Third time's a charm...

After only three days of work at the Bully I already think this is the most rewarding, challenging and worthwhile subject I’ve taken at university...

My third day ran incredibly smoothly and I feel that I used the trials of last week to launch the day off to a good start. I went in with the mindset that I was going to work harder than ever to complete each story to a high standard and as quickly as possible...and I had decided that in order to make sure every word I wrote was read and critiqued as fairly as possible, I was going to have to ensure my stories were complete before Linda wanted to check them... this meant coming up with full and fabulous lead... something I had struggled with over the last two days of work.

The day began with a 9am appointment with the photographer and a trip to Castleton to cover a story on IGA raising money for Camp Quality via an auction of footy jerseys. This photographer this time was Scott, a man I had briefly met a few months before hand via a photojournalism subject at uni. For the story I interviewed the NQ area manager of Camp Quality, IGA’s promotions manager and a family who had a daughter with leukaemia. I was set guidelines for the stories length and angle by the chief of staff in the newsroom, a woman I had not worked with before but who was very direct in how she wanted the story and I found her directions helpful.

The most challenging part of this story was interviewing the mother of the child with leukaemia as she seemed quite distressed to be talking to the media about something so personal, few of her answers made sense and I had to continually prompt her and re-ask questions in a different way to try and get anything worth quoting... I found this to be a big learning curve, as most other people I had interviewed were fairly media savvy and knew their answers before the questions were asked.

While writing the story I struggled with the lead again, but I made sure I completed it before I showed Linda and the only change that was made before printing was the addition of a full stop in the middle of a sentence and the removal of one quote... success at last!

The next two stories I wrote for the day were career profiles for the Career One section of Saturday’s paper... they are written from questionnaires that we send out to different companies/businesses...or just everyday people who know who have interesting jobs or stories to tell. The stories are more like advertorials as they are basically a way for companies to get their name out there for free... but I really enjoyed writing them as it was a chance to be much more creative than with the regular news stories I’d done in my time so far.

Again I found the lead the most challenging part of writing... but I persisted on finishing every detail before Linda checked the stories and she made little change to anything I had written.... And she said I’d done a great job with both of them... I was quite pleased!

Linda told me I was to find some people of my own to write career profiles on, but it is hard because I’m not from Townsville and I don’t have many contacts here... but on Monday night I went to a business meeting for my partner’s work and met a lot of local business owners and have since recruited many of them as talent for me to write stories on... again I feel like I’ve accomplished something that is usually very much outside my comfort zone.

One big lesson that arose from my third day was to check every detail of my work scrupulously. Today I received an email from Linda saying that my leukaemia story was printed with the incorrect phone number in it and that the paper would have to print a correction... I checked my notes and it turns out that the phone number error was just a typo... but it is a big lesson to learn. Linda said, “A good lesson learnt early on means you won’t make the same mistake again. It is all a learning process”.... and I think so far Linda’s wise words are the best thing I’ve learned since being there.

(NB: I will try to post the stories I have had published here over the weekend... I just don’t yet have electronic copies to put up.)