Work Experience - Day 1

After waking up late leaving no time for getting ready, I quickly dashed out of the house at around 8:33am, needing to get to said work experience for 9am. In the end I was around 8 minutes late - not great, but it could've been a whole lot worse.

Today didn't comprise of much, although I did gather a basic understanding of the routine the Isle of Thanet Gazette has. (Remember that thing I said about knowledge?)

After a reasonably slow and daunting start (meeting all these new people in a new environment, or even more daunting, try to do something these people are professionals at), I started typing up some letters and meeting announcements for this Friday's Gazette. Never have I been so paranoid of my spelling. Not even in an exam was I so worried about those bloody apostrophes, despite the fact I was only typing up who won this months bridge tournament!

Following that, I went with some reporter - Andrew Woodman - to Margate Magistrates and Crown Court, which was rather overwhelming. I realise it's only Margate and nothing spectacularly big, but seeing the whole process of justice was rather cool. I did get some odd stares from the Magistrates though, who probably wondered what this little brat was doing there.

In the afternoon, I learned about NIB's (news in brief), where I took some overly long press releases or lifeboat reports and summed them into roughly 100 words. Sounds easy, and some were, but for others you really did have to think about the who, what, where, why, when, how and more importantly - what people wanted to know from the story.

Towards of end of the first day, there was a long but ultimately helpful news meeting where I could see how stories were gathered, formed, moulded, processed and pushed along that production line of journalism. All very fascinating.

So, in general, the first day went well. I can't say I was very confident but I listened and watched a lot to what the people did there - who they spoke to, what they asked etc. Let's see how it goes tomorrow...