At BQE Media, a company which owns and operates eight century-old, established weekly newspapers in Brooklyn and Queens, our internship programs challange even the most innovative students in organizing a skill set to prepare for a career in the news business. Our curriculum offers choices in writing, video, design, social networking, computer information engineering for the media as well as 'new media' operations. We require interns learn core skills and focus on an elective medium for the term. We have 9 tracks available.

Internship Programs With BQE Media

1.Writing Track
for newspapers
for Magazines
for web sites
Blogging
Feature writing
Business & Finance writing
Hard News Writing
Police Reporting
Indesign layout for newspaper stories
Sports - & using social network “Queens Sports Network”
Public Relations writing (Queens Attractions: Zoo, Hall of Science, Parks, Bot. Gardens)

2. New Media Track
Using social media to get the story across various social media platforms
Short text local news subscription development (mobile news alerts)
Mobile news program development
Twitter & facebook – connecting to produce viral communication and leads to websites.
The digital edition of magazines … the future …
Emailing the digital edition
News & Blogging for hyper-local social media sources (Astoria News Beat etc.)
Google Applications in communicating news

3. Writing – Video Track
Shooting Video to enhance story
Standalone video as a story
Video downloading onto websites
Broadcast journalism in Newspapers
Producing video slide shows – audio slide shows
Effective writing for video news & feature stories

4. Broadcast – New Media Track
Work on our Monthly LIVE TV Show – planning guest appearances with staff, promoting the show within our media properties, Camera, video, audio or video work.
Live webcast production
News videos focusing on businesses
Viral broadcasting
Shooting business videos & creating 2 minute, 30 seconds and 8 second commercials for websites.

5. Media Social Network / News Track
Using BQELife (create, maintain & promote group of news-centric hyper-local social sites)
Growing news in our mobile device news platforms
Creating hyper-local news that people need

6. Design & Advertising Track
Digital Magazine production – including placing video, audio, flash and flip platform production
Advertising design for Newspapers , magazines and web sites
Mobile device ad platform design
Indesign layout – illustrator – photoshop etc. for advertising design

7. “Computer Information Engineering in Media” Track
Designing platforms of communications in the news medium
Designing APPS for customers to be able to communicate with their clients.
Web design
Community Marketplace site design
Hyper-local Social Network site design implementation

8. Marketing Track
Email Marketing with video
Using Contact software
Promoting stories through our media and free social network platforms

9. Photography in Media Track
Using Photoshop
Slideshows on web sites
News photography
Feature photography
Newspaper photo journalism, magazine photography, web photography

Call us at 718-639-7000 or email jobs@queensledger.com for an interview. We only accept those who show a passion for learning and want to work on a variety of skills.

On Tuesday nigtht, June 15 2010, our live call-in one-hour wariety show will feature a new food sponsor; HOOTERS. Check out channel 34 on Time Warner Cable stations and viewers can call in with questions. A few Hooters girls will grace us with their presence this night. Our questions will surprise and entertain you. For those of you who have followed our show Mike Niebauer and I co-host the show "Queens Independent" in which we interview interesting people who make Queens the best place in the free world. Stay tuned to my blog for other guests who will be on this month.
As you might know we are on every third Tuesday of the month at 8PM and the show is rebroadcast 6 times during the month.

Each week, our friend Ken Doctor — author of Newsonomics and longtime watcher of the business side of digital news — writes about the economics of the news business for the Lab.]

Ah, the Dream of the Wilting Flowers. Like many web dreams, premature, premature, premature…and then, maybe soon, pop. A sensation, with lots of dollars involved. Our best current example: Steve Jobs’ “invention” of the iPad, which of course was dreamed up in quite similar forms, decades before, in the fancies of Alan Kay and Roger Fidler, among others.

It’s all timing, right?

So it’s a good time to get a sense of what’s happening in local mobile commerce among news companies.

A friend visiting the exhibition hall at the NAA Orlando convention in April told me he’d been besieged by mobile commerce vendors. Then there’s the group (mobile commerce) grope, symbolized by the Groupon craze. Get a whopping good deal — but only if you can get enough of the crowd to go along with it as well. Of course, iAds are on the horizon, with Apple offering a sweet-smelling twist on walled-garden marketing pitches. Google’s AdMob — the leading mobile ad network — just got the thumbs-up from the FTC and has launched AdWhirl, its open-source (take that, Apple) “mediation layer” to facilitate mobile commerce. You can’t stay on top of all the mobile-marketing plays these days, no matter how much you try.

