In the coming weeks, MinnPost readers will be seeing three new bylines on the site: Alexander I. Amend, Wilt Hodges and Emily Ness. They will be gathering data and information, looking for ways to engage readers, and reporting and writing articles for MinnPost as part of our just-launched internship program.

Alex graduated last year from the University of Minnesota’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and most recently worked as an intern at the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting in Washington, D.C. Says Alex: “What gets me excited about MinnPost is that I think a lot of the Pulitzer's areas of focus would work well in the microcosm that is Minnesota -- a highly media-literate and media savvy/interested microcosm at that.”

Wilt has been a freelance reporter for the Minnesota Spokesman and he is a recent MacArthur Honors Scholar at the University of Minnesota. His academic background includes African and African-American studies and he plans on attending graduate school to study journalism. “As an intern, I would like to incorporate and expose more voices to MinnPost readers -- those from African-American and African communities (particularly those from East Africa),” Wilt wrote in his application to be a MinnPost intern.

Emily is just out of the University of St. Thomas, graduating with a double major in journalism and psychology. At St. Thomas, she was staff writer for The Aquin, the university’s student newspaper, and later became the paper’s opinions editor. “It gave me a new perspective on news,” Emily says.

MinnPost plans to take on another group of interns this fall. We are looking for interns to do work in a variety of areas: news and feature writing, data-gathering and analysis, reader engagement, news graphics, photography and video-audio reporting. We are especially looking for candidates with news reporting experience and candidates with graphics and quantitative skills who could do data mining, maps and crowd-sourcing.

If you’re interested in a position, contact me at rbuoen [at] minnpost [dot] com.

Roger Buoen, a MinnPost managing editor, can be reached at rbuoen [at] minnpost [dot] com.