The Star Tribune offers a unique summer design internship that exposes a developing journalist to print design in all our sections. We pride ourselves in choosing talented, driven college and graduate students who can design pages in the whirl of deadline and immerse themselves in a project over a few shifts. We expect our interns to come to us with skill and leave with polish and invaluable experience from a major-market newsroom. Each intern is assigned a mentor in addition to a supervising editor.

Candidates for our print design internship should show a strong, developing visual sense for page design outside of the classroom.  They should have newsroom deadline experience designing news, sports, business or entertainment pages. Some knowledge of Adobe Photoshop is required, and knowledge of Adobe InDesign is a bonus.

Most successful applicants have completed their junior year in college, worked for a college news outlet AND interned with at least one other professional daily news organization.  While we would never say never, the odds of your landing one of our internship spots are not very good if you’ve never interned at a professional newspaper, news magazine or website. We’re looking for budding journalists who’ve demonstrated they’re ready to make the most of this opportunity.

Your application, which must be uploaded or postmarked by Dec. 1, 2013 should include:

• Up to 10 of your best published clips demonstrating your ability to design compelling pages
• You can upload the pages to our jobs site or send us a link to your online portfolio
• If you don't have a digital portfolio, you can mail a CD or your portfolio to the address below. We will not return them.
• A cover letter telling us what skills you’d bring to the position and why you want to be a journalist
• A resume detailing your journalism experience as well as three references, including their titles, phone numbers and email addresses
• Two letters of recommendation. At least one of those letters should come from an editor who’s seen you work in a professional environment on deadline. Please do not submit letters of reference from fellow student journalists.

How to apply online

• We prefer that you apply online, which you can do by clicking the link below.
• You can upload your cover letter, resume and clips using our online tool, which accepts a number of file formats (PDF, JPEG, FIG, DOC, DOCX, TXT and BMP).
• Our system will let you upload up to six files in addition to your cover letter and resume.
• If you have more than six files to submit beyond your resume and cover letter, you should combine some of them.
• None of your files can be larger than 2 MB.
• You can complete your online application in stages by selecting the link marked “Continue later” at the bottom of each page. That will prompt the system to email you a case-sensitive username and password that you can use to sign in and finish at a later time.
• We won’t see your application until you click submit. Once you take that step, you won’t be able to alter your application or attach additional documents to it.
• If you apply online, your references can email letters of recommendation to newsrecruiter@startribune.com with your name in the subject line, or snail mail them to Duchesne Drew (address below).  Please ask your references to write your name on the envelope.

The online application tool we use, SmartRecruiters, is optimized to work with Mozilla Firefox. Other browsers may not give you full functionality.

If you apply through snail mail

• Place all of your application materials in one envelope and send them to Duchesne Drew, Managing Editor for Operations, Star Tribune, 425 Portland Av., Minneapolis, MN 55488

Questions?

If you have questions about the internship program, please reach out to our internship coordinators.

• You can call Duchesne Drew at 612-673-7111 or email him at ddrew@startribune.com.
• Or you can call staff writer Neal Justin at 612-673-7431 or email him at njustin@startribune.com.