Musings about work experience

My experience of work experience so far has been mixed, to say the least.

At the Northampton Chronicle and Echo I mostly helped out the over-worked and over-stressed education reporter, which consisted more often than not of writing words to accompany pictures of large groups of schoolchildren put in the paper more for commercial reasons than journalistic ones – see my previous post for a rant about that.

This week I have been at The Sentinel in Stoke-on-Trent, where my primary task has been to write 150 word down-page snippets about charities that want more volunteers or male voice choirs that want more members. This is to fill space in the paper during the traditionally quiet week between Christmas and New Year.

I’ve tried to come up with story ideas and have been successful on one or two occasions, but for the most part I have been used as an absolute skivvy, made to do the things that no one else wants to. And I feel very much obliged to carry on and do it because, after all, they’ve been good enough to offer me work experience, and they need these things done to fill their paper.

There’s no denying that these bits and bots are important to the paper and its readers, at least to some extent. If lots of parents buy a newspaper because it has a picture of their kid in it, the paper gets more money, and can carry on existing, and breaking the more important stories from the region. And if more people decide to get involved in charity work because of a NiB they’ve read, well, that can only be a good thing.

I think the course at City presents us with a polished, idealised view of what journalism should be, and often is. But it is a view that is very much removed from the reality of the pressures of newsrooms. These last two weeks have been a bit of an eye-opener, for all of us I expect, and have made me realise that there’s an awful lot more to this trade than meets the eye. It’s not all worthy, for-the-sake-of-democracy-and-accountability type stuff, there’s a lot of (necessary) mundane-ness out there.