So, talk me out of it if you can, journalism departments of Washington, but I despair of ever finding any intern who will better serve Leader readers than have the Luddite and the Truant.”

The argument for seeking funding for future internships

1.  Colleges all-but require internships for graduation;

2.  Professionalism demands we train apprentices;

3.  Students need the grant money internships funnel to them;

4.  Exposure to campus-hatched ideas is good for newsrooms;

5.  Newsroom reality is a good antidote to hothouse academic theories.

The argument against seeking funding for future internships

1. We hit the peak this summer. Why should we suffer near-certain disappointment?

2. Why should Leader readers and staff gamble that other interns will be this good?

3. It would be unfair for future interns to have to endure endless war stories about The Luddite riding his bike long distances for short stories and The Truant bearding death to get samples of toxic water.

4. Now that we know certain community leaders in Port Townsend will target interns for hazing, what kind of people would we be if put another set of interns in the cage?

Dear Journalism Schools,

Just try to talk me out of cancelling the Leader’s journalism internship.

I know, I know:

1.  Colleges all-but require internships for graduation;

2.  Professionalism demands we train apprentices;

3.  Students need the grant money internships funnel to them;

4.  Exposure to campus-hatched ideas is good for newsrooms;

5.  Newsroom reality is a good antidote to hothouse academic theories.

All that right-thinking clap-trap is fine, but what about our needs, those of us who read and write The Leader?

Port Townsend’s newspaper hit the double jackpot this summer with Carmen “The Truant” Jaramillo and Brennan “The Luddite” LaBrie.

Must we put a brave face on and offer up our newsroom next summer, hoping against hope the fates will again send apprentices such as these our way?

One can only imagine unsuitable facsimiles of these two will be a horrible let-down.

Consider the daring Truant, on loan to us from Washington State University, where she’s a senior.

She developed icy nerves by flouting Port Townsend High School’s attendance policies, yet managed nonetheless to emerge with a solid command of the English language and clarity about news’ importance as the oxygen of democracy.

On her second week on the job at The Leader, she picked up a 12-pack of Mason jars from Don’s Pharmacy and drove with them to Anderson Lake, where she pulled on muck boots and latex gloves to gather quart samples of lake waters that had just killed a dog and were said to hold the highest concentration of lethal neurotoxins of any lake in the country.

A week later, she followed her nose along the cobbled beach of Port Hadlock to the rotting carcass of a gray whale, which she photographed for a front-page story.

This month, she told several sides of the story of the sweet pup that spent three weeks in the hospital after being dragged behind his human’s truck. She fielded calls from several involved parties with bruised feelings, heard threats of legal action and kept her eye on the truth...and the dog.

About the same time, we sent her into the lioness’ den at Jefferson Healthcare to track how some of our neighbors who fight addiction or mental illness are in an endless cycle: jail-hospital-shelters-court- social agencies and only sometimes get well. Irritated by her persistent and calm queries, hospital staff 15 years her senior yelled at the Truant and shook a finger under her nose before settling down to find answers to questions about our public hospital’s pieces of that heartbreaking puzzle.

When all around the County were losing their heads, our Truant kept hers and wrote a meaty analysis of the constitution and case law that protects William Bacchus’ First Amendment right to grace Quilcene’s main drag with a lynch-mob symbol if that’s his heart’s desire.

Tough act to follow.

What are the odds that in the same summer we’d have another hard act for future interns to follow? So unfair, as our Commander-in-Chief is fond of saying.

Imagine a college student with old-fashioned good manners, no smartphone and no car. What else could we call him but Luddite?

He arrived a week or so after the Truant and, with one less year of college and fewer campus clips, instantly applied himself to two hard tasks: tightening up his writing and shooting crisp, clear news photos.

What he lacked in experience he more than made up for in persistence, the essential ingredient of journalism.

Pedaling his bike all over town, he became a hero to Jefferson County’s dominant demographic by devoting careful attention to articles about the growing crisis in elder care, a memory loss support group, training for foster parents, Bayside Housing & Services’ provision of hundreds of beds for the homeless, organic food projects and all manner of community celebrations.

If you know our Luddite as the tyro behind the Spruce Street Weekly, you’ll be nodding your head when I say he’s an unusually kind lad but not a treacly jellyfish. Some awesome parenting went into this specimen and as we’ve badgered and pushed him, he has been absorbing it all in his quiet, watchful way.

Insisting on detailed feedback and eager to talk writing and reporting, he has suffered through rookie errors while honing his craft day by day. And when I assigned him to write about the revival of a lost community quilt, there was no eye-rolling, no sighing, just lots of questions and brainstorming and then a lovely bit of social anthropology in our paper, showing how we stitch disparate people into a community.

He wrote. A lot. And his confident voice emerged: knowledgeable about this place and an observant lover of its foibles.

Consider the clever piece he wrote last week about Candace Hulbert gearing down her cookie dynamo or his charming account of the Zumba flash mob that helped local restaurant owner Kris Nelson’s lover propose with memorable panache. Any paper would be thrilled to capture a sense of place this way.

Both interns, who graduated from Port Townsend High School, made the paper better all summer by spotting hometown stories and even errors the older newcomers on the staff might have walked past. Which is why I’m whiny today. Whhyyyyy must we submit to the vagaries of chance?

Maybe there are more interns out there this good, but I doubt it.

Also, it’s not fair to any future intern, some tender lamb who’ll have to endure endless war stories: “Well...Brennan rode his bike uphill and into the wind all the way out to Jacob Miller Road for a story. I think you can walk to Boat Haven,” or “Carmen waded into poisonous lake waters in leaky boots. Are you really going to refuse to be tased for a story about tasers?”

So, talk me out of it if you can, journalism departments of Washington, but I despair of ever finding any intern who will better serve Leader readers than have the Luddite and the Truant.

(Dean Miller is Editor of The Port Townsend Leader. He would like readers to know the Washington Newspaper Publishers Association funds these internships with generous donations from several foundations, including the Bruce Wilson and Henry Gay Internship Scholarship, named for the father of            former Leader publisher Scott Wilson.)