Interns: My first week at The Herald-Times
My first week included lots of reporting and learning how Amazon Alexa works.
Some background: I’ve been jazzed about journalism since high school and fortunately the paper let me spend about an hour a day in their newsroom my senior year. So I had met a lot of the newsroom three years prior.
My first day I arrived bright and early (for a college student) at 9 a.m. and one of the reporters, Micheal, met me at the front desk, gave me a short tour and took me back to the newsroom where my desk would be.
Honestly, for some reason it’s really exciting to have your own desk, phone and email for the first time in your career.
Soon after, I caught up with the paper’s editor about whats changed in the past three years and he asked me what I’d like to do this summer.
I’m a designer, right? I want to design, but I’ve got other skills, too. I told him I hadn’t really done any reporting, outside of class, since the last time I was in the building.
I learned some newsrooms are a little more “all hands on deck,” and the possibilities of what you can do and learn are almost endless if you’re willing. I would have a chance to do graphics reporting, social media, page layout and more later in the summer.
So I started out reporting!
Every day the newsroom has a 9:30 a.m. meeting where we discuss what stories we’re working on. It was my first day, so clearly, I had nothing.
Michael threw a story about the opioid crisis my way. Another reporter gave a story about an after-school camp that teaches kids with disabilities to ride bikes.
I’m not one to disappoint, so I knew I’d have to find a way to get this job done.
Here are the steps I took:
- Read the press release to get key facts
- Wrote up whatever I could with the information
- Called the first source, got his voicemail, left a message.
- Used the time while I waited for a call back to research the second story.
- He calls me back, we have a great interview. I find out writing notes when someone is a fast-talker is hard.
- I have quotes! I pop them in the pre-write I did and the story is done.
After that Michael took me out to lunch since my direct supervisor, the managing editor, was on vacation. I was very thankful because I forgot to pack a lunch since I was almost late that morning.
After lunch, that story was finished and I was able to move on to my second interview for the bike camp story, with the camp director. I learned that the camp was taking place close by so I left early to go cover it and just like that, the day was over.
The rest of the week went pretty similar. I got an assignment, I did my research, I interviewed and I wrote. Several stories led me to go out on location. By the end of the week I’d written about opioids, bike camps, animal memory, gardening, gas prices, and had several more stories in the works about service trips and community events.
In between assignments, the managing editor came back from vacation. I told her how I love social media and the cool things I could bring to the paper, including putting the paper on Amazon Alexa — which I did by the end of the week. We talked about using graphics in my reporting and others, as well as working some days on the pagination desk.
So while I didn’t design anything, or even open Photoshop my first week, I learned a lot and can’t wait for next week to start.
