Internship Reflective Journal

Journalism holds a powerful dream for idealistic young students. There is a yearning behind most would-be journalists to report the big issues and make a positive difference in our world. Whether your passion be human rights, politics, health, the environment; there is a field of discovery we all want to pursue in order to achieve that influential change (and maybe rack up a Walkley along the way).

When one thinks of regional newspapers, these types of life changing stories are rarely associated and the journalistic dream loses some lustre. The other reality is money talks. Advertising and sales take precedence over news reporting. And so, balancing haphazardly between the newsroom and the advertising section of the Townsville Bulletin is Advertising Features, and me, the idealistic intern.

The Townsville Bulletin is one of North Queensland’s largest daily newspapers, with a readership average of about 100,000. With a focus on community issues and events, the ‘Bully’ aims to inform, entertain and lead public debate through their coverage of local, national and international news. The Advertising Features section of the Bully controls most editorial and advertorial articles, the Career One lift-outs on Wednesday and Saturday, the feature homes in the Real Estate Guide, the monthly senior citizens lift-out ‘Primetime’, the tri-monthly Catholic News lift-out, as well as many other once-off magazine type publications. Often forgotten about by the larger sections of the paper, the Ad-feats team consists of an editor and three journalists and they are the bridge that spans the rocky relationship between advertising and news.

With dreams of an international travel writing career, I foolishly entered the belly of the Bully with a heavy heart rather than an open mind. But the 13 weeks I spent in Ad-feats were surprising, challenging, productive, a huge learning curve and overall incredibly enjoyable. I was initially surprised that I wasn’t treated like a subordinate at all; I was thrown straight into the deep end of researching, interviewing, reporting and writing. On my first day I was sent out with a photographer with little more than a media release for background information and had to interview the Traffic Police Chief Inspector, Main Road Minister, several local council members and MPs and three teenagers. I was nervous beyond belief, but with a deep breath I dove head first into the role of journalist and gathered all the relevant information with ease.

Being a relatively shy person myself, interviewing is something I have always felt I struggled with. When thrown a media release at short notice it is difficult to wrap your head around an idea before asking the right questions and getting the right information from an interviewee. At one stage I was left a memo note with a name and phone number and told to interview the talent about ‘baptism’. Talk about unprepared. However the opposite can be even worse. When given too much time, or when the talent is particularly talkative or interesting, my biggest problem often became having too much information and wasting precious time siphoning through it to find the story.

One of the most rewarding skills I picked up through my time at the Bully was being to pick an angle for a story and getting just the right information needed. I can now pick three or four precise questions that I know will get the quotes I’m after. But I’ve also learnt to be flexible. When the interviewee provides an unexpected answer or some new information the order or angle of a story can change completely. I learnt this through several career profile articles for the Career One lift-out. Most of our information for career profiles is collected via an emailed questionnaire and we often have to ring the talent to clarify details. One line from a phone conversation can lead to a new line of questioning which in turn opens new ideas, perspectives and angles on an article.

My toughest lesson was learnt early on when a story I wrote was printed with an incorrect phone number. The error turned out to be purely a typo, but it made the importance of accuracy hit home hard. Names and phone numbers are the most important information to get correct and I now check and triple check them before sending my work to the sub editors, I even ring the phone number I’ve typed in the story just to be 100 percent sure.

My editor was great at providing feedback to my work. She would often have time of an afternoon to sit with me and read over my stories, communicating why any changes were made, correcting slight style errors or relaying positive comments. My first few stories were often rearranged, with the lead being shortened or taken from a lower par in the article. I wholehearted enjoyed receiving critical feedback. When another journalist was criticised for her ‘lazy’ writing, I overheard her say, ‘That’s what sub editors are for.’ It is easy to see journalists becoming complacent about under par articles when writing them day in day out becomes mechanical and monotonous. Having editors and sub editors is definitely a back up that can breed laziness, so I made sure to not fall into that trap myself. My guiding rule was that I was there to impress and I wanted them to miss me once I was gone, which meant keeping my standard as high as possible.