Let’s look at newspaper companies and what they’re doing with mobile commerce. Talk about timing: When Dan Finnigan ran Knight Ridder Digital a decade ago, one of his favorite mantras was the Dream of the Wilting Flowers. As in: It’s 4:30. You’re driving down the street. Your phone knows where you are, of course, and coming up, on the right is a florist…with a perishable commodity, flowers that will be worthless within 24 hours. Your “smart” phone, knowing where you are, who you are, your flower-buying habits, and maybe your spending proclivities, sends you the florist’s coupon for half-off, if you stop by within the half-hour. Satisfied merchant, satisfied customer, a perfecting of supply and demand.

It’s still a great vision, with a new generation chasing it, and getting closer. Talk to newspaper companies, though, and you’ll hear the answer is “we’re not yet there.” Closer, but not quite there.

Bill Ganon sees that wilting-flower dream, but he’s drilling down into something more basic: mobile sales training and the establishment of mobile pricing standards and analytics. Then, maybe by the end of the year, he says, the location-aware capabilities of smartphones may start to smell the daisies.

Ganon is the general manager for local market development for Verve Wireless, and Verve is the newspaper industry’s biggest mobile play. Spurred first by AP investment and partnership in summer 2008, many newspaper companies have turned to Verve for mobile content and, now, ad solutions. Verve now powers more than 400 mobile news sites for newspaper and broadcast companies including MediaNews, Hearst, Belo, McClatchy, Freedom, and Lee.

Verve is making a new ad push, after seeing its first forays fall flat locally. That push is predicated on scale. Its network — the Blackberry has just been added to the iPhone, with Android and iPad applications on the way, says Ganon — has grown dramatically. Year over year, for April, it has grown to 8.9 million uniques (from 2.9) and 130 million page views (from 51 million).

When Ganon — a veteran of old media sales at Newsweek and Sunset, as well as eight years with Qualcomm — took over local sales eight months ago, he found a ragtag group of local mobile efforts. Now, as Ganon describes his work, we can see the emerging newsonomics of local mobile pricing. As the mobile commerce world explodes, Ganon is focusing on the basics. He says Verve can now count 75 local sites beginning to make consistent sales, up from around 20 when he came on board. The basics of the push:

Training: Verve’s local market sales team of four is spending lots of time training newspaper and broadcast sales staffs on how to sell mobile. That’s reminiscent of the ongoing training done by Lem Lloyd’s merry band through the Yahoo-powered Newspaper Consortium. (In fact, with all the Yahoo, Verve, and marketing-services training ongoing, I’d wager that newspaper sales people have gotten more training in the last two years than in the previous two decades.) Verve’s training focuses on taking the mystique out of mobile: “Advertisers don’t like stealth solutions. They like to know what’s behind the curtain,” says Ganon.
Pricing: Ganon urges a $15 CPM (cost per thousand) floor for selling mobile. With that guideline, he says Verve-powered sites are averaging $19 CPMs, which would be about twice the average of what news sites on getting on the desktop web. Says Ganon: “This is your time to define metrics.” In other words, try to establish a price, not allowing prices to fall to low single digits as inventory is sold by middlemen, as has happened in the main digital business. Right now, most newspaper companies can count no more than five percent of their digital revenue, coming from mobile. Most of that total — maybe $100 million — is going to bigger, national brands like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. That’s out of maybe $500 million involved in mobile advertising overall in the U.S.
The Pizza Sale: Salespeople are being trained to sell the crust (a banner ad), the sauce (a landing page, tailored to action off the ad), and the toppings (call-to-actions, whether “click to call” or map directions). Pricing is still impression-based, though, Verve sees cost-per-click and cost-per-acquisition offers down the road.
What’s apparent is how early we are in local mobile selling — and how far away it is today from adding appreciably to news site revenues. The deals are small, and even the best-performing sites can count no more than 20 advertisers, with most having far fewer on their sites at any one time.

And the Dream of the Wilting Flowers? Ganon says Verve should be able to add in location-aware selling, maybe by the end of the year, but he believes that it “will be a major breakthrough.” So, 2011, maybe. When that breakthrough comes, the big question is who will benefit most: the local newspaper and broadcast companies, or Apple, or Google, or Yahoo, or maybe Verizon or AT&T?

