One of the requirements to graduate from the University of Alabama with a journalism degree is to complete three credit hours worth of an internship, which ends up being something like 360 hours of work in the field.

We all knew that if we wanted to actually cover something that mattered, we needed to sign up for the internship program that ran in the fall or the spring, or, more specifically, avoid the summer internship like the plague.

There’s very little news in the summer months — students are gone, summer programs are far and few between and, from what I’ve heard, interns spend more time twiddling their thumbs than typing stories.

Fast forward to the present time.

As the calendar shifted to June here in Selma, I found myself a little nervous that I’d have nothing to bring to the table in terms of enterprise story ideas and paper-selling topics. You can only watch cars run stop signs for so long, so, other than that, I didn’t have a clue what to write about.

But I’ve quickly learned that there’s no such thing as a slow news day in Selma.

As I sit here today [Thursday] and write this, we’ve got a man wanted for the murder of three people, two of whom were 9-years-old; we’ve got Selma law enforcement officials after a courthouse escapee; and we’ve got a burned police car sitting at the station from the recently-opened sub-station in GWC homes. All of this and it’s not even 2 p.m.

In fact, because my desk is located just inches away from the police scanner, I find myself paying more attention to the chatter happening on it than anything else that’s happening at the office because I just know someone is going to do something stupid (ex: the fellow that ran out of the courthouse and hid in an abandoned house today) at some point in the day.

I’ve memorized, or attempted to, at least, all of the Selma Police Department codes so I won’t need to look them up when the operator is yelling frantically.

I wait everyday for my dream call, a 10-96 guilty of a 10-68 while being a 10-97D while acting as a 10-56. Or, in modern speak, a mental person guilty of a shooting while being a civil disturbance, fighting, while intoxicated. At the rate we’re going, it’ll happen too. Just you wait.

Today marks my one-month anniversary at the Times-Journal, and I can honestly say there’s been no shortage of stories, and there doesn’t appear to be a shortage coming any time soon