As I sit at my desk typing this out, I reminisce about all the good experiences I had with my internship at the Marietta Monitor. Primarily, I worked as a staff writer, but I also helped with photography and delivering the newspaper to local businesses. The Monitor gave me some valuable experiences, access to great articles, and taught me some life lessons I will forever cherish.
When I first walked in the door of the Marietta Monitor, I really didn’t know what to expect. I have done a previous internship at Madill Record, but I knew that this experience would be different. Marietta is a town that I had known my whole life but never truly knew what it was like here.
I quickly learned that Marietta is a town that embraces its newspaper like I had never seen before. The community support was astonishing, and that is because of the quality of work provided by the Marietta Monitor. While in this role, it was up to me to help continue the reputation of the Monitor, and I believe I did this job to the best of my abilities.
During the internship, I got to meet with a famous county music star’s brother. James Jennings, who is kin to Waylon Jennings, came into the office to see if we had any stories over their grandfather.
Allegedly, the grandfather was a U.S. Marshall who had shot a man in Marietta sometime in the 1900’s to 1910’s. The Marietta Monitor has been in operation since 1895, so this was not an uncommon request for us to locate these old articles.
Unfortunately, we were unable to find the story over their grandfather. This was still a once in a lifetime experience to meet and share stories with James.
My favorite article that I wrote for the Marietta Monitor was a feature on Marietta’s High School football team. As some of you know, I am an avid football fan, but my love for the sport is not what made this story so fascinating.
In this story, I got to inform the local community on why the Marietta Indians are destined for improvement this upcoming season. Marietta has had only one winning season in the last ten years, and that has caused low morale for the team and the community. I wanted to give the citizens of Marietta hope for their upcoming season, because Marietta’s Head Coach Alex Doby sold me on how he would make this year’s team successful.
Coach Doby has changed the attitude and drive of this team based on his coaching philosophy. These changes and his story will drive anyone into believing this team will finally have the success they have desired. This article has made me a fan of Marietta football, despite my hometown being a divisional rival for them.
The biggest thing I learned during my time at the Monitor was what community journalism is. One of my tasks as an intern was to read “Community Journalism” written by Jock Lauterer. While I dreaded the book when I first opened it, I quickly realized how important this book would be to my understanding of journalism.
Community journalism is consistent with newspapers with less than 50,000 people in the area and contains mostly local news. The purpose of community journalism is to focus on local news rather than state, national, or world news. According to the book, approximately 97% of newspapers in America fall in this category.
Why is this information important? For me, I needed to understand this concept because it is what my career choice is based around. Whether I am a staff writer for a medium-sized newspaper organization or a managing editor for a small newspaper company, both opportunities fall in line with this idea.
“Our job is to cover the everyday lives of ordinary people,” quoted Jock Lauterer. Whenever I receive my communications degree, I want to jump into the journalism field and provide news content for as many people as possible.
I have always had a passion for providing help to everyone I can, and this career would stay contingent on that. I would be able to write about the lives of everyday people in the community and benefit them with news coverage they would have trouble finding on their own. When I understood what community journalism is, I found what I wanted my purpose in life to be.
Without the internship at the Marietta Monitor, I may have never come to this conclusion of where I should direct my life.
Gary Jackson is a third-year Communication major at the University of Science and Arts of Oklahoma.
