Psycho

When Martin Balsam's Arbogast heads into the mysterious house overlooking the Bates Motel in Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 classic Psycho, you feel like screaming at him to turn around, sprint to his car and hightail it back to Phoenix. Nothing good is going to happen here.

It's the same feeling I sometimes get in working with young college interns who regularly arrive in our newsroom, each one of them every bit as inquisitive as Arbogast. I often find myself asking whether I should encourage them to turn around and hightail it back to their dorm instead of tutoring them on the finer points of reporting and writing.

I'm not the only one who feels that way.

"People who I don't even know walk by my desk and tell me to get out while I can," said one of this summer's crop of Union-Tribune interns, University of Chicago sophomore Rachel Cromidas.

But Rachel is not alone. Every summer, and often in the fall and spring, interns walk through our doors, determined to make it in an industry that many say is dying. Aren't they learning anything in college? Are they stupid or something?

"I don't see it as a dying industry," said Rebecca Go, who served as a metro intern in the spring of 2008 while finishing up her senior year at Point Loma Nazarene University. "I see it as a changing industry."

For those of us who have little hope, who wake up ready for another day, only to get a dose of reality from Romenesko, I introduce you to the future of journalism.

Say hello to Edgar Segura, Cal State Hayward.

"It's scary, sure, but there are a lot of possibilities."

Some of the possibilites are outside of the box. Take Adam Loberstein, a UC Davis student who spent the summer writing for the Union-Tribune's Currents section. If Adam never lands a paying newspaper job, he's sure to do quite well with his Web site . It's a Fantasy Baseball player's dream, a site that is siphoning revenue from local newspapers.

One former intern, who asked that she not be identified because of NPR policy, graduated with a bachelor's degree in political science for UCSD and a master's degree from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. She was one of the better interns we had, writing several stories that landed on the cover of the metro section and a couple that earned their way onto A1.

After earning her master's, this young woman found a summer internship at The Dallas Morning News - just in time to witness one in a string of layoffs and buyouts.

"I got to see the staff eviscerated," she said matter-of-factly, like an experienced cops reporter talking about the latest homicide.

Our intrepid reporter returned to California, where she hoped to land a job with The Los Angeles Times. But they, too, were in slash-and-burn mode.

She didn't give up. She landed a job with NPR doing some freelance work. She's also writing for magazines and dabbling in other areas of journalism.

"I've managed to cobble together a decent living."

So how does she see the future? Was that master's from Berkeley worth the paper it's written on?

"We need newspapers," she said. "We need good journalists."

Rebecca agrees.

"It's quite scary that the industry is declining," said the staff writer at the San Diego Daily Transcript. "But I'm fairly optimistic. There's going to always be a need for journalism. It's changing. We may be going online, but the need will always be there."