Hello!

Today was my third and penultimate day of work experience at The Argus, and I’m still not over the hysteria that comes with having my own phone.

Today has been the best day by far, because I’ve been so busy! I’ve almost finished the story which will appear as a double-page spread at some point (next week I think?), and I just need to inform the picture desk to send a photographer to an event on Saturday to complete it. I also wrote pieces about buses in Barcombe, a walk organised by people recovering from addictions, Clearing places in Sussex and a couple of other little bits. What I have discovered, though, is that if someone doesn’t want to give you information, they’ll do ANYTHING to get you off the phone. I think I probably annoyed a lot of people today with my incessant questioning, but I suppose you have to be quite determined and stubborn in journalism. I also had to make my first call to interview someone about some complaints, and I’ve only done interviews about nice things so far, so I thought it’d be really uncomfortable, but it all went smoothly and they didn’t hang up, so that’s something.

In other news, I had a few little pieces printed in Wednesday’s Argus, including the print version of this on p.19, and a couple of little tiny stories, and there was this in today’s Argus (p.2). In fact, for the Made in Chelsea story, someone from the picture desk called me over and asked me to identify the people in the picture, and based on the fact I was the only person in the office who appeared to know who they were, I was given the task of writing the story. I was more than happy to do that, of course.

We also had a crash course in web journalism by one of The Argus’ web editors, Sarah Booker-Lewis, which involved looking at the array of internet-related resources available to journalists. I’ve decided I need to build something on Google maps, as that’s a cool way of displaying information, and I really loved seeing how all the hits on the website are analysed; particularly how you can see the level of activity on the site over the course of the day. I actually really enjoy the web side of things; I love playing with technology and seeing what it can do.

Although it’s been short and sweet, and I’ve probably made numerous mistakes along the way that people have been too polite to tell me about, I’ve really liked my little taste of being a real working journalist. If anyone would like to offer me a job so I can carry on doing this, please feel free!

Kayleigh