Local talent makes good

A.J. Pacitti, the Providence Phoenix's summer news intern, wrote in our Rookies' Gude last week about the outlook for aspiring journalists and there's a bit of news on some of her intern predecessors, quite a few of whom went to Brown:

California native Te-Ping Chen, 22, recently moved from a Washington, DC-based blogging position with the news-and-opinion magazine the Nation to work for the Interna-tional Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which is also based in DC and which backs investigative reporting projects. 

Te-Ping, of course, besides helping to introduce Clean Elections' legislation in RI, later interned and freelanced at the Phoenix, writing about bank robbers and a paucity of drug treatment slots, among other things.

Cranston native Sarah Rainone, 29, is an editor at HarperCollins. She used networking to score a deal for her first novel, Love Will Tear Us Apart — about old friends meeting again at a wedding in Rhode Island — which is scheduled to be released next summer by Three Rivers. ...

Arizona native Alexander Provan, 25, has a freelance position at the men’s magazine GQ, where he is a re-searcher, fact-checker, and writer. Provan, a 2005 Brown grad and a former Phoenix intern, says he needed a job, and was hired after completing an internship at Harper’s.

He writes for a slew of other publications, including the Chicago-based music magazine Stop Smiling and the arts-oriented the Believer. Following graduation, he did some work for a non-governmental organization in Bolivia, where he did some reporting, including stringing for the Associated Press.

“One hundred dollars can last an entire month in Bolivia,” Provan says, via e-mail. “The downside, of course, is that it can be tough to convince someone in New York City that you, as a 23-year-old freelance journalist with only a modicum of experience, are the person to write that lengthy article on the Bolivian separatist movement.”