The Macdonald Journalism Internship Endowment

      At NCPR, I've been fortunate to experience an independent but supportive setting. My supervisor, David Sommerstein, along with Catherine Wheeler, provided me the freedom to create, but ultimately, it was my responsibility to take advantage of that opportunity. After numerous early alarms and dedicating 20-40 minutes to listening to our morning radio program, Northern Light, I gradually pushed myself into a social atmosphere despite being an introvert.

After a semester of training in radio writing, audio recording, and audio editing, I joined North Country Public Radio as a journalism intern, producing news stories for Northern Light, NCPR's morning news program.

In the spring 2025 semester, I began my internship at North Country Public Radio. I started by learning the basics of writing for the radio by writing copy. Copy is a short news story that is later read aloud by the hosts of NCPR's morning show. It needs to be quick, to the point, and easy to listen to. Learning how to write copy was a very important skill because it set the foundation for the longer stories I worked on in the summer. I also learned how to properly use recording devices and edit with audio software such as Adobe Audition.

My professional experience at North Country Public Radio began in January 2025, shortly after the 2025 presidential inauguration. I, along with my fellow news interns, Nora Kenyon and Richard Haller (of SUNY Canton), began honing our skills in writing news stories for the radio, copy writing, audio editing, web design, interviewing, and photo journalism. Our advisors, David Sommerstein, Monica Sandrezscki and Catherine Wheeler, were quick to get us started writing stories that would be published for the radio.

I began my experience at North Country Public Radio in February of 2024 as an independent study. I spent about eight hours a week at the station developing essential radio journalism skills like recording, interviewing, writing for the ear, and audio editing and production. David Sommerstein and Monica Sandrezscki, my primary supervisors, gave my co-intern Zach and me lots of fun and challenging exercises to build our reporting skills from the ground up.

During my internship with North Country Public Radio I not only got to develop my writing-oriented journalism skills, but also gain abilities in an entirely new style of journalism to me — broadcast radio reporting.  

As an intern at NCPR, I learned a lot, got outside of my comfort zone, and learned how to be a good reporter. During my seven-month internship, I collaborated with a team of professionals and another intern to cover a wide range of stories, from Canton's oldest resident turning 105 to a local Fort Drum teen winning an award to a local seed-to-tray program in Malone. I immersed myself in the company culture and worked well with team members to produce and edit important stories.

Here are some things I learned and accomplished during my internship:

Iman Maani interned at North Country Public Radio where she produced a variety of audio news stories, including local Juneteenth celebrations, the 1970s feminist movement in upstate New York and Indigenous poetry and art. Earlier on in the internship, she worked on producing news copy, while getting familiar with newsgathering. As the internship progressed, she began to research and pitch original news stories. Working with a team of reporters, she interviewed, wrote, edited and fact-checked news stories for radio broadcast and online publishing. 

For the spring and summer 2022 semesters, Jessica trained with NCPR news reporters to learn the basics of journalism. She learned how to interview people, record those interviews, and turn those recordings into audio stories to be aired on the radio. Jessica developed the ability to turn written news stories into a script to be read out loud for the NCPR hosts. In addition, she was able to construct her own stories.