Next steps for interns with Rockton-Roscoe News

First of all, we're excited about your interest in working with Rockton-Roscoe News. With 30,000 readers each month, there's more to cover in Roscoe, Rockton, and South Beloit than we have time to cover. As one of our interns, you can practice writing, photos, sales, art, design, reporting, events, social media, video, sports, entertainment, marketing, management, coding, etc. We're eager to help you build your resume, so if you want any kind of experience in communications and media, we want to help you get it. If you have an ideas, questions, or suggestions, email editor@roscoenews.com or text 815-408-0140. Of course, we strongly encourage you to sign up for our daily email newsletter.

Communications skills are becoming more and more crucial in today's job market. In business, design, IT and entertainment, even in science and medicine, knowing how to communicate can be the key to success. And getting actual work experience (which we provide) is one of the most important steps in your career.

What to do first

• Fill out the signup information form. Tell us about yourself and what you're interested in doing with us. The Google Form makes it easy. Also, send us a picture of yourself. Email it to editor@roscoenews.com or text it to 815-408-0140. We need a headshot to put on your press pass.
• Create a free Ghost Pro account on this website so you can post articles, photos, and content on Rockton-Roscoe News. (Bonus points for your resume: if you want to tell employers you are familiar with Newspack as well as Ghost, sign up here too.) Fill out your profile, and your photo will appear as part of your byline, along with your name, on the stories you post.
• Get trained. Sign up for the free online Earn Your Press Pass training. The Illinois Press Association has agreed to give our high school interns access to take this training for free (instead of for hundreds of dollars). This is required by some media employers and is the official program offered by several state press associations to overcome the lack of trained young reporters. The training is self-paced, online, and designed to turn an ordinary person like you into a functioning newspaper reporter, with a practical, straight-forward and comprehensive approach. A sixteen-year-old in Kansas used what he learned to start his own news outlet. Topics:
  • Newspaper Jargon
  • Interviewing
  • Types of Stories
  • Writing Techniques
  • Associated Press Style
  • Editing
  • Journalist Rights and Ethics
  • Photography
• Keep in touch. Contact me by email at editor@roscoenews.com or by text at 815-408-0140. You can also email us individually at alycia@roscoenews.com, harold@roscoenews.com, or jean@roscoenews.com. We send out regular emails to our core staff with updates, story ideas, and questions. Let us know how often you want to receive them. Send me ideas about stories and projects you want to work on - that's called "pitching." I send ideas in each email, so you can reply and tell me which story you want to do - don't be shy.
• Get together in person. Invite your friends to come. We'll let you know when we're meeting next as a team, or you can suggest a time and place by texting 815-408-0140.

How you can start now

• Once you've started contributing regularly, you will get a laminated press pass with your name and picture. You can also get a custom email address, such as emma@roscoenews.com or aiden@roscoenews.com.
• Find a beat. Do you want to cover a particular sport or club or neighborhood? Can you interview a local business owner or get pictures? Is there a social issue that affects our community? What are people talking about? What do they need? Show our readers what it's like to be a high school student.
• Help with our community calendar. Volunteer to keep up with one set of events at one place: at the village hall, a live music venue, a school, or another place. Add their events to our calendar yourself or teach them how. Report on what's happening there.
• Take pictures or videos. Did you just see something that represents our community, or that people would like to see? Capture it and post it online. Jean says you can bring your video camera when she does one of her interviews (and then maybe she won't have to write the story!) We'd like to do more with Instagram and YouTube, and our TikTok account.
• Help design something: t-shirts, totes, pens, ads. Could we create infographics, news memes, or cartoons?
• Figure out your generation. One of the biggest challenges for any news media is how to market to young people. Where do you and your friends get your news and information? What do you think is the best way to engage high school and college students? Do we need to provide a different kind of product, besides a website?
• Help with social media. We want to post all our stories on social media, respond to comments and questions, etc. Sometimes I get too busy to do even that much. But we'd like to go beyond that. Tell us what you'd like to do. Could you be our public face on Snapchat at school? "Good question. I'll ask the principal and snap the answer later." You would probably word it differently.
• Cover a sport or a team: pick one. Report on the players and their games.
• Help with our most popular feature: our weekly death notices, which are seen by thousands. We get a weekly list from the county coroner with about 60 names. One person needs to go through that list each week and look for local people. Or you could subscribe to email notices from one of the local funeral homes and make a note of the local people who have died. You can write a one-sentence summary of the most interesting thing about them.
• Write about interesting people or places near you, such as a neighbor or local business. What do you want to report on?
• If you're interested in coding, we could use help customizing Ghost. It runs on Node.js (JavaScript) using Handlebars (also JavaScript), so you'll be very trendy.