Cronkite School Sends 15 Business Journalism Interns into Newsrooms

Fifteen business journalism students from the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University will intern this summer at major news organizations around the country.

The students, who will work in newsrooms at Bloomberg News, Reuters, Fox Business News, the Los Angeles Times and others, have taken coursework in the business journalism specialization at the school, which is funded by the Las Vegas-based Donald W. Reynolds Foundation. The internships are funded by the foundation, grants from other donors or news organizations themselves.

“We are delighted not only with the interest that our students have shown in the growing field of business journalism, but the confidence that news organizations have in our students,” said Andrew Leckey, the Reynolds Chair in Business Journalism at the Cronkite School and president of the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. “Global and national events have underscored the importance of business journalism and need for quality business journalists.”

The business journalism specialization, launched three years ago, combines journalism classes at the Cronkite School with courses in business and economics at ASU’s W.P. Carey School of Business. Students graduate with the critical skills to report on business, finance, real estate and the stock market.

As part of the program, the students compete for the summer internships at top media companies, providing work portfolios and proving their skills and knowledge through various tests. The media organizations, working in conjunction with the Cronkite School, select the final candidates.

Since 2003, more than 13,000 journalists have received free training from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, which is headquartered at the Cronkite School and funded by the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation, a national philanthropic organization founded in 1954 by the late media entrepreneur for whom it is named. Headquartered in Las Vegas, it is one of the largest private foundations in the U.S.

The Cronkite School, named in honor of the longtime “CBS News” anchor in 1984, prepares the next generation of journalists in both the time-honored fundamentals embraced by Cronkite and the multimedia skills necessary to thrive as journalists in the digital age. Housed in a $71 million state-of-the-art media complex in downtown Phoenix, the school is the home of the Carnegie-Knight News 21 Initiative, Cronkite News Service, Cronkite NewsWatch and the New Media Innovation Lab.

2012 Business Journalism Interns