Internship Spotlight: Ben Warren ’25
Ben Warren '25 in NYC, where he completed a data-journalism internship at The Wall Street Journal.
The Wall Street Journal
Prior internships, part-time gigs and experience with Dickinson’s student newspaper set the stage for Ben Warren ’25 to complete a data-journalism internship at The Wall Street Journal. Ben spent roughly half of his time combing through data sets and writing reports and the other half learning the ropes of reporting for a top global news source. As he sharpened programming skills and became more comfortable talking with strangers, Ben also developed greater interpersonal savvy. “Everyone has their motivations to talk to reporters, so I learned how to pick up the little signals and context clues that helped me understand those incentives,” he says.
Majors:
Internship title:
Data reporting intern
How did you find this internship?
I think I found it on LinkedIn, actually. Then I applied through the Wall Street Journal application portal. I was searching for newsroom internships that had a data aspect to them, so this was a perfect match.
What was it like, day to day?
I’d say it was split 50/50 between programming and data analysis, supporting my projects or my team’s projects, and traditional reporting, which involves lots of phone interviews, online research, reading through documents and writing.
On the programming side, I might be sent a new data set we acquired through a Freedom of Information Act request from a state government, then have to do a quick summary of what it showed. Or I would write a program to scrape a webpage (like Wayback Machine captures of Elon Musk’s tweets that went into this project) and port that information into a database.
On the reporting side, I would talk to other reporters, industry professionals (think CEOs, lab scientists), political analysts and pollsters—really, anyone who had something useful to say about an article I worked on. I trawled through legal documents and tracked sources down on LinkedIn too.
Was it helpful to you?
Definitely! This was my first time in a professional newsroom—though my work for The Dickinsonian was great preparation—so I got a good sense of the rhythm of a reporter’s job. It seems basic, but I got a lot more comfortable talking to strangers on the phone and learned to ask the right people the right questions. Everyone has their motivations to talk to reporters, so I learned how to pick up the little signals and context clues that helped me understand those incentives.
I also sharpened my Python and R programming skills, learned some new statistical techniques and added to my web-scraping wheelhouse.
Oh, and of course I have to give a shoutout to the Dow Jones News Fund, a program for aspiring journalists that brought me out to NYC for a week before my internship started and gave me an excellent crash course in business reporting. Not to brag, but I know what it means to short-sell a stock now …
Have you had any previous internships?
Last semester, I interned at the Center for Sustainability Education, editing the biweekly newsletter there and doing a few data-analysis and visualization projects. Before that, I interned at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, providing GIS and data-analysis support for an economic research project. In a past life, I did some part-time work for a data-visualization consultant and was an editorial assistant on a political science podcast.
What advice would you give to fellow students considering an internship?
People say this a lot, but it really is true: Apply for roles you think would be a good fit, even if you don’t think you have enough experience or qualifications. Let them decide to reject you (or not)—don’t reject yourself. The internship listing from WSJ said they preferred candidates with prior professional journalism experience, but I still applied. And they hired me. Go figure.
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Published September 10, 2024