Hey guys,

Good to hear you’re all going well in the internships. How’s the coast Jo I was supposed to go back this weekend but I have more pressing matters at hand. You mustve had a wild internship there with the storms and the floods and that young bloke getting sliced in the face. It’s the most happening place in the country at the moment.

Things are going well here. Today’s an unusual day where everyone is getting off early. I’m just waiting to call the coppers and check a few facts and then i’m going to shoot off. But otherwise the hours are, as they repeatedly told us, long. I’m one of the lucky ones because i do mainly pic stories that don’t take too long to do at all and i usually get home at a reasonable hour. But our senior journalist Kate, who i live with, gets run ragged. Just this morning she was out of the house at 4am with our photographer to attend a RSPCA raid on a house where a man was keeping more than 100 dogs in some of the most dispicable and squalid conditions imaginable. They were told to bring gumboots and were given disposable jeans and a facemask for the breathing.

I have found the job does have its perks though (on top of the fact its fun and you get to meet interesting people and write all day and I do a few opinion pieces every so often which generally just piss the public off). We get media passes to the movies every so often (not that there is many movies on in this fine town, they only release one per week and have a maximum of four showing at the one time.) And today I was given some free passes to attend the absolute classiest of entertainment travelling through the Rum City tomorrow night, The Eye Candy strippers on their national tour. Me and our photographer may attend and maybe I will do a review, I don’t know. If I don’t do one for the paper i’m sure I will find a captive audience on the JSchool blog (I saw you lot hanging out front of that strip joint, Mitch is the only good and honourable one amongst us) Earlier on in the year I was invited on a monster truck and I was in a car that went through a burning ring of fire. Yesterday I was offered to go sailing on a boat we were short of time. There’s loads of shit like that that you wouldn’t be exposed to in another job.

In the perks department that about the hieghth of it. Being a journalist certainly doesn’t help you much with the ladies, the girls all love the photographers, they are mesmerised by the camera and they want to use it. No one ever asks me to use my notepad or my pen. I get the occassional person who is impressed by my shorthand but it is usually old ladies and they say things like “I haven’t seen that in years,” or “I didn’t think they taught that anymore,” and I say things like “Only at JSchool the best damn journalism education and training centre in the galaxy.”

Anyway gang, look forward to seeing you all at the end of the month,

joe