Amid the sea of gray newspaper columns, each with their bold blue headlines screaming for attention, one detail caught senior Grace Hu’s eye — it was her name printed in the byline.
“It felt real,” Hu said. “I got to hold some of the stories that I ended up doing. And I was really happy. It felt really good.”
Hu was one of the students chosen for a workshop with the Scripps Howard Foundation Emerging Journalists Program at the University of North Texas. She was then paired with Community Impact, a statewide non-profit newspaper with a 2 million readership, for her summer internship.
“I worked for them from the middle of June to the start of August,” Hu said. “That was 160 hours, so I was working around like 45 to 50 hours a week. I was with New Caney Porter, but I was [also] working with Lake Houston.”
These long working hours were filled with editorial meetings, interviews, numerous tedious phone calls and shadowing other reporters at City Hall.
“I’d wake up at around seven, and then my dad would drive me in, so I could clock in by nine,” Hu said. “On Mondays, we always had an editorial meeting—that meant sitting in small groups and editors checking in on everyone. Mondays, everyone had to be in the building, but on Tuesdays and the rest of the week, you didn’t have to be. You could work from home if you wanted.”
Though working from home gave her more sleep, Hu valued the atmosphere of the newsroom. Being around colleagues who shared the same passion as her for journalism energized her in a way that the comfort of home couldn’t match.
“I really enjoyed being in the office and then going to special events,” Hu said. “There was this really fun event that we got to go to. It was this veteran’s lunch. We got free lunch. My first editor ended up getting me tickets to go with her.”
Before this internship, Hu worked as a reporter for her school newspaper, primarily covering feature stories. Her work included a “National Assistant Principal’s Week feature series“ as well as pieces like “Karen’s RoundUp Legacy” and “Preparing the Food, Serving Up Smiles, Brightening Our Days“. Community Impact, however, expanded her skills into hard news coverage.
“When I started working for Community Impact, we were covering flood meetings,” Hu said. “They wanted me to look through this public meeting and then write down anything that was significant for the public to know. It was like squashing everything into a little ball and making it as digestible as possible with a very simple word choice.”
The transition from recounting events in features to writing hard news articles was challenging for Hu. Her mentor, Alan Bernstein, an ex editor of The Houston Chronicle, advised her to ‘Bring the hay down for the goats to eat,’ a metaphor that helped her make complex information readable.
“They focus on explanatory journalism, which is very different from what I want to go into, which is New Journalism,” Hu said. “[New Journalism has] a very clear storyline, and they have characters that are at times more flamboyant than they actually are. But explanatory journalism, it dumbs everything down. For my [47-minute] flood mitigation meeting and all the hours of research I did, I had to turn that into a one-minute or two-minute read.”
One of Hu’s favorite stories explored food insecurity. Through an in-depth analysis of nonprofit data, she discovered that around 13% of individuals in Fort Bend County struggled with this pressing problem. This revelation left her surprised, highlighting the hidden challenges faced by many in her community.
“I was basically pulling data from a nonprofit organization that maps out for each district how food insecure each population is across the U.S.,” Hu said. “They showed how food insecure children are, how food insecure are seniors over the age of 55, and then for different races and ethnicities. So that was a pretty big story.”
Another story that Hu did was on the housing market. Even though this might seem like a dry, black-and-white topic to many, it was an experience that left Hu with a lot of everlasting memories.
“It was one of my biggest stories because it was right after the lede story which is what they open the entire newspaper with,” Hu said. “So I got to interview a realtor for that. There was this really embarrassing moment where I asked her, ‘What kind of housing market myths can you debunk?’ and then she said ‘What kind of myths are there?’ I was like ‘I don’t know any myths.’ But it went well besides that.”
Then there a two-part story on flood mitigation in Harris County—a topic Hu covered so thoroughly that she ended up writing her AP Government research paper on flood mitigation. Although the story fell outside her assigned area, Hu had persuaded another reporter to let her take it on.
“I had to stay up really late every night to keep working on the flood mitigation story,” Hu said. “I covered so many flood mitigation stories that I knew basically everything there was to know about flood mitigation at the district level.”
While the internship provided its share of breakthroughs and bylines, it wasn’t without its challenges. Following her mentor’s advice to never give up even when she was outside of her comfort zone, Hu recalls having to consistently fight for the stories she wanted to write.
“I was always pestering my editors to give me more stories for the internship,” Hu said. “They would have never given it to me if I wasn’t actively fighting for it every single day. I was asking them, ‘Can I write the story?’ So just showing them that every single day you want to write, they’re more prone to trust you with bigger stories.”
Apart from this, Hu also discovered how tedious making phone calls were. Because the newspaper was community oriented, talking to other people over the phone to get data or interviews was a major part of the job.
“I was calling 20 to 40 people every single day,” Hu said. “Half of these people were receptionists and so they would not know what I was talking about. They would then reroute me to another person. Then this other person would say ‘Actually I’m not the person to go to for this.’ And then they would reroute me again. And then someone would probably hang up down the line.”
Even though Hu did not enjoy calling other people, she discovered her love for research. As an aspiring novelist, Hu stated that she was able to explore different topics, and it gave her a new perspective about the field.
“I thought I would hate researching, but that was one of my favorite parts,” Hu said. “I think it’s just like when you do research, it’s different from reading about an article because you forget that information immediately. But doing the research yourself, you’ll remember it. And just seeing the final product, in my opinion, is the best part.”
Now, as editor-in-chief for the school newspaper, Hu plans to implement the lessons she learnt at her internship in the news classroom.
“I want to introduce mock editorial meetings,” Hu said. “I think it’s a good peek into the newsroom. And then also story pitches for anyone who wants to go into the journalism field. If we did this then they would already have more basics than what I did.”
Apart from these new introductions, the “number one” thing Hu wishes to see realized someday is a physically printed newspaper.
“I think it would just be such a complicated process,” Hu said. “But I hope that somewhere down the line we can have physical newspapers to print. In journalism right now it’s all online, so it’s harder to kind of visualize yourself in the field, versus when you’re holding a physical thing that you’ve worked on and has your name on it.”
For Hu, the internship was not merely a job, but it was an experience that deepened her understanding of what it truly means to be a journalist.
“I learned more about AP style, like news writing, feature writing,” Hu said. “And just seeing my own work published, that’s how you know that you want to go into the field. If you’re excited to just go to a day job and just write, like if you can sit down for like nine hours and write nonstop, then that’s how you know that you would want to be a journalist.”
What began as an internship became a defining experience, one that pushed Hu beyond the classroom and into the reality of journalism. Now, as a freelancer for Community Impact, Hu carries clarity and a sharpened sense of purpose into every story she tells.
“It showed me that I would want to do bigger stories,” Hu said. “I wouldn’t want to work on [the stories] for one or two days and then get it published. I would want it to be big projects where they’re taking up like months of my time. Like investigative journalism. That is one of my dreams that I feel I want to dabble in.”
