Last Updated: March 23, 1997
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More than two decades after I traded my budding journalistic career for motherhood, freelance writing, and (eventually) the classroom, the prospect of returning for a summer stint in a newsroom proved fascinating.
Time had eased the restrictions, which in the 1960s relegated me to women's page work, and I envisioned a six-week experience of daily deadlines and reporting for the paper's electronic edition.
Then came The Fourth Floor at the Columbus Dispatch.
I entered the world of Accent (the feature section) as an intern, with assignments of short features and section page stories. Had my work been limited to writing or editing stories, I probably would have brought back little to my classes. After all, I'm active as a freelancer and, in a given week, edit between 80 and 100 stories written by journalism students.
Much to the credit of the Dispatch and Accent editor Pam Coffman, though, my summer work extended beyond the confines of the newsroom and into an educational realm.
Thus, I spent time interviewing library director Jim Hunter about the uses of databases and other ways of retrieving information. Veteran photographer Mary Circelli brought me along on a rain-soaked shoot. Charlie Hayes, the former chief photographer who now runs the paper's "transporter room" showed me how to scan photos. I joined Coffman for a visit to the Web site and heard firsthand about its operation.
To learn how to pull public records and deal with computerized data, I turned to Mike Berens, the Dispatch's award-winning specialist in computer-assisted reporting. Copy editors and layout specialists allowed me to watch them as they worked, and Coffman assigned me to "coach" a freelance columnist. Jim Crowley, head of systems, even gave me a classroom-like lecture about the paper's operations.
Those educational experiences encompassed about six hours a week. Otherwise, I could be found at a borrowed desk ("Let's see who's on vacation this week") in the Accent section. I enjoyed the assignments, from localizing wire stories to writing section pieces to making calls on short features.
In that respect, it was a bit like the newsroom where I first worked in the 1960s and penned features for the women's page. But gone was the noise of wire machines, smoke-filled air, and yelling from the managing editor's office. Thumbs up to those changes!
At the modern paper, however, people communicate to each other by computers. Much of the production work has moved into the newsroom, where some staffers specialize in desktop publishing work as opposed to the standard reportorial tasks of the past. More efficient? Yes, but it changes the landscape for those of us debating what we should teach in journalism programs.
In my copyediting days, I seldom made substantive changes in stories - that was the duty of the line editor who sent the story to the desk. I discovered that Dispatch editors massage copy and often make changes. In the future, my classes will focus on more collaborative efforts between writers and editors.
Now, as I show my students some videotaped interviews with Dispatch workers
and editors, and as I explain the environment of the '90s, I feel a bit nostalgic
about a summer where I worked and learned. I have a clearer idea of what interns
are to expect on their assignments. And I have a stronger respect for the people
and the work in a newsroom. 
Lesher, journalism coordinator at William Paterson College in Wayne, N.J., was attached to the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch.
