A Day in the Life of a Journalist

There has been a lot of debate about internships recently, whether they should be made illegal, whether they should be paid, whether or not they’re just the preserve of rich kids with well-connected parents. For me, finding a placement was not straightforward. Before eventually getting accepted to do work experience at the BBC and British Airways Highlife Magazine my applications were generally ignored. I even got rejected by Now Magazine’s online team whose recent hard-hitting feature articles include an interview with Kerry Katona’s mum who revealed she smoked during pregnancy! Whatever your opinion on work placements, the reality is that if you want a job in journalism they are pretty much obligatory so I decided to spend my summer trying them out.

I began my work experience with the BBC Midlands news team just around the time the super -injunction scandal started blowing up. Whilst having to complete a two hour long health and safety tutorial I secretly listened as my mentor and her friend discussed scandals, which were common knowledge in journalistic circles, but which they weren’t allowed to go to press with for fear of getting sued. Obviously I can’t repeat what was said but everyone from soap stars, sports stars and former politicians were gossiped about.

On my second day I got to go out on the road with a sports reporter and a cameraman. I gushingly said to the reporter, ‘you must have a great job if you love sport and get paid to comment on it’ to which he replied ‘we mainly have to talk to footballers and football managers who are normally twits.’ As an athletics-lover Paula Radcliff is sort of a personal hero so I was really excited when I discovered the reporter had met her: ‘yeah she’s nice, her husband isn’t though.’

I found out that we were going to be reporting on the GB Olympic Archery team who were holding a competition in front of three hundred local school children in order to boost the sport’s profile and mimic the noisy conditions the archers would face come the games this summer. I couldn’t have anticipated how crazy the pupils would become when a camera was pointed in their direction: they just went mad. One kid yelled at us ‘do you know Justin Beiber? Can you give me his number?’ Why exactly she thought reporters from BBC Midlands would be close personal friends of teenage Hollywood megastars, I’m not sure. It took five hours to shoot enough footage to produce a two minute TV clip. Back at the television studios the reporter had to edit together the footage and do the voice-over. He told me that in order to produce good television you have to be a good storyteller, always looking for new angles and ways of putting things together.

At 6.30pm on each day of my placement I went to the production gallery to watch the evening’s news broadcast go out live. The technical feat involved in putting together thirty minutes of television came as a revelation to me. There was one woman who was constantly counting down the time during the program, making calculations about how long the presenters would have to speak and how much time should be allotted to each story. Although I was given zero responsibility and simply had to sit there I could feel myself tensing up, knowing how important it was that the right button was pressed at the right time, it was clear the pressure the rest of the team were under.

The combination of having to work ten hour days (nine am until seven pm) and the massive set of cost-cutting measures which are hitting the BBC, did leave some of the staff disgruntled but their complaints about their professional lives weren’t always what I expected them to be. One of the TV presenters told me that it was particularly hard for her filming her story for that day because whenever they got the camera rolling a member of the public would walk into the shot and repeat the phrase ‘BBC equals big black cock.’ Another was annoyed at having to interview a local MP because, according to her, ‘he really smelt.’ Local media is sometimes criticised for being a bit mundane but to be honest my time at BBC Midlands was anything but.