<p>For journalism internships, a lot of college depts/schools of journalism have listings of internships or links on their web pages. They are worth looking at even if it's a grad school of journalism, because the listings mostly cover more general internships too. </p>
<p>If you work on your college paper, or similar, you could ask other people there if they have done an internship in the past. Here, the paper also keeps huge files of all the information sent directly to them about jobs and internships, going back quite a few years, so there might be something like that at your school, depending on how organized the person who gets sent it all is.</p>
<p>Also, some of the state/regional newspaper associations keep lists of internships at all the newspapers in their association. I don't recall seeing a DC list, but there might be one. The PA one is the most comprehensive I have seen, if you are interested in looking elsewhere. Alternatively, individual newspapers and magazines often advertize their internships on their web sites, but this is quite a time-consuming way to search unless you already have a good idea about which ones might have them.</p>
<p>It is hard to find a journalism internship as a freshman, because most people don't have the kind of experience or portfolio that companies want to see. And a lot of them are unpaid and want you to have a car, which can limit where you are able to go. They also tend to have really early closing dates for applications, so a lot of them are gone already. </p>
<p>It's tempting to send out applications indiscriminately, but you need to take into account the time you might be asked to put into the whole application process. For some of them, it's quite a formal process, and you can go through stage after stage of cuts, getting asked for additional, often quite specific, things each time. I just heard I got an internship that I applied for back in early November. Since November, just this one newspaper corporation has asked me for: a portfolio of published work; two original unpublished articles of different lengths which would be suitable for publication in their newspapers; an outline detailing which sections of their newspapers I am most interested in, why I would be suitable for those sections, and ideas of the kind of things I might write about; a telephone interview; an in-person interview; and an informal language test. I think this one was the most demanding application of all, and it is paid, but you only need to get to the later stages of a few of these kind of things and suddenly something that you might not get, and even if you do might not pay you, is taking up a lot of time. Even for something like copy editing, you can be asked to take an exam as well as the usual application.</p>