Internships in Chile

At Southern Pacific Review we welcome interns to write news and do reporting about events in Chile.  This is an unpaid position. It fills school requirements for an internship abroad and helps college graduates who are trying to break into journalism gain experience.

The Death of Print Journalism

We know that the journalism business is turned upside down now.  The major sites for news today are Facebook and Google.  But those, your journalism professor would say, are not news sites.

The for-profit news business is almost dead because Facebook and Google have take almost all the advertising revenue and few people read print publications.  That’s why so many print and online news and general interest sites have gone out of business or get by on donations.  Even those remaining sites that have tried to expand to stem the hemorrhage of ad dollars, like The Guardian, have had to retrench and lay off. Some cities in the USA do not even have a local newspaper anymore. Or what they have is a shell of their former self.

How to Start you Career as a Journalist

So, if you are looking to make a career in journalism you need to forget about The Washington Post and consider finding some niche to differentiate yourself among the huge pile of resumes.  Specialize. Reuters is hiring, as the new news model for The Washington Post and others is to pay wire services like that for articles instead of staffing their own overseas or even domestic news bureaus.

The other niche that will never go away is something like writing for industry publications, like oil and gas and, of course, computers. Computer journalism is difficult to break into because there are too many people interested in that.  But there are hundreds of other fields, like mining, shipping, or salmon fish farming, all of which you could experience first hand in Chile. That might not sound glamorous, but writing about topics like that pays the bills and will become interesting to you as you do it. The other option is to write for a PR firm.

But to get in the door at any of these places you need experience.

Internships with Southern Pacific Review  

We are the only English language publication left in business in Chile that devotes itself to writing news about Chile.  There are others devoted to, for example, fly fishing. The reason for that is we are non-profit and even non-revenue.  We don’t even accept Google ads.  It’s just not viable to be in the news business in that way anymore.  So we do it for fun.

Work From Anywhere

We need interns to pour over the Chilean news and write summaries for us.  We only need one or two interns at a time, as we publish only a couple of articles per week, preferring quality over quantity.

We need news articles on Chile.  If you have a flair for writing and write well then you could go beyond that and write essays, such as write about your travels here, or weigh in on culture issues.  It all depends on your skill, your devotion, and your way with words.

Stay with us for 3 months or stay for a year.  Work from overseas if you want and live anywhere in Chile you want.  We all work remotely.  So there’s no need decamp to and live in the polluted crowded city of Santiago when you could live, say, in Patagonia, the desert, or the beach. Network with others and make friends.

We only need 10-20 hours of your time per week, or less.  So you can gain experience that you need for your school internship requirement or job prospects, yet not have to work a full-time job.

What do Interns Do?

You need to be able to read Spanish and write English well.  You do not need to be able to speak it, as you would not understand the Chilean dialect anyway, at least at first. You should be a reader, as only people who read write well.

What you will do initially is write summaries of the Spanish language news. That means read the newspapers here, online or in print, and write summaries of their articles, and watch TV news.  Fill out the details with information you research with Google using Spanish or English sources.  Write 500-800 word pieces. Publish one article per week, two if you feel ambitious.

To do more in-depth writing, it would take you some months to get familiar with national and local issues to write about those.  So you could not do any original reporting or analysis at first.  But stick with us a while—leave when you want to—and you could do that. We will teach you.

So get in touch.  Write to our publisher.  That would be me:  werowe@walkerrowe.com.

Walker Rowe,

Publisher