Before starting my internship it had been over 2 years since I’d written a news article, as I had taken some time off in the middle of my university course and since returning had only undertaken theory subjects. Though I initially struggled with writing the articles to a satisfactory standard, I was well and truly into the swing of creating full, polished stories by my third and fourth week and since then gained mostly positive feedback. My major feature article, on a local quadriplegic running a peer support program for other spinal injury patients (to be printed at a future date, possibly Saturday 7 November), was deemed ‘a wonderful job’ by the Weekend Extra Features editor, when my Ad-feats editor had told me not to have high expectations of my first draft. But by far the most rewarding feedback I received was from my interviewees. One man I wrote a career profile on told me I had ‘made him seem important in the world.’ This, I think, is when I realised regional newspapers, and even Advertising Features, can make a difference to the world, though it may seem to start off small.

The absolute highlight of my internship was my front page story. Working in Ad-feats rather than the newsroom, I had thought it impossible to make the front page. Oh, how wrong I was. Our September edition of Catholic News was set to mark the centenary anniversary of Mary MacKillop’s death and I had been given the contact details of a local Catholic family who were descendants of Mary MacKillop. I found the story incredibly difficult to write as I was given few guidelines as to what it was supposed to be about. After it was written, set for publishing the next week, my editor told the newsroom editor about it and my story was poached from Catholic News and published on the front page of that Saturday’s paper. OK, maybe it was a slow news day... But I still think I have bragging rights.

The most difficult and unsatisfying aspect of journalistic work was wasting copious amounts of time chasing contacts who didn’t return phone calls, chasing dead end leads, having to re-write entire stories that didn’t work out the way you first thought they would and chasing people to book and re-book photos. At first I found booking photos a difficult and time consuming task. It is strange to explain to someone over the phone that a photographer they don’t know will meet them at a certain place to take a picture for an article that they didn’t know was being written until I rang and interviewed them 15 minutes ago. When booking a photo you have to provide the photographer with some concepts or ideas for a creative photo that suits the article you’re yet to write. It becomes even more difficult when you’re given very few time slots over a week to book your photos in. In its infancy an article can seem like such an intangible being. It starts with a tiny idea, you call one contact who tells you to call the next contact and so on, you finally get some quotes and information, your idea starts to form the outline of a story and a photo (usually of someone you’ve never met, in a place you’ve never been to) is taken by someone who has very little idea of what your story is actually about. Yet somehow it all seems to come together. Seeing my completed published articles was such a fulfilling and rewarding achievement when everything seemed to start off so disorganised and elusive. By the end of my internship I could begin to imagine the finished result of an article from its conception, making the road to the final product much smoother.

Over my 13 weeks in Ad-feats I wrote 32 stories, including several for the newsroom, and 21 have been published. Several of the remaining stories will be published this Saturday, including my major feature article that I think I am most proud of. The rest will be published during the next few weeks.

I can understand the dread one feels of becoming just another cog in the inner workings of a giant news machine like the Townsville Bulletin and its father News Limited, but by taking pride in my work I definitely feel the place I held was an important one. Seeing the passionate interest my editor and fellow journalists took in their own work taught me that an intense interest in everything is all it takes to be a successful journalist. I have learnt to become interested in many things I was not previously interested in, which in turn has lifted my interviewing and writing skills far above what they previously were.

In the current economic climate and internet information revolution many large newspapers are dying off or struggling to stay afloat. While my classmates will graduate in a few weeks, I have one more semester of university study to fulfill before launching into the pool of potentially jobless journalism graduates. With fear of sounding overly sentimental, my internship at the Bully has truly changed my whole perception of regional journalism. The understanding of journalism from a university student point of view is nothing like experiencing journalism in the real world. The real world is challenging, but far more rewarding than anything university has taught me. My mindset has changed dramatically and I believe this will continue to develop my professional self in a positive way.

Though it’s undoubtedly important to remember the passion that inspires you to first enter journalism, it is life changing to discover it is often the little things that make the biggest difference. And so, the idealistic young intern emerged wiser and far more passionate from her run in with the real world.