Aurora Smaldone
Intern in Action, October 2002

New York, NY-- Sometimes you just know what you want. That certainly is the case for English major Aurora Smaldone ’03, who has always loved the written word. That love has translated into an interest in the media, which developed into an internship last summer at CNN with two Barnard alumnae, Rose Arce ’86 and Maria Hinojosa ’84.

"I’m interested specifically in the news business," says Smaldone, "because I think writing, whether for print or TV, takes on an especially important and influential role."

During the summer before her junior year, Smaldone sought an internship with a major news organization. She found several on the Career Development internship listings, but when Journalism Professor Frank Brady mentioned his former student was the Pulitzer Prize-winning Arce, Smaldone’s hopes increased. She found Arce’s e-mail through the alumnae network and contacted her about a summer internship. Arce was delighted to take on Smaldone as an intern. She received the Amy Lai ’89 grant to fund her internship through the Career Development Office’s Alumnae and Donor Sponsored Internship Grant program.

Working on a variety of stories, Smaldone set up interviews with spokespeople for Arab-American advocacy groups for a story on FBI diversity and interviews with Mafia experts to cover the John Gotti funeral. For a story about the death of Christina Long, the 13-year-old Connecticut girl murdered by a man she met online, Smaldone spoke with the father of the alleged killer.

"That was a tricky phone call to make," she said.

On her first day at CNN, Smaldone covered a Mafia indictment in Brooklyn with Hinojosa.
"I grabbed my Metrocard, grabbed Aurora, and we were out the door," Hinojosa explained. "When we walked in, I told her to do whatever needed to be done immediately, and, two seconds later, she came back and it was done. I thought, ‘Now that’s a Barnard student.’ She’s a good observer, but when I wanted or needed her opinion, she always gave it without hesitation."

The highlights of the internship were being sent with her own camera crew to cover press conferences with Governor George Pataki and interviewing the president of the American Museum of Natural History, Barnard’s former president, Ellen V. Futter. The first press conference Smaldone attended was an award ceremony for two Port Authority Tunnels, Bridges and Terminals workers who had detained a man later found to be on the FBI terrorism list. The story she wrote on the ceremony was picked up by the CNN newswire.

Smaldone landed the Futter interview after a press conference on a new fossil exhibit from Spain. "It was only after the interview that I confessed to being a Barnard student," she admitted.

Smaldone also had the opportunity to work on CNN’s 9/11 coverage. "I’ll never forget Lashawn Clark," she said. "A mother of five who lost her husband as he tried to help a woman in a wheelchair escape from the tower. She was an amazing woman."

Asked what she felt she learned from the internship, Smaldone said, "Learning from Rose and Maria, I have a much better understanding of what it means to be both a correspondent and producer and what the relationship between the two is. What also struck me was the collaborative nature of TV news versus print journalism and how, behind a two-minute TV piece, there are hours and hours of work."

"Working with [Smaldone]," said Hinojosa, "brought back the feeling of what we learned at Barnard: that you know you’re a woman in a complicated world and you know that you can handle it."