“We don’t give them a chance to breathe, really. We throw them in and they learn the hard way.”
—Brian Voerding, WDN editor
WSU student photographer Andrew Link knew something big was going on when he received a call from his editor at the Winona Daily News at 7 a.m. on a Sunday in August 2007. Southeastern Minnesota was being hit by a devastating flood and Link would be joining the state and national media documenting the historic event. “I got in and it was a full staff in the newsroom,” Link recalled. “I was just taken aback.”
Link ’08, spent that Sunday traveling through Winona, Minnesota City, and Goodview, and during the following days captured images of the aftermath in Rushford and Hokah. The Daily News received numerous press awards for its coverage of the flood that claimed six lives and caused an estimated $67 million in property damage. “I just went from site to site getting as many photos as I could,” Link recalled. “It kind of blew me away that this big event was happening and I was a part of it.”
Link worked at the Winona Daily News for a year-and- a-half before graduation. Now the newspaper’s photo editor, he frequently hires qualified WSU students looking to build their own experiences outside the classroom.
That, said WSU Associate Professor of Mass Communication Tom Grier, is just what he hopes for when students join the Winona Daily News as interns or part- timers. The connection between WSU and the newspaper has been going strong for more than 20 years.
“I always talk about the skills you’re introduced to in the classroom and taking them out in the real world,” Grier said. “We try to do that as much as we can here, but we tell students, ‘We can only teach you so much about interviewing, writing, photography, and you have to go out and do it.’”
Lauren Osborne ’11 remembers her WSU Mass Communication courses and her “real world” experiences working for the Daily News going hand-in-hand. “I started at the Winona Daily News my sophomore year and it was a really nice companion experience to my schooling,” said Osborne, who is now digital news editor at the St. Paul Pioneer Press. “It was really cool to learn in class and then sometimes immediately go to my job at the Daily News and put it into practice.”
“It is a great resource to have,” said Brian Voerding, Winona Daily News editor since 2011. “It is providing additional value for the students’ education. We don’t give them a chance to breathe, really. We throw them in and they learn the hard way.”
“We don’t give them a chance to breathe, really. We throw them in and they learn the hard way.”—Brian Voerding, WDN editor
Anne Jungen ’05, cops and courts reporter for the La Crosse (Wis.) Tribune, cherished her experiences at the Winona Daily News. “I started working part-time on the obits desk, and the result was I had the chance to work one-on-one with a high-caliber editor, Darrell Ehrlick,” Jungen said. “I was a sophomore in college and he would sit down with me and go line-by-line and edit—‘Let’s make this sentence stronger, make this more active.’ You’re learning the importance of accuracy, how to interview people. It happened early on for me, and I realized, Yeah, I know how to do this, and I love it.”
