Six(ty million bazillion trillion) things I love about working in ad-feats...

Week Six...

One of the best things about working on a Friday in the advertising features section at the Bully is that we print the careers guide on Thursday night... this means as soon as I arrive on a Friday morning I can log on and see which stories were printed and where... and I already know what tomorrow’s section is going to look like...
Working at the end of the week also means that one of my priorities on arrival is to check all the photos that our photographer has taken for my stories earlier in the week... A lot of the time when writing my stories I do the interviews via phone or email, so I often have no idea what the talent looks like, so I love logging on to see what ideas Darren has come up with for the pics that match my stories...
This morning was particularly exciting... I have, once or twice, consoled myself with the fact that working in advertising features means I won’t really be getting a front page story (not that I’m saying I would even if I was in news, just that it’s one more obstacle in the way).. .so you can imagine my delight when I looked at last night’s printing to see that one of my career pieces had made the front of the career guide... pretty exciting!
But the day got better and better...
I spent the day writing two more career features... one on my Internship lecturer Hume and the other on my Indigenous studies lecturer John... they were both so interesting it was difficult to narrow them down to just 500 words. Linda loved them both and made only one change to the lead in Hume’s story and none in John’s.
The most difficult thing there was tracking them both down to pin down a photo appointment for the next week. But all worked out fine in the end.
With Catholic News out of the way (It has been printed and is just waiting for publication on Thursday next week) the ad-feats girls are working on their next project, the ‘party book’.... the party book is a shiny new quarter fold to be published at the end of October, which is basically full of advertorial for different party hire/catering/function/venue/planning/costume etc businesses around Townsville...with the in between bits filled in with little general party idea stories written by us.. With the other ladies cover the advertorials, Linda gave me free rein to write some short filler pieces about party games, party theme idea etc..
Mid-afternoon Linda walked back into the office laughing cheerfully...
“Guess what! I’ve just been in the news room bragging about our Mary MacKillop relative’s story... I built it up, I dragged it out, I said to (the editor)...’Mary MacKillop has no decendents, she had eight brothers and sisters, and none of them had any children... but WE found a releative...and not just anywhere, not just any relative...but guess where we found one, right here in Townsville! With kids going to Saint Josephs!”
(Ok maybe this isn’t all a direct quote...but it was something like this and it was something like this and she assumed different voices for each person speaking and it was incredibly dramatic and completely hilarious!)
There were also lots of bits with the other girls cutting in a laughing and whispering to me about how Linda loves to go into the newsroom and stir them up...
Anyway... with Linda assuming the voice of the (male) editor the next bit was something like, “’Linda this is HUGE! We’re running the story tomorrow with a teaser on the front page!’”
I was stunned...not only had I already secured what I thought was going to be the grand achievement while working in ad-feats (front of the career guide)...but BAM... My Mary MacKillop story was getting a teaser on the front page of Saturday’s paper!
(For once I was actually excited to be working a 5.30 open at the shop the next morning so I’d be first to see the paper.)
It was truly a great day at the office!