Ask Walter Sanchez, publisher of BQE Media in Brooklyn and Queens and a Verve client, and he’ll tell you it’s an uphill climb. I met Walter at a recent New York Press Association conference, and his marketing efforts were way ahead of the curve, among publishers. He’s busy selling social sites, SEO, SEM, and mobile sites, he’s proud of getting such small businesses as Beach Bum Tanning sold on mobile ($500 a year for a landing page and 3,000 short-text messages). But he’ll tell you that most local merchants are indeed still mystified by the web, and they’re slow adopters: “When those 21-, 22- and 23-year-olds start buying their own businesses, in a few years, then, we’ll see real adoption.”

Twitter, facebook, short texting and linkedin are the new media gateway to the future.

What We Do and Who We Are ...

Dozens of media properties

BQEMedia is a company with well-established media properties in Brooklyn and Queens which embraces the new technology in a relationship branding world. While some newspapers seem content with chasing fads created by the internet, social media and mobile technology, we have a clearly defined, lasting strategy to produce and deliver local news and crucial information to a community of consumers.
Readers and businesses now have the ability to receive the local information they need in more ways than ever before: print, web, digital format, texting, short text notification, mobile devices, news feeds, emails and through our ‘user created’ social networks. We are one of the very few who has the knowledge and ability to be able to deliver important information to our readers in all these ways. Our business model is built upon strengths of the ‘relationship’ we have created with our readers and followers for over a century. Heading down the next century we are well ahead of the curve.
We focus on Brooklyn and Queens, New York and we have media properties which have been continually published since 1873. That’s more than 137 years of growing - one reader at a time. Our mission - to match our loyal readers, who we call – our members, to businesses from our neighborhoods who can provide services to them. We are now leading our readers and our business customers into the digital age of thinking. It’s the way we are all beginning to lead our lives, and we have won awards for our efforts in the news industry.

How We Do It - Communication is now ‘viral’ in nature

As communication has become viral in nature, top communicators, like us, use social media to band its readers/followers. This action is the new journalism. Not every newspaper, magazine and news outlet ‘gets it,’ but we do. Because we are bullish on publishing, we look at our empire as the bedrock of an informed society. We have taken the lead on global reach beyond a village to be ‘information distributors’ with contemporary measures. We now have the ability to reach out for our business customers to extend their brands and advertising by focusing their marketing efforts - to the world of readers and consumers who are more likely to use their product.

Our Business Model Sets Us Apart

As ‘new world information distributors,’ our model sets us apart. We have developed products within the new technology as a means to be invited by the consumer to enter their world – and their community of inbound information. If they want us on newsprint, we’re there (8 weekly community newspapers), websites, syndication feeds, on facebook, twitter, a digital magazine version, a calendar of events through their wireless mobile device, we’re there. We help our customer businesses stay connected to our community – even as their community evolves. We offer a social networking venue where we will come into their home. It’s how news companies will be effective in the 21st century. Now we will get them together in social networks, by categories of their passions, engaging the people and grouping them locally. Businesses are included as they can find the social category which they can provide a service.

It’s Called Relationship Branding

We become an important part of their lives by being a dear old friend and a mentor to our longtime passionate readers. We are that friend who travels the community and the world as a part of OUR daily lives to provide the comfort of informed and meaningful dialogue of new and consistent information to our readers, which they now require in their daily lives as part of their world. To many, it’s brought to them in social media methods. That’s what sets us apart. At BQEMedia we use our weekly newspapers, various social media, blogs, mobile device publishing platform and traditional news web sites to energize them and make our communities vibrant.
Our properties focus on events, special sales, calendar of events, crime news, death notices, birth announcements, our opinions, our reader’s opinions, profiles of important people and stories on businesses.

BQE Media owns and operates:
- EIGHT weekly community 48-page newspapers
- A borough-wide glossy 72-page magazine - It's Queens
- Eight hyper-local news websites -
- A group of Social Networking Web Sites for communities of web users - www.bqelife.com
- Hyper-local proprietary Search Engines
- A Blogging School; Social Networking School & Seminar Series
- Sports Leagues for Kids & Young Adults - Heroes League
- A Social networking hyper-local sports network site - www.BQESports.com
- 8 Mobile news web sites including mobile landing pages & short texting
- A short text news alert service for dozens of our communities - text Glendale to #21-321

Who We Are ...

The Queens Ledger/Greenpoint Star Weekly Community Newspaper group, quite simply, are a group of eight weekly community newspapers which have been bringing local news of people who are being born, living and dieing in towns in Queens and Brooklyn for over a century. We have accumulated millions of readers over that time and have a weekly circulation of 150,000. The internet has now provided us the opportunity to expand on the relationship with our reader customers and our business (advertising) customers by creating a synergy never before available.

