Interns: More reporting, training and coding
Two weeks of interning down, eight more to go.
Hi. 👋👋 It’s me again. Before we start, I just want to say it’s really weird having a sleep schedule where you naturally wake up at 6 a.m. everyday. I wasn’t prepared for that to happen. However, it’s kind of nice to have time in the morning slow down and do a little bit of whatever you want.
Anyway, here’s how this week went.
I didn’t go into the office on Monday because I had training in Indianapolis with the group that organizes the internship program. I got a free AP style book. Lost my car in the parking garage (who hasn’t done that?) All was well.
I took over my paper’s social media account over on Twitter and everywhere else @theheraldtimes this week, starting on Tuesday.
We use Social News Desk, which is similar to Tweetdeck and Hootsuit. I’ve never used the later two, but I really like Social News Desk.
It’s kind of crazy to be in charge of scheduling the social media presence for everything that’s thrown up on the web. You have to keep up with all the notifications (there are so many!) and reply to everyone who slides into your direct messages. I also had to do this while juggling writing different stories.
I’ve learned that readers really hate the paywall. Like, a lot. Sometimes someone with a subscription will post the whole story in the comments.
I think running social media accounts is fun because I get to try all kinds of new things if I want to. I did some research and found out that Vox’s meme tool is open source. You can run your own content through their generator, or download it and customize it for your organization so you don’t have to reupload your logo every time.
Wednesday was more reporting, with a small story about local pools opening and another about Indiana’s population rising.
With the population story, I got to code (at last!) some charts to go with the online story.
I don’t know anybody who codes anything completely by scratch, so I modified some examples of charts that use www.chartjs.org, which is a JavaScript library for making charts. JavaScript libraries make my life a while lot easy. I also found another tool called highcharts.com that is also useful for making charts.
On Wednesday night I attended a community event and DIDN’T actually write anything about it. But, I guess it was helpful to get some story ideas?
Thursday consisted of mostly just tying up loose ends on several stories and pushing out content online.
Friday I scheduled out A LOT of content to go up on social media due to the three-day weekend. I spent the entire day writing social media posts and double-checking the story budget to make sure I didn’t miss anything.
