Youngest PLCA intern in decades reflects

     ​When I first walked up the steps to the main entrance to the state house, I had a sense of my own abilities as a reporter that was probably a little unearned, a little inflated.
     I had taken plenty of courses that ran me through the intricacies of newswriting. I had worked as a fact checker during the semester prior and I had some clips from my school paper, some of which, I maintain, are pretty good. I thought I was well-suited, if a little tentative, to cover state government that summer.
     So it was probably for the best that my first two week stint was under the tutelage of Brad Bumsted, a veteran Harrisburg muckraker.
In that two-week window, my idea of what it was I could do as a writer was flipped on its head. My copy became Swiss cheese and I had to take it back to the drawing board and pivot, try to see it from different angles and find holes that an editor or reader might, and beat them to the punch.  I later heard Brad described as a kind of drill sergeant: you have to break the new recruits of old habits, especially when one of them, I would later learn, was the youngest to ever be accepted into the program, and I think, still wet behind the ears.
     From there, rotating stints with my fellow intern, I was able to soak in the variety of different approaches to reporting the news that the separate outlets offered, oftentimes watching as my stories were edited in real time, with explanations from the reporters for paragraphs moved and sentences cut.
     I ran sources down in the corridors of the statehouse, and conducted man-on-the-street interviews in downtown Harrisburg. And I was treated like a working journalist in a storied newsroom with lauded reporters, which afforded me a trove of experiences that simply isn’t on offer in a classroom.
   In that twelve week window, I saw how integral journalism is to maintaining an accountable democracy. I left that summer with just a peek into that world, but for the reporters I worked under, the work continues. I’m happy knowing that, as journalism adjusts to a changing landscape, future students will get the same taste of the tenacity and integrity that should be at the forefront of any budding reporter’s mind.
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Colt Shaw
 Temple University, 2016 intern