how to write a cover letter npr

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How to apply to an internship at NPR Visuals

By David Eads | October 14, 2015

(This post was edited in June 2022.)

We want to see your best work. Here’s how.

Who’s Eligible

To be eligible for an internship with NPR, you must be a college student (undergraduate or graduate) or a person who has graduated no more than 12 months prior to the start of the internship period. You must be planning to work from the United States and authorized to work in the United States throughout the internship term.

Cover letters

All candidates must submit a cover letter. Your cover letter should be a statement of purpose. We’re interested in what you’re passionate about and why you’re passionate about it. (Most cover letters tell us that you are hardworking, passionate and talented, etc. And that you love NPR. We don’t need you to tell us that.)

• Tell us what you care about and work on.
• Tell us why you are passionate about your work.
• Tell us why this opportunity will help you reach your potential.
• Tell us how you will contribute to our team.

There are also a few simple style tips you should keep in mind:

• Use hyperlinks for any reference to online work. We’re mostly reading your work on our computers, and being able to click a link saves a lot of time.
• Export your resume, cover letter, and all other documents as PDF. PDF is more secure and portable than Microsoft Word files.
• All candidates must have an online portfolio.
• For coding candidates, we also ask for a Github profile. Applicants may use their Github projects as a portfolio. (If sharing via Github is not an option for you, please provide us another way to evaluate your technical skills. This might entail sharing a side project, writing up how you approached a project, or submitting a code sample in a different form.)

Portfolio projects and work samples should always include your role in the work if it was done on a team. When talking about your work, we want to hear about what was good but also about what you’d change.

Selection process

After you submit a resume and cover letter, our selection committee will read through all the applications. We’ll reduce the list to approximately 8-10 candidates by eliminating applications that don’t have a cover letter and resume or who clearly aren’t a good fit for the team.

If you’re one of these candidates, a few folks from the team will conduct a short interview with you over video chat (such as Zoom or Google Meet). Our interviews usually last 20 to 30 minutes, depending on the size of the applicant pool and our availability.

You’ll get an email before your interview with outline of the questions you’ll be asked in the interview and also given the opportunity to ask any questions beforehand. The questions may vary a bit from interview to interview based on your professional experience, but we will be as consistent as possible.

If you make it to the interview round, we’ll collect references if you haven’t uploaded them already. Then we’ll call your references and conduct some follow-up via email, possibly asking one or two more substantial, interview-style questions. Email communication is crucial in our workplace, and gives us an opportunity to see how you communicate in writing. We expect that answers are prompt, succinct, and clear.

We’re a small group of photographers, videographers, photo editors, developers and designers in the NPR newsroom who make visual journalism. Check out our latest stuff !

Why we’re doing this

We want to open our field to the best people out there, but the process doesn’t always work that way. So we’re trying to make the job application process more accessible.

Applicants with strong cover letters and good interview skills naturally tend to do well in this process. Often, those skills are a result of coaching and support — something that not all students are privileged to have. To help candidates without those resources, we’re being more transparent about our process and expectations.

We’re certain that we’re missing out on candidates with great talent and potential who don’t have that kind of support in their lives. We think knowing our cover letter expectations and interview questions ahead of time will help level the playing field, keep our personal bias out of the interview process, and allow better comparisons between candidates.

Current positions

Our paid fall/winter 2022-23 internship program runs from Oct. 3 to April 15. Check out our careers site for more information. Here are the internships available this term.

We hope to hear from you!

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Hey, Students: 5 Things That Are Wrong With Your Cover Letter

Steve Drummond

Elissa Nadworny

We've written a lot about the link between college and the workforce — and the kinds of skills graduates will need in the 21st century to succeed. One of the skills you need is knowing how to present yourself. To put your best foot forward in the workplace, and in life.

And so, as we started to read the current round of internship applications, we have some advice for you.

The problem we see, over and over and over again? Well, let's just say your cover letter needs some work.

More often than not, the problems are there right from the very first sentence. Actually the first three words: "I am writing ..."

As in: "I am writing to express my interest in an internship" or "I am writing to apply for the internship with NPR."

Think about that for a moment: You've written to us to tell us that you're writing to us to apply for the internship that you've applied for.

(By the way, we blame the Internet for a lot of this form-letter stuff .)

In letters that start off that way, things usually head downhill from there. You're then probably going to tell us, in a lot of multisyllabic words, how you'll apply your creativity and your passion and your research and analytical skills, and the perspective you've gained in your academic work/daily blog writing/study abroad semester/volunteer experience to become a "dynamic" and "hard-working" member of our team.

