The more prepared, the better: Analysing the internship performance of Filipino journalism students

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.