Former Reporter Editor Lands Internship At Florida Times Union

Christian Ortega, who served as editor-in-chief of The Reporter during the 2018-19 school year, has landed a sports internship at the Florida Times Union, a daily newspaper publication in Jacksonville. 

Ortega, 23, will begin the internship in May and finish in August. He will cover two sports teams—the Jacksonville Jaguars, a major-league football team, and the Jacksonville Jumbo Shrimp, a minor-league baseball team and class Double-A affiliate of the Miami Marlins. 

“I think this opportunity will be really good for me,” Ortega said. “I will get to spend more one-on-one time with the editor and learn from them.” 

Since September, he has covered basketball and recruitment for Inside The Gators, a news website centered around UF sports. Ortega covers UF’s lacrosse team for the The Independent Florida Alligator, the student newspaper at the University of Florida, where he is a junior studying journalism.

In 2019, Ortega was named a Reporter of the Year finalist by the Associated Collegiate Press in the two-year colleges category for his work with The Reporter. He also received four first-place awards at the Florida College System Publications Association conference in Tampa last November.