USA Today Audience Editor Sydney Bergan ’23 Lands ‘Surreal’ Olympic Assignment
The internship that launched Sydney Bergan ’23 on a path to covering the upcoming Summer Olympics in Paris, France, started off on an unexpected trajectory.
As a junior at Syracuse University, Bergan landed an internship through the prestigious Dow Jones News Fund with McClatchy, but instead of serving as a reporter—which was her career ambition—Bergan was assigned to the digital media program as an audience engagement intern.
Bergan spent 10 days enhancing her digital media literacy skills at Arizona State University, taking curated stories and repackaging them for different audiences. From there, Bergan worked as an intern for The Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer. Before long, The Sacramento Bee hired her as an audience editor while she was still enrolled in classes at Syracuse. Now, she’s an audience editor for USA Today.
Being an audience editor was the perfect blend of content creation and newsworthiness. Bergan excelled by understanding how to create stories that resonate with audiences, and she enjoyed having conversations with people about what types of content they want to see.
“I thought of myself as a reporter and I always knew I loved people and telling their stories,” says Bergan, who earned a magazine, news and digital journalism degree from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications.
“But once I started, I just fell in love with the audience engagement work. I love the content creation and curation side of journalism. It allows me to be creative. I do a lot of content design for USA Today, coming up with stories that will reach our audiences wherever they’re looking for their content. I love looking at the analytics to see what stories, videos or graphics perform well and which ones don’t. It’s all so fascinating.”
Her next assignment will take her to Paris to create content around the Summer Olympics for USA Today. It’s a dream come true for Bergan.
“I love the Olympics. Always have. It’s crazy I’ll be covering the Summer Olympics! It just feels so surreal,” Bergan says. “I worked hard to get here, and I know I’ve got this, but there’s some imposter syndrome at play. This is a big deal. I’m working with journalists who have covered the Olympics many times before. I’m the new kid on the block and am just trying to learn as much as I can and soak it all in.”