Being an editorial intern at The San Diego Sun has been gratifying for me, both personally and professionally. I’ve come to learn that there’s a lot more complexity to downtown than what I originally gave it credit for.
One of the first things I noticed was downtown San Diego’s lack of appealing architecture (another intern and I noted Fifth Avenue’s buildings as “unoriginal,” compared to–say–Chicago’s famous bay windows).
I came to find out that behind that boring facade existed a passionate community of middle and working class folks, whose throughline was a dream of a better San Diego.
There is Carlos Padial III, who runs Lids of Encouragement; and Maryna Goncharenko, owner of Adore Coffee House. I wrote stories about each. Both want to do better, and I genuinely hope they are able to accomplish that.
Concurrent to the narrative of downtown’s hopefuls is the narrative of downtown’s civic failures. With a growing homeless population, my work carried the undercurrent of class commentary (I also wish better for the unsheltered population).
I plan to come back to The Sun for a fall internship. It’s been a great experience to cover issues so near and dear to my heart. I’m glad to know about new communities. As someone wanting to go into solutions journalism, I look forward to all the opportunities I can get to write about people.
I think what best encapsulates my spring internship is how, with proper guidance under Editor Ron Donoho, I’ve been able to negotiate my outlook on journalism into being more people-centric. This isn’t to say that I wasn’t ever people-centric. Before this internship, I considered myself a “Filipino American, anti-imperialist and people-centric journalist.”
I would still say that. But coming into the internship, I assumed that since The Sun’s area of coverage was downtown I would be writing about homelessness and a variety of cultural critiques about class divide. With certain issues I covered, I had trouble balancing my passion for activism with the news stories I was writing about.
Knowing my tendency for being bull-headed, this became an especially tough-to-lose problem. Eventually, I was able to work around this while still maintaining my outlook on journalism. By asking and providing proper counterpoints to my outlook, my editor was able to help bring out more nuance in my stories by challenging just how informational my writing could be.
In this, my writing was able to better afford humanity that a lack of nuance, or “flattening,” often imposes. I became more people-centric by being less bull-headed. With considerably more thought, I was able to portray people with as much nuance that a word count of 500 can allow. That’s something I’ll always thank The San Diego Sun for teaching me. SDSun
(Interested in an internship at The San Diego Sun? Send an email, along with a resume and two of your best writing clips to: rondonoho@gmail.com)
