Inside a Campbell classroom, where the curriculum has been updated to reach all students, including those learning English. Courtesy of Patch.com.
By Amanda Holst, Public Affairs Assistant
When the School of Journalism and Mass Communications received an email from Patch.com offering to arrange internships, journalism lecturer Tom Ulrich reacted immediately.
“This is the type of opportunity I want to see for our students,” Ulrich said.
Patch.com, a micro-local news operation developed by AOL, has created websites for communities across the United States with the goal of providing indepth, local coverage.
Ulrich’s advanced reporting class collaborated with editors from 10 Patch.com sites on several major assignments including a series on how immigration affects neighborhoods.
“We help students understand how things work in the industry in real time,” said Patch.com Regional Editor Priyanka Sharma-Sindhar. “We help them set priorities and offer guidance on what to look for and what questions to ask.”
For his internship, journalism major Eddie Fernandez became the eyes and ears of Campbell. You can read his story, researched and written by a team of SJSU students, on the CampbellPatch website.
Fernandez reported on the efforts of Campbell Union School District’s English Language Development program, the classification of an English learner, and the funding involved with the education of English learners.
“I learned that stories never go the way they are originally planned,” Fernandez said.
In this way, Patch.com’s hands-on professional training with supervision from instructors is giving students like Fernandez the opportunity to grow.
“We offer this to students who are interested in writing for a living,” Ulrich said. “They step into a world driven by deadlines that requires them to interview people who sometimes don’t want to speak. It’s a real life experience.” #