Getting the best out of your work placement

Summer is a busy time for placements in newsrooms — for those wanting to get on to a journalism course, and for students planning to put their course experience into practice in the workplace. Here, University of Portsmouth journalism placement guru Bernie Saunders offers some practical advice on how to get your newsroom placement off to a great start.

The student who turned up at the news desk early one Monday morning had so nearly got it all right.

He’d found the right building. Check. He was early. Check. He was reasonably dressed. Check. (Although the three piece suit was a little over the top!).

But he turned fifty shades of grey when I posed him his first question. “What stories have you got for us?”

The blood drained from his face and he stammered: “Er…what do you mean?”

“Stories,” I replied. “You know, the lifeblood of a newsroom…the reason journalists exist.”

Sadly, he’d committed the fundamental error made by many work placement candidates…to assume his only task was to turn up and everything else would be handed to him on a plate.

And here endeth the first lesson about placement. If you want to get off to a great start on a placement in a newsroom, where journalists spend every waking hour producing stories, then arrive armed with a story or two, or at the very least, a couple of ideas.

They don’t have to be earth shattering exclusives. I didn’t actually care what the stories were about, as long as they were relevant to our target audience.

Employers want to see you are already thinking like a journalist, and thinking about stories which appeal to their audience.

Think what it says about you. Here’s a journalist, with stories ready to go. Not some wide-eyed wannabe waiting to be entertained.

And once you have impressed them in this way, the likelihood is they will get you doing more interesting and more challenging stories, more quickly.

Which brings me to my second key piece of advice.

Know what the publication’s big stories have been in the previous few days. Know the issues its readers, listeners, viewers care about and think about how the stories might be developed through new angles, or different, more interesting (read digital) ways of telling of the story.

It doesn’t take more than a few minutes to read the publication’s recent coverage. But I used to despair at the number of placement hopefuls who couldn’t tell me what our top story had been in the previous 24 hours.

Some couldn’t even tell me ANY story we’d published in the previous few days.

Of course, once you have impressed the newsdesk with your story ideas and knowledge of the publication, you’ll need to demonstrate your great nose for news, great writing skills, great shorthand, knowledge of media law, enthusiasm and commitment to journalism etc etc etc.

But in my experience first impressions can make or break a placement.

And what happened to our poor, starry-eyed hopeful at the start of this piece?

I gave him two hours to get out and about in our city and to return with two story ideas…or not return at all.

He came back with two good story ideas, both of which turned into page leads….and some months later we gave him a job.

He stays in touch and tells me he now deploys the same question when young hopefuls turn up at his newsdesk.

My old dad had lots of sayings, most of which annoyed the hell out of me when I was a youngster. But the older I get, the more I find myself using them.

One of his favourites was: ‘Failing to prepare, is preparing to fail.’

Irritating isn’t it? But he was right.