My internship writing for The Tico Times, which ended last December, was the most valuable semester of my formal education – if conducting interviews shirtless on a Caribbean beach or traipsing through the jungle behind coffee farmers and Peace Corps volunteers can be called “formal.”
In addition to the freewheeling pleasures of spending four months in a gritty Central American city instead of a string of classrooms and testing centers, I was able to improve my Spanish, step forward as a writer and more closely examine Central American politics, art and culture, the tourism industry, press issues, businesses, environmental struggles and pressing regional issues like border disputes and drug trafficking – all from the unique perspective of a journalist writing for an English-language newspaper.
As the writing intern I was asked to write one feature story per week for the Weekend section of the paper, as well as any arts page articles or hotel reviews the Weekend editor required of me. I was also to cover anything newsy that the editor-in-chief might need to fill space in the news section. Since the paper’s full-time editorial staff has only three writers and one photographer, my role in the news section fell to covering a sort of backstop beat, meaning that I reported on anything and everything the full-time journalists didn’t have time to investigate.
Between time spent in the office writing and making phone calls and time outside, doing interviews and traveling around the country to track down stories and do hotel reviews, there were weeks in which I easily worked 60 hours. The internship paid a stipend of $200 a month. By my primitive calculations, I figure that I earned just over $.80 an hour – not even half of what I would get making beds and mopping floors in a seedy youth hostel.
Fortunately, the work experience, an improvement in my writing, and an increased cultural understanding of Latin America were the real payoffs of the internship. By December, I had written 52 articles, all published in a well-respected international newspaper. The internship greatly padded my meager writing resume and directly contributed to my landing a part time correspondent job with Provo, Utah’s The Daily Herald.
While the most memorable parts of my internship happened while I was traveling on assignment, what happened inside the newsroom was just as important. Like many traditional print newspapers in this age of bloggers and a rapid-fire 24-hour news cycle, The Tico Times is struggling financially. After 54 years as Central America’s leading English-language news source, 54 years of investigative journalism, heavy hitting environmental reporting and struggles to protect press freedom in Costa Rica, much of the paper’s funding is drying up.
In order to combat an impending tragedy, long-time publisher Dery Dyer, assistant publisher Abby Daniell, and former editor-in-chief Steve Mack created The Tico Times Association, a non-profit wing of the organization used to secure government grants and private donations. The Tico Times officially made the transformation from being completely advertisement-based to employing a “mixed-model,” half for-profit, half non-profit system in October of 2010, while I was an intern.
As more U.S. newspapers also make the switch, it has been interesting to see how the system has worked in a country where development and environmental organizations could potentially contribute to a paper that supports their cause. But have they contributed yet? The response is disheartening: not really.
My four months at The Tico Times were highly successful. By actually spending an extended amount of time living in Latin America as a reporter, rather than a tourist, I gained a new appreciation for the culture, built up a decent résumé of writing clips and discovered several future employment options. I wouldn’t trade the experience that The Tico Times afforded me for anything, and certainly not for a semester spent inside a classroom.
Nate Perkins is a student at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, U.S., a former Tico Times writing intern and an encyclopedia of obscure bands.
