Article 2023

The More Prepared, the Better: Analysing the Internship Performance of Filipino Journalism Students

OJ
Opiniano, Jeremaiah M.
 CE
Christine Estorque, Joanna
 JG
Joshua Gutierrez, Benjamin
 MU
Martin Urmenita, Jacob
Journalism Practice
Journal · Vol. 17 · Issue 3 · pp. 624-646
Abstract

Internships in journalism frequently gauge the technical skills of students. The employability of journalism students in the news media industry rests on applying industry-aligned news work skills. However there have been few studies or assessments of the seamless integration of journalism students' technical or hard skills and their soft skills, the latter referring to personality skills that are also required of modern-day workers and of journalists. This mixed methods study determined how editors and mentors of interns quantitatively and qualitatively assessed the technical (hard) and soft skills of journalism students from a comprehensive university in the Philippines. This study integrated feedback as a word cloud and as thematised qualitative statements, as well as numeric assessments of 299 internship evaluation forms through structural equation modelling. It was found that the more that journalism students were prepared for on-the-job training, and the more that classroom lessons were applied, the better the students' performance during the internship sortie. © 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

Keywords

Author Keywords

Internship Work placement Mixed methods journalism education technical and soft skills the Philippines

Index Keywords

Author Affiliations
Department of Communication and Media Studies, University of Santo Tomas, Manila, Manila, Philippines, Department of Geography, The University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, Australia
Department of Communication and Media Studies, University of Santo Tomas, Manila, Manila, Philippines
Funding & Acknowledgements
University of Santo Tomas, UST
The authors thank the journalism program of the University of Santo Tomas for the permission granted to access the data from the internship evaluation forms. This paper was also presented and commented at the Fifth World Journalism Education Congress (July 2019, Paris).
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10 Bugeja, Michael J., “Making the Connection”: Aggregate Internship Data as Direct and Indirect Measure Informing Curricula and Assessment, Journalism and Mass Communication Educator, 74, 1, pp. 17-30, (2019)
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