Bridget Bennett, 2012 HHS graduate, photographed President Barack Obama when he visited Minneapolis in June 2014. Lisa Persson, 2013 HHS graduate, once shot a portrait of Osmo Vanska, the director of the Minnesota Orchestra. Liam James Doyle, 2012 HHS graduate, covered a #BlackLivesMatter protest in St. Paul on Martin Luther King Day this year.

These opportunities were the result of working at the Minnesota Daily – a daily college newspaper that prints Monday through Thursday, covering news that is focused on the University of Minnesota – Twin Cities (UMN) campus as well as the Twin Cities. Although it is completely student-run and managed, the Daily operates separately from the UMN as a non-profit organization.

Bennett, Doyle, and Persson are three of four HHS alumni who have worked as photographers for the Daily in recent years. The fourth is Alex Tuthill-Preus, 2014 HHS graduate.

The Daily is the fifth-largest daily newspaper in Minn. and the third-largest daily newspaper in the metropolitan area, according to its website. With such ranking, working at the Daily gives Bennett, Doyle, Persson, and Tuthill-Preus exclusive access to important events in their community.

“If you like sports, it is a great job because you get basically a front row seat to every sporting event on campus, since most home games of the prominent sports have photo requests,” Persson said. “When I shot hockey last year, I got to travel to Philadelphia with one of the sports reporters to shoot the NCAA Frozen Four.”

Persson has also covered many concerts, from big names to lesser-known ones.

“Some artists I have shot live include Mod Sun, Nas, Earl Sweatshirt, Avey Tare’s Slasher Flicks, Wiz Khalifa, Tyler the Creator, Mac Miller, Riff Raff, Chance the Rapper, Atmosphere, Prof, 2 Chainz, Dessa, G-Eazy, Dem Atlas, and Cypress Hill,” Persson said. “I’ve also shot a lot of local bands, which was cool because I usually shot them practicing at their houses or practice spaces, and they all had a really unique setup.”

These opportunities may be hard to come by, but some of Persson’s favorite shoots were those without the popular culture appeal.

Persson’s first assignment was shooting the Zombie Pub Crawl in Minneapolis – an annual event during which thousands of people dress up as zombies and roam from bar to bar in the Warehouse District.

“There were a lot of great costumes. It was really hard to communicate and get information from people – you have to get everyone’s name in the photo, or they can’t run the photo in the paper – because everyone was either hammered or in character acting like a zombie,” Persson said. “I took some cool shots from a ferris wheel that are still some of my favorite photos I have ever taken.”

Persson also once helped with another reporter’s project on crime in the dorms at UMN. She spent Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights wandering through the freshmen dorms and listening at doors, trying to find underage drinking, drug use, or other illegal activity. If the students were comfortable with it, Persson would then go in and take anonymous-style photos of the action inside.

“Obviously a lot of people were pretty sketched out by it and said no,” Persson said. “The most interesting part, however, was the amount of people who actually said yes and let us come in and record them and take photos of them doing illegal stuff. So now I have a front page photo of someone in Territorial Hall snorting a line of molly off of a desk using a U-Pass.”

Although photojournalism at the Daily may not seem like a conventional job, it requires the same work ethic and commitment.

“The amount of hours the photographers put in at the Daily can change every week. The stories we pick up are always different, and one week never looks like the week before,” Doyle said. “Some shoots are more straightforward than others, and you may only be there for an hour or so, but other times if you’re covering an event like a Gopher football game, you’ll be dedicating many hours for that one story.”

The work schedule is never set in stone, either, and the Daily photographers always have to be on call.

“You have to have your phone on you all the time, which is really hard,” Persson said. “The photographer staff is expected to accommodate breaking news at a moment’s notice. If there is a fire, accident, or other random thing on campus, it is important to cover it.”

However, the sporadic hours go hand in hand with journalism. Working at the Daily has given Bennett, Doyle, Persson, and Tuthill-Preus real experience in the field and helped them improve as photographers.

“I’ve learned how to take better photos through constant hands-on experience with professional equipment and weekly photo critiques with all the other Daily photographers,” Tuthill-Preus said. “It’s basically my top priority when it comes to time management, and I’ve definitely had to skip some classes for it. But it pays off in being where I learn most – out on the job.”

Managing the responsibility as a college student can be difficult, but Doyle believes the commitment is worth it.

“This is a real job – not just an after-school extracurricular. The balancing act can be hard because you want to perform well as a student, as an employee, and also have a social life,” Doyle said. “Because of this, my days are pretty much non-stop, and I’ve had to forfeit many of my precious weekends for work, but I wouldn’t change it because I love the important work that we do, and I’m proud of the work I do at the Daily.”