Lessons Learned

''The news media are for the most part, the bringers of bad news…and it’s not entirely the media’s fault. Bad news gets higher ratings and sells more papers than good news.''
-Peter McWilliams

As I strolled into the ad features department at 9am I was advised I would be in the newsroom today. I wasn’t sure how to react so I said okay before heading into the news department. After having a browse through Friday’s Bulletin and a few of the other papers, I was summoned. Lendl told me of one story I had to cover about a charity walk as well as a jetty upgrade and a quirky feature on street names.

I was off, but with what? I was not going out report today so I felt I was left with very little information about my stories. I had one media release about the charity walk which was little help so I contacted a few sources. For my jetty story I had nothing! I was told to look up previous stories and gather information from them. So I tried my hardest to write the jetty story from about three or four articles all which were not overly informative. I tried contacting the island’s mayor and council with no reply at all, I kept trying all day. To my disappointment I had no source in my article which I knew meant it kind of fell to the bottom of the importance list.

My street story was just as bad Lendl told me it had to be quirky but when I called a councillor he was in a meeting and the other councillor did not even answer. I rang the city council and got the media department and after explaining to them what I was doing I got an ‘I’ll call you back’. So I was left with two complete stories at 2pm while waiting for contacts to get back to me for my third story as I felt I had reached my limit on decent sources to talk to.

Another I noticed early on in the morning was a few of the journalist’s who received complaints about articles. While not trying to be nosy I did hear how someone was complaining about a photo of their shop appearing in the paper and another complaint about the content of an article. This scared me in a way that someone could complain about what you had written and how there really was no solution. But I guess this is something I may have to deal with eventually- I will not be looking forward to it. A lesson learned- be confident in your stories, check spelling and if you have doubts talk to your editor.