Recruitment decisions may have been posted on the door of Kerckhoff 118 in week 2, but the process of joining the Daily Bruin is far from over for the 2016 fall intern class. Before new staffers are able to work for the paper, Daily Bruin interns must go through a dozen hours of weekend training with professional journalists, as well as attend a two-hour media law training.
These hours mark only the beginning of what, for some interns, will become their primary extracurricular activity at UCLA.
Across all departments, getting into the Daily Bruin is no walk in the park. This past quarter, we received 464 applications and accepted 232 of them – a 50 percent overall acceptance rate. Our most applied to sections were Online and Opinion, both with acceptance rates of approximately 40 percent.
It may come as a surprise that there is a high interest in joining the Online department since it’s a non-writing section, but that trend is actually the same as past recruitment cycles. You may not think “experience in web design and user interface” when working for a college newspaper, but working for Online gives many students hands-on knowledge in an area of programming for which UCLA does not offer courses.
As a student group with hundreds of staffers and a handful of editors, the Daily Bruin rivals other large groups on campus in size, including Model United Nations and USAC’s Student Wellness Commission. Given the area and scope of UCLA and the surrounding city, there’s quite literally a lot of ground to cover when it comes to reporting, and our staff has the manpower to match.
As most of you know from attending a large public school, such sheer size comes with logistical issues, and the organizational structure at The Bruin is no exception. Each section’s editor team, usually comprised of an editor and one or more assistant editors, must onboard the new intern class to the various programs we use to string The Bruin together, from Slack, to Camayak, to internal sites that make up the behind the scenes of the paper you pick up while walking on Bruin Walk.
As the new interns go on to write, take photos and create content in their sections, they’ll slowly get the hang of things. The news cycle is 24 hours, seven days a week, and it can take a while to get used to balancing the ever-constant pace of the newsroom with midterms, assignments and readings.
The end product, however, is worth it. The Daily Bruin is the only remaining daily newspaper in the UC system, and we’ve won numerous awards over the years at the state, regional and national levels. As we navigate the uncertain future of journalism in general, we’re glad our readers and interns alike support our endeavors.