Faces Profile : Bess Davis

By Justin Woodburn

A Dow Jones internship doesn’t usually lead to a 1000-acre ranch in southern Wyoming. In the case of Bess Davis, a UM senior print journalism major, it did.

The journey started in Indiana, where Davis was a Dow Jones online editing intern at the Indianapolis Star, a large metro paper with a daily circulation of about 350,000.

Davis moved into a townhouse two blocks from the newspaper’s office, which she found on Craigslist.

At the Star she worked from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. five days a week. Her primary assignment was to pull stories from the wire, edit them and post them on the Star’s Web site. Sometimes she had to re-write wire stories to fit the paper’s demographic. Editors would also send reporters’ stories and photos as they came in throughout the day for her to edit and post.

The highlight of Davis’s summer was her first published story, a front page centerpiece on the ticket fiasco that preceded the opening of Lucas Oil Stadium, new home of the Indianapolis Colts. The continuing ticket problems became her beat and she wrote five more stories throughout the summer, in addition to answering phone calls to the paper concerning the issue.

Despite her success Davis felt detached from her work and the Midwest culture.

“I didn’t enjoy living in the Midwest.,” Davis said. “No one spoke Irish, no one was a vegan, everyone was a Republican.”

Southern Wyoming may not seem much more hospitable, but Davis has accepted an unpaid internship there to work on the Kindness Ranch. She will be helping to rescue and rehabilitate former laboratory animals like horses, sheep, pigs, dogs and cats. She hopes to profile the animals and employees who work for the organization using print, photography and video.

“I want to be the person to feed them in the morning and I want to be the person to tell their stories,” Davis said. “This is something I care about.”

Davis hopes to find a job as a communications director in the field of nonprofit animal welfare.

“We need to learn how to take our degrees into other areas,” Davis said.