OK dudes and chicks, here goes my first blog post on the internship. I was going to leave it until tomorrow and do a whole week wrap-up until I finally read John’s letter and realised it was supposed to be an on-going thing, oh well. My week has been pretty up and down, but at least I’ve been able to wear a suit every day.

My office on the Southside contains the digs of three newspapers – and it’s all pretty much contained in the one room, with the editors at one desk island, the reporters at another and the photographers down the other end. The advertising/real estate gang is in a separate part of the office and we have nothing to do with them. I have met nobody from advertising, and so nobody has approached me to do any advertorials/real estate schtick which I guess is a good thing.

I would say that the management style, of me at least, has been incredibly hands-off. I’ve been given three or four stories, but most of the time I’ve been asking people for more stories or else researching and pitching my own ideas, which has been quite difficult. I’ve written a range of community/arts based stories, most coming in at about 200 words or so, and I believe they will be published across all three papers, which should hopefully be quite good for me and my portfolio. I estimate I’ll get about 5-8 articles published over the papers. Would be interested to know how many articles you guys expect to get published!

Tuesday was a difficult day as my contact editor was out of the office (as was one of the other editors). Hence, it was difficult to know what to do throughout the day. I have a feeling that things were much more low-key since it was the day after publication date. I spent a lot of the day wondering what to do and milking the last ideas out of the internet. This was a pretty depressing day as anybody who has read the facebook page recently can attest. Thankfully, things got better afterwards.

Every other day has been OK, I have had enough to do, and have been calling/receiving calls daily and getting articles together. One of the good signs is that the editors/journos are interested in me getting photos for each of my stories, which sort of makes me feel as though they’re serious about them. I’ve interviewed a bunch of different people – a breast cancer survivor, a local artist, a school principal, the regional director of Vision Australia and an old, half-sighted guy who used to work at their Kent Street centre…who else, some American, a few other people. Today, with the interesting backstabbing of Mr Rudd, we were sent out to interview punters in old mate’s electorate of Griffith. The responses were mixed, and most quite ambivalent except for the lovely man who called Ms Gillard a “fucking bitch”. That one didn’t make the vox pops section, unfortunately. The rest of the day was pretty OK, I finished up a couple of stories, rejigged another for another paper and watching Kevin Rudd crying on the television. At the end of the day the editor told me he’d read my stories and that they weren’t bad. I tentatively asked “so, do you reckon they’ll find a home?” and he said they would. Yay.