It is that time of the year that journalism students are furiously seeking an internship. My job is to gather a list of employers, typically about 80–90 newsrooms, and to help each student to find the most suitable workplace for learning.

Every year, the toughest challenge is to get students interested in small newspapers outside the big cities. The majority of the 45 students seeking an internship in our centralised internship system tend to send their applications to newsrooms producing national-level journalism.

Simultaneously, editors-in-chief of local and small regional newspapers are contacting me with frustration: why is it that their papers seem to be less interesting places for internship in the students’ eyes? Why do they not get applications?

I am trying to plead the case of minor newsrooms, because they may in fact turn out to be more fruitful places to do the internship than the most appreciated urban newsrooms. In a small newsroom, even an intern can get a lot of responsibility, learn all dimensions of the journalistic process, including photography and layout, whereas in a big-city newsroom there are photographers, graphic designers and layout-setters who actually limit the intern’s possibilities for learning. To live four summer months in a place that differs from your own reality can be very insightful for a (future) journalist.

The most typical reasons for not accepting an internship “in the countryside” are the lack of a driver’s license and the unwillingness to let out one’s student apartment, or to pay the rent for two. They are, of course, acceptable reasons. But every year there are also students who get anxious about not getting a job – having applied for internships at well-known media organisations in the capital area only.

This is not a new problem, though. It was discussed in various committees when I was a student representative at the Faculty, student union and journalist’s professional union. Besides, we all know that the internship can have a significant impact on one’s future career path. Many students are afraid of the “local newspaper destiny”, as one of my students put it: once you embark on a local journalism career, you may, according to a deeply rooted belief, never manage to upgrade yourself to the national level.

But the fact is that even local newspapers need ambitious and devoted journalists. In terms of workplace learning, the prestige of a previous employer should not be the sole criterion for future employers to recruit a candidate, either. Instead of asking who employed you, they should ask: what did you learn?