Read that sentence out loud. Try doing it without taking a breath. See what we're talking about?

Continuing from there, you'll then praise us at NPR for our dedication to the mission of exploring the complex policy initiatives that are something something about America's something something education system.

Then, having put us to sleep with writing like that, you'll tell us about your writing skills.

Now, all of this isn't meant to poke fun at you. We're just trying to make it clear that, when you write us that paragraph, we pretty much tune out from there. Which is sad, because so many of you are amazing and talented students who've done some incredible things . You've started a nonprofit or traveled the world or raised a sibling or learned a third language or have insights into a culture or community that others don't know about.

It's sad, too, because in many cases you really like us and really want to work here. Usually, you're about to tell us, that's because you grew up listening to NPR in the back seat of the car while your parents had us on the radio and you came to admire the work that we do.

So, instead of all that, here are five things you can try:

Tell us a story

Here at NPR, that's what we do for a living. We tell stories, and the goal is to be interesting and exciting and make people want to keep on listening or reading. Stories have characters and movement ... well, you get the point. And so to introduce yourself to us right off the bat, and get us eager to know more about you, show us your stuff writing-wise.

Let's illustrate. Which of these, drawn from actual examples, would you rather read?

I am applying for the position of NPR Fall Intern. I believe that my strong interest in education topics and background in research qualify me for this internship. My undergraduate and postgraduate academic careers have taught me to critically analyze and synthesize large amounts of data quickly. I also have experience conducting research in corporate and office settings.

The first time I ever went on live television, I was in Lahore, Pakistan. By the time I ended up in Pakistan this past January, being on camera wasn't new to me. I had several years of on-camera experience under my belt traveling around the world with an educational travel show for kids. When I lived in Los Angeles, I spent my hard-earned bartending money on TV hosting classes for a year.

If you're like us, you'd much rather read that second one. It was written by one of our actual interns, Kat Lonsdorf.

Don't bury the lede

We're always afraid that, hidden down below, somewhere after that awful first paragraph, there's a fascinating person with great ideas. And we might not ever find out. It's a basic lesson of journalistic writing: Put the good stuff right up there at the top. Grab us and hold us and keep us reading.

Ask not what your internship can do for you ...

To paraphrase John F. Kennedy , don't tell us what you'll get out of the internship, but what you can do for us.

Here's what you should avoid:

As a recent college graduate in the humanities, I believe I stand to benefit from the development of skills and career direction which an NPR internship provides.

I believe that NPR is the ideal internship for me as the position will allow me to explore ...

Aim at the right target

It's so nice when we get letters from people who've made it clear they're interested in our topic: how learning happens, and that you've read what we do. Slip in a comment that shows you've listened to a story or two, or checked out our blog . And maybe tell us — without a lot of big words and jargon — what you think about schools or teaching or education.

Instead of, "To Whom It May Concern," put our actual names (If you're applying to the NPR Ed internship, our names are at the top of this story) in the heading of your letter.

** Extra bonus: a story idea or two that you'd like to see us write about.

Have someone else read your letter

We call this editing. Spellcheck is great, but take the next step: Have someone look over your letter to check for misspellings. They can find punctuation mistakes or long, clunky sentences. If you can't find someone, read your letter out loud.

In the journalism world, all these things are important. But they might help you in lots of other fields, too.

Good luck! We're looking forward to reading your letter. Oh, and the deadline is Sunday, July 15 .

This post was updated July 7, 2018.

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from training.npr.org: https://training.npr.org/

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Cover Letter Advice from NPR

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Sometimes cover letter templates can be kind of boring for arts, media, and communications positions. NPR has a great cover-letter-writing guide for their internship applications, and this advice is translatable for jobs that go beyond journalism!

Get the Reddit app

r/journalism is a community focused on the industry and practice of journalism (from the classroom to the newsroom).

How do you write a cover letter for a journalism job? What does your first sentence look like?

Do you write it like a straight cover letter and describe what skills and experience you have that they need methodically, or do you style it like a personal essay?

If I talk about where I worked and my degrees, it feels like I'm just writing a longer version of my resume and kind of dry.

If I spice it up and get creative, I feel like maybe I'm losing them and wasting time.

How do you approach writing a cover letter?

Do you try to hook them?

I am great at conveying other people's stories, just not my own story.

What do your first sentences look like?

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