My first week
I was at Radio-Canada every day this week (Feb. 6 to 8) from 9 in the morning to 5 at night and needless to say, it was an amazing week.
On Monday, I had a ‘Welcome to Radi0-Canada’ day. I visited most of the halls and offices in the ever confusing Radi0-Canada tower with Jean-François L’heureux, a television director who was my instructor and another intern from UQAM.
I don’t think I understood how many people work behind the scenes in a news organization to produce content before meeting these said individuals on Monday: journalists, producers and technicians whose name don’t appear often on your screen or whose voice you don’t hear on the radio, yet are essential to any broadcast.
On Tuesday, I learned how to use iNews, the program Radi0-Canada and CBC Montreal (who are situated underground in the Radi0-Canada tower, right next to Radi0-Canada sports, where I’ll be interning) to produce content, amongst other things.
I don’t want to enumerate the functionalities of the program because I know it will bore everyone in a matter of seconds, but what’s important to know is that EVERYTHING that you see, read and hear on Radi0-Canada (from the bureau in Regina, to the one in Winnipeg) goes through iNews.
What you can see above, in the right-hand corner, (the Microsoft Excel-like part) is what Radio-Canada calls the ‘conducteur’ or the news rundown. It’s essentially what will be said during any broadcast. For example, at 8:45:00, Michel will start his debrief and at 8:45:10, a super with his name will appear on the screen. It’s that precise. But that Excel-like section is also used for assignment editors to assign stories to various journalists. To sum up, it has various functions.
On the third day, I learned how to use NewsCutter. It’s the program Radi0-Canada uses to edit videos. We got to work on it all day so it was a lot of information, but I think I’ve managed to understand. There definitely was an adjustment to make: it’s very different from Final Cut Pro, which we use at Concordia.
Overall though, I found that NewsCutter was more user-friendly than Final Cut Pro. My reasoning is that there are a lot of functions in NewsCutter to edit in a more effective way than on Final Cut Pro. For example, you can add frames manually in NewsCutter. Cool, eh? Moreover, the Radi0-Canada keyboards have stickers to identify what every key’s shortcut is (if it has one).
From Monday to Wednesday I was with Jean-François L’heureux and on Thursday I began a two-day training with Paul-Eric Dumontier, an editor at radi0-canada.ca. With me, training, were two established journalists: Michel Chabot and Jeff Yates.
Chabot, a former Concordia communications student, has been a television journalist for the past 15 years with TVA and Radio-Canada. It was interesting to see someone who’s been in the business for a while have a training with me. Yates is a former Concordia journalism student too. We were three former Concordia students in the same room, at Radi0-Canada. Yates was a journalist at Métro for a while before being hired by Radio-Canada a couple of months ago.
We experimented with Scoop, the platform Radio-Canada uses to produce online content. It’s very similar to Wordpress. Paul-Eric asked us to write an article and he reviewed it on the class’s projector. Remember when I wrote about the file tree? That’s where writers get the wire stories from agencies such as AFP, AP and Reuters. Editors and writers can either publish a wire story directly on the Radio-Canada website, or use the information in them to write their own story. In either case, you’ll see the name of the agency in the byline.
The final day was one of the best journalism experiences I’ve had. Michel Chabot and Jeff Yates weren’t there for the second part of the training: writing for the web. Consequently, I was alone with Paul-Eric, one of the top editors at radio-canada.ca, the whole day. In the morning, we discussed what websites I liked, and why I liked them. Did I like the website becuase of its titles? The font? The images? The layout? Paul-Eric, it turns out, also really likes longform journalism.
For at least 30 to 45 minutes, we surfed on the radi0-canada.ca homepage and discussed how ‘that’ picture’s framing could be adjusted, how ‘that’ title could be changed and how ‘this’ lead could be shorten. Needless to say, it was awesome. We took a break for coffee and then visited his web team. Radi0-Canada has an employee that works exclusively on longform content and how it can be presented to the reader (I’d love to have that job, that’s for sure).
Also on the web team is journalist Bernard Barbeau. Last year, I interviewed for a job at Agence QMI––a Montreal-based news wire operated by Quebecor––and it was Barbeau who interviewed me.
After lunch, Paul-Eric gave me some news wire stories to work on. Scoop allows the user to change the url ‘slug,’ the words you see after ‘.com/’ in a url, so we worked on which keywords would work best for a dispatch. We also decided on potential titles.
Lastly, Paul-Eric gave me one more dispatch about Shia LaBeouf’s anti-Trump project called ‘He will not divide us.’ I worked on which images to chose from one of the various agencies (Radio-Canada can use pictures from the CP, AP, Reuters and more), which words to use in my slug, on my lead, on insert quotes and all the other components of an article published on radio-canada.ca
It took a little bit more than 45 minutes to write it. When I finished I told Paul-Eric, who was sitting on a computer next to me, to see how I did and what he thought of my piece. To have an editor from a major media organization sit down next to you to edit your text is incredible. His comments were insightful and I learned a lot from how he changed some words and sentences (and the reason why he was doing so).
When we were both satisfied with the piece and its presentation, he looked to see which of his colleagues were working (we were downstairs, in a computer room––the web team’s office is upstairs, next to the television sets) on his Google account. He then got up and called one of them by phone.
Hey I’m in a training session right now with an intern. Do we have anything written about Shia LaBeouf’s art project being suspended?
I thought I was doing this as practice, so understandably, I had a hard time believing it was actually going to end up on the website. But it was.
I haven’t technically started my internship (my first day is Thursday, February 16), yet one of my articles was published. I couldn’t be more happier. It was a great way to finish the week.
You can read the article here.
I will continue writing about my experience at Radio-Canada throughout my internship. Feel free to give me your thoughts on Facebook, Twitter or by email at etienne.laj@gmail.com.
Cheers,
Étienne
