Though the 2011 internship program at the Associated Press is dead, the good news is that the internships will return in 2012, AP spokesman Paul Colford confirmed to Richard Prince.

“The Associated Press is putting all of its internship programs on a one-year hiatus, as well as our attendance at journalism recruitment conventions, as we focus our financial resources on our essential core businesses,” Colford said. “We will resume an internship program in 2012…”

The announcement that the programs will just skip a year “was met with skepticism,” Prince writes. In 2007, the AP announced a one-year hiatus for a program that paired minority student journalists with AP writer/editor mentors for a five-day workshop. That program never returned.

We also suspect that the program will not return in 2012, but for a different reason….