Internship Journal

Week 1:

Today was the first day of my internship. I arrived on time after school to the Alameda Sun office on Encinal avenue to begin my work. The first thing they had me do was put issues in envelopes to send to their out of town subscribers. This went pretty well, except for one of the first ones I did, which I accidentally printed the stamp on the wrong side of. Fortunately, it was still able to be sent and I made sure to be more careful next time. 

Week 2: 

During my internship this week, pretty much all I did was throw out old editions of the Alameda Sun. In the office, they have a huge bookshelf that houses all of the old issues of the Alameda Sun. Unfortunately, they had too many of each copy (needed only 10 of each, had about 30 instead), so it was my job to find and dispose of the extra copies. This went pretty smoothly, since it was a pretty simple task. Next they had me put the latest issues on the shelf in order by date. This was pretty easy too, so long as you could keep track of what order the papers were in and how many you had of each.

Week 3:

This week is the week I got my first reporting assignment. My job was to cover the rededication of Paul's Newsstand, the last newsstand of its kind in the Bay Area. I actually found this to be a lot more fun than I originally had expected it to be. I went down to Park Street and attended the big ceremony/celebration that was going on down there, making sure to get a quote and picture of the people who were responsible for creating the plaque that went along with the rededication. All in all, I think it went pretty well even though the person I was supposed to get a quote from seemed sort of annoyed that I was asking her questions. All my hard work paid off in the end; I was given a spot on the front page of the Alameda Sun that week! (below the fold, but who really cares?)

Week 4:

This week they had me work on archiving older copies of the Alameda Sun. I had to bind the issues with these spike binding clips that went through the middle of the paper, as well as staple in the loose pieces that were only one sheet. Unfortunately, I ended up having to redo some of them because I accidentally stapled the loose pages the wrong way, making them unable to be read. Later on, Eric (one of the editors) and I put the binders into boxes and sealed them up to be shipped off to Michigan to be professionally archived. 

Week 5:

So this week, I was supposed to do a movie review about a documentary playing in Alameda about Fred Korematsu, a Japanese man who fought against the internment camps. Unfortunately, I confused the times that the movie was supposed to be showing; I thought it was showing 5-6pm but instead it was showing 2-5pm. I felt really bad, like I had let down the paper, so I went in and apologized in person for my mistake. They were fine with it, but I had learned my lesson not to rely on my memory for things that important. Instead they gave me a tedious job of compressing old electronic issues of the Sun on the computer, in order to save space. This took a really long time, as there were about 50 papers in need of compressing and each took at least 5 minutes to compress, even though the estimated time always said 10 seconds. 

Week 6: 

For my final assignment, I chose to do a movie review on Pirates of the Carribean 4. This was an interesting experience for me, since I had never really watched a movie that critically, and didn't have much experience in writing movie reviews. Fortunately, it turned out to be pretty easy and fun; it also seemed like I got more out of the movie than I would have if I had just watched it leisurely without taking notes. The editors enjoyed my story and said they would publish it in one of the next few editions of the paper.