Week 8 was a bit abbreviated after being under the weather on Monday, but Wednesday turned out to make up for that missed day. After the morning news meeting, I headed to the assignment desk to work with Mike Akin.
Mike was kind enough to let me work on a little part of the show for that day, which was on Senator Tim Kaine’s latest bill in Congress. I sat in on the conference call, and had planned to ask a question about the bill’s impact on Hampton Roads, but after three reporters asked their questions, the Senator’s press aide ended the call. Lesson learned – be assertive on conference calls.
I wrote a forty-second voiceover and then headed up to the intern “lunch and learn,” which began with sandwiches and discussion with WAVY’s Katie Collett and Chris Reckling. They talked about how they got into the business, offered advice, and told a few stories from their careers.
Katie and Chris emphasized that it is okay to be uncomfortable and shaky at first when on-camera. This was a great comfort to me; I had gotten in the routine of coming home after a day at the station, watching the WAVY evening broadcast, and suddenly finding myself feeling inferior and ill-prepared to be a reporter when watching the tightly-worded and cleanly-delivered reports from the experienced reporting team at our station.
After a short break, we reconvened for a focused conversation on advice for obtaining a career in television news. This was very helpful for me; while I have been working extremely hard to become a qualified candidate for an entry-level reporting job, it’s a bit unnerving because I won’t be graduating with a technical journalism degree, so it was really helpful to learn about job-hunting and application strategies.
After the meeting, it really hit me that the internship was more than halfway over, and I pledged to myself to double down and work even harder to maximize my development as a newsgatherer in the few weeks I have left here at WAVY.