Weekly Newspapers:

One of our weekly newspapers, (The Queens Ledger) has been published every week in the same neighborhood of Maspeth, Middle Village, Woodside and Elmhurst, Queens since 1873. The Leader Observer of Woodhaven has been published every week since 1909. The Greenpoint Star was originally a daily paper in the 1800’s. Now it is our weekly which covers the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Williamsburg. The Glendale Register, in Queens, has been published every week since 1935.
The Long Island City / Astoria Journal has been around since 1986, the Forest Hills Times since 1995, Queens Examiner since 1999 and the Brooklyn Downtown STAR since 2004.

Magazines:

It’s Queens – the Magazine is a quarterly magazine which is available on 650 newsstands throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. It is distributed by Hudson News. It features businesses, movers, shakers and interesting tidbits.

Digital Platform Brings Pages Alive

It is also the first regional magazine in New York City to be distributed electronically on a ZMag digital format. Pages come alive right in front of the reader on a computer screen. Pages have video, flash, email acquisition platforms and linking features which enhance the reader experience. Folks, we’re all going to be reading magazines and newspapers this way in years to come. We just did it first – that’s all. It’s called ‘paginated media.’
It’s Brooklyn – the Magazine is a quarterly magazine which covers Brooklyn. It is available on 650 newsstands and mailed to thousands of top businesses in Brooklyn. It too is emailed in digital format.

Web Sites:
We have eight “award winning” news websites (one for each of our regional weekly papers) with stories, video, calendars of events, blogs and a Brooklyn/Queens business directory with 35,000 listings. The site is updated all day long, seven days a week. The sites are highly intelligent web 2.1 interactive sites which allow readers to post their own blogs, post events, place free classified ads, comment on stories and interact with all the members/readers and business customers of our Queens Ledger/Greenpoint Star family.
Business partners and customers become more involved with BQEMedia through our web sites. We offer search engine optimization and a business web site development plan which includes metatags, google map finding, video, classified ads, e-commerce, coupons and more. We build websites for businesses and make them part of our family of our news websites – which affords a healthy online business presence - all searchable.
We have a website for our magazines which profiles some of the glossier things around each borough.

Mobile Device Sites; Short Texting For Customer Branding; Targeting:
Our business advertising customers are given the opportunity to target patrons through short texting (mobile texting through our master account), in order to create a one-to-one marketing tool. We send ‘short text’ mobile device customers coupons, messages and alerts from our clients. This enables you to collect the mobile information of your customers. Readers / customers who ‘opt-in’ are your best customers.

Our Social Networking Strategy includes consistent local newsy twitter feeds to our followers, facebook fan page accounts and websites for some of our community organizations. We are building our readership on a Social Networking Web Site service platform for our readers/members/partners under the name ‘BQELife’ and ‘Brooklyn / Queens Life’. The sites, to be run by our members and readers, allowing hyper-local interaction between readers, users and businesses. These web sites grow organically because the hyper-local groups can easily interact with each other to communicate, prosper and be proactive. So new people will join every day.
Actually, with the proprietary software platform we have developed allows groups to build and grow a social network on a web site of their own without even consulting us. It includes news feeds, ads, events, a local proprietary search engine and local news columns that we generate from our own sites. It also offers neat tools so that the members of the site have a great web experience.
But - the web’s new life is smarter than we can imagine. Digital publishing will only become stronger and a reliable platform that will be easier to use. Content will be more important than delivery very soon. Why? Because people will eventually find the content they desire – and have the ability to get it delivered any way they want. We have been producing digital editions for a number of our media properties since the technology was developed.

Queensoooooopedia and Broolklynooooooopedia are local proprietary search engines, which our media company owns and operates. We have linked up with ‘tybit,’ to build a search engine, which searches the world wide web, takes the top four search engine readings and combines them to give a hyper-local search result scheme which is second to none. Each of the web sites under Brooklyn / Queens Life umbrella have this proprietary search engine – which allows business to buy key words which are available as ‘pay-per-click’ options for users of the search engine.

Blog / Social Networking School:
Blog U is a program we offer as part of our company model. We hold social media lessons to help our readers/members/partners on blog consulting for businesses and socially savvy individuals. We feel if our business partners and readers understand and use twitter, facebook and dig to its maximum ability, then our family will be stronger.