Toronto Star interns have covered the world

By Gustavo Vieira

Skim through the Toronto Star and you will find their bylines.

Browse the Star’s website and there they are too. Google their names, follow them on twitter and you’ll see they are much more than 'regular' interns.

In mid-September they wandered around the newsroom, trying to find the way to the nearest bathroom and shortcuts to the cafeteria.

But by early October they were covering Ontario’s election, chasing rare violins and tracking messages in bottles, using just to some of their skills.

But smarts and talent are not enough to land a spot in the Star’s one-year internship, they have plenty of experience, including a lot of mileage in Canada and abroad.

Beijing, Kigali and Kiev are just some of the places some have worked. Others  covered the G20 in Toronto, Parliament Hill in Ottawa or reported on Canadian women’s prisons.

In the age of multimedia they have written for newspapers and magazines, and produced for television and the web.

Eight are new faces to the Star. The other four worked so hard they got to stay.

This is the 2011-2012 crop of one-year interns at the Toronto Star:

 

CHANTAIE ALLICK is a political science graduate from the University of British Columbia. This spring she earned a masters in journalism degree from Carleton. She has worked as a reporter for The Globe and Mail, the National Post, Blink Magazine in Kigali, Rwanda and the Barents Observer in northern Norway. She has been a volunteer and English teacher in Lima, Peru. While studying at Carleton, she was one of two students to win the Carleton Norway Journalism Travel Award. You can follow her on twitter here.

 

STEPHANIE FINDLAY is a 22-year-old university drop-out from Kanata. She was news editor at the Ubyssey, UBC’s student newspaper, when she was hired as a summer intern at Maclean's. The following June, Maclean's hired her as a year-long intern. She wrote weekly feature stories and toured universities across Canada, contributing to the universities guide. She also covered the Toronto G20 and TIFF. This summer she was hired as a staff reporter at Maclean’s, but left to join the Star’s internship program. You can follow her on twitter here.

 

ALYSHAH HASHAM comes out of a whirlwind education this summer in Toronto, interning as a summer reporter at the Star and making the city her new home. Before that she graduated with a bachelor of journalism and English literature from Carleton University and was a student reporter at CTV Ottawa. In 2009, she also did a radio internship in Nairobi, where she grew up. Follow her on twitter here.

 

LIAM CASEY is a graduate of the MJ program at Ryerson. He has twice worked in the Star's summer reporting program as well as an eight-month stint in the box in between. He was the editor of the award-winning winter 2011 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism. Prior to that he interned at the Ottawa Citizen and Toronto Life. Before that he unsuccessfully tried to cure diabetes through monotonous work with transgenic mice and cloned cells. He is fluent in French and really funny. You can follow him on twitter here.

 

WENDY GILLIS enters the one-year program with two Star summer internships and one eight-month gig in the radio room under her belt. She is a graduate of Ryerson's master of journalism program, where she produced a radio documentary, studied long-form journalism, and wrote a thesis on publicly funded in-vitro fertilization. Previously, she studied English and history at the University of Saskatchewan. Wendy got her start in journalism as the editor-in-chief of the Sheaf, the U of S undergrad paper. You can follow her on twitter here.

 

EMILY JACKSON is a Toronto-based journalist from Calgary. After completing her bachelor of commerce at Queen's University, she moved to the west coast to get her master of journalism at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism. She just finished at The Globe's Report on Business and her work has been published in the Vancouver Sun, BC Business, and various other Postmedia newspapers. You can follow her on twitter here.

 

ANITA LI has a diverse background in journalism that spans print, broadcast and online media. Anita has previously worked as a research assistant for The New Yorker'sBeijing bureau, an on-air reporter for CTV Ottawa, an associate producer for CBC News and a blogger for thestar.com. Most recently, she was a reporter/editor for The Globe and Mail. Anita holds a master of journalism from Carleton and an honours bachelor of arts from the University of Toronto. You can follow her on twitter here.

 

 
NIAMH SCALLAN is a print and multimedia journalist who has written for The Globe and Mail, The Province, The Tyee, and others. A UBC master of journalism graduate, she also holds a bachelor's degree in international development from the University of Guelph. In 2010, Niamh (pronounced “Neeve”) travelled to Ukraine with a team of students to produce a documentary on global pain management that aired on Al Jazeera in July. Her interests range from municipal politics and urban affairs to global development issues. You can follow her on twitter here.

 

JOSH TAPPER is a 2010 graduate of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in New York. As a student and freelancer, he has reported from North America, Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia. His articles have appeared in the Washington Post, NYTimes.com, the New York Daily News, the Jewish Daily Forward, Tablet magazine and Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab. An Ottawa native, Josh also holds a B.A. (Hons) in history and English from Dalhousie. You can follow him on twitter here.

 

JENNIFER PAGLIARO has regained her love of Toronto after moving to Ottawa for Carleton University's bachelor of journalism program. She's been an intern at The Ottawa Citizen, The Canadian Press and The Globe and Mail. At school, she was a news editor of The Charlatan and once survived an angry Ann Coulter mob for her Maclean's OnCampus blog. Jennifer will join the Star after working at a local radio station in Gulu, Uganda as part of The Rwanda Initiative. You can follow her on twitter here.

 

LAURA STONE comes to the Star from the Calgary Herald, where she was working on a series about women's prisons as part of the inaugural Michelle Lang fellowship. She covered breaking news and federal politics for a year and a half at Postmedia News in her hometown Ottawa. She got her first gig three years ago in the radio room. You can follow her on twitter here.

 

MICHAEL WOODS is excited to return to the Star as a year-long intern after completing the summer reporting program. He just graduated from Queen's University with a degree in history and political science. He was editor-in-chief of the campus newspaper, The Journal, and spent a summer reporting for the Kingston Whig-Standard. Born and raised in Ottawa, he enjoys a good plate of nachos and playing music on various instruments. You can follow him on twitter here.

Gustavo Vieira is a journalism intern in the Toronto Star's radio room.

Comments

[Dave]

Do many Toronto Star interns continue to work at the paper once their internship is over? I often hear about these interns, but do not see their names in the paper after a little while

[Dave]

Nice to see a bit of diversity in the mix