Jacob Donaldson - Media Internship

Interns can be phenomenal help to a growing business - especially if that business is a creative industry work within the Memphis Music Community. Young people have experiences with the market that most people are trying to reach - young adults and parents of young adults. They have younger siblings and youngish parents and are in new communities with fresh ideas and a lot of ideas. They don’t want to be getting coffee for executives, they want to be contributing to something bigger than themselves. They see the connections that tired eyes miss and exhausted media staff forget over time in the trenches.

Jacob Donaldson is one such intern, taking photos and videos for social media and a variety of artists this past year on tours coming through and from Memphis.

Jacob is a Media major at Visible Music College and he sees the world through the lens of stories from, well, the lens. He has his camera slung at all times, is working in lab and classroom with phone, camera, still and video, and making presentations better through his work, his ideas, and his internship weekly. Jacob works on a school “newspaper” or “newsletter” although it is not in print. He is a higher expert than me in getting engagement from audiences within and without the college and he exercises his knowledge monthly with gathering appropriate content in scope and length.

My favorite photo of Jacob himself was on the night of the “after show” by one of my favorite artists Jon Foreman from Switchfoot. Jon opened a show at FedEx Forum and then did a post show gathering of acoustic music at Visible Music College. Jacob saw his current “hero" - not Jon, but Jon’s media person, as she was managing the time afterwards. I was going to snap a phone pic of the two of them together (who never get snapped but are always snapping others), but just got this shot of them talking.

That is what an intern does - works all hours of day and night capturing good content and then walks up to their peers in the industry and gets that connection for the future.

We need them - interns!