skip O’Rourke for details.