She’s Brittani Osborne, 26, a 2012 GSU alumna and Gannett human resources intern. She’s worked for Gannett since November, and she recently started recruiting for the major media company. Her visit to Will Sutton’s Mass Media Writing and Editing class Thursday, February 25 was an opportunity to help prepare students for the workforce – and paid internships.
WILL SUTTON/Courtesy photo
Osborne chats across tables with Wesley Love and Malcolmn Williams.
Osborne spent some time talking about Gannett and how the company is rebranding itself as two separate companies, Gannett and TEGNA. The former focused on newspapers and the latter focused on broadcast operations. She said Gannett, her employer, split and formed two companies to become more focused and efficient, and they are working on rebranding the company to get other media operations to be as recognizable as its best and biggest brand, USA Today.
Osborne told the students that Gannett is a good company, and flexible. She said though most of the summer internships are in markets where some of them might not live, Gannett is willing to “work something out” in instances where the company sees a promising student.
Not all the students in the mass communication class are mass communication majors, including JarMichael Nelson, a kinesiology major. He was surprised that the company offers internships in areas other than journalism.
“We got to know about broader variety of internships. Even though they don’t fit my field it could lead to something more,” he said. “She mentioned that her major was not mass communications and it was pre-law in addition to political science and now she works in human resources for media. She showed me that anything is possible even when it doesn’t directly fit your major.”
During her visit, Osborne discussed how students sitting in some of the same seats she sat in a few years ago can be more successful. She talked with individual students about specific Gannett opportunities, and she collected resumes, cover letters and autobiographies. She said students should create LinkedIn profiles, properly formatting the pages, making sure dates and other information is accurate, providing a summary with value, including recommendations and creating a customized URL.
“I’m glad she came, and she is very polite,” said Marion Owens, a mass communication major with an interest in broadcasting. “I learned about Gannett careers, to help find information and got more insight on opportunities …”