Tag: LastDay

Day 8

Guys!! My story is up on INDY Week’s website! Find it here: https://indyweek.com/news/durham/durham-hit-10000-participatory-budgeting-goal/.

If you are for some reason interested in economics, I highly suggest you read it as well as the original story, found here.

In short, my last day at INDY Week was bittersweet. I finalized my story (I went with the first version after Jeff told me to “trust my instincts”), and it went through copyedits and the like before publication. I also ran some basic copyedits on Thomasi and I’s story, adding Oxford commas to every serial phrase (we’ve had some disagreements). It was a great day, but I’m sad to be leaving.

Since it’s my last day at the office, I’m putting some journalistic things/phrases I’ve learned below:

  1. Some terms:
    1. Lede: The first sentence/paragraph of a story. Should give a basic summary of the story.
    2. Hed: The story’s headline.
    3. Dek: The sentence that goes after the headline, kind of like a subheading but longer and more comprehensive.
    4. Graf: A paragraph in a journalistic article. In journalistic writing, these are usually short; Thomasi is a big fan of grafs that are only one sentence long.
    5. Folo: A follow-up question, often in reference to an additional email sent to a person who you already emailed on that topic.
  2. Getting quotes is hard, especially when you’re using a high school email. I found that, on average, more people responded to emails from my Gmail account than from my CA one.
  3. People want to read personal stories. Starting an article with an anecdote is a tried-and-true way to draw people into the text.
  4. Getting advice from peers is beyond helpful, but when in doubt, go with your gut.
  5. No matter how bad you think you are with technology, in a news office, being under a certain age means you’ll always get questions about it. Case in point: even the college interns were asking me if I could find people’s emails for them.

I’m so grateful to the awesome people at INDY for this experience. I learned so much and had an amazing time!

Games and Goodbyes

My last day at my work experience program was an emotional one. I spent some time with Mr. Rothrock doing a recap of what I accomplished these past two weeks. In a brief overview, I assisted with the leading of several camp activities, as well as planned curriculum and conducted my own activity without the assistance of the other councilors. I learned how to budget, and learned how to calculate how much income it takes to break even with the costs of rent, materials and employee pay. We also reviewed the 7 total marketing things I made for the company, including ads and business cards. I provided him with a list of people who replied yes upon my questioning about whether or not we could display advertisements on their location. I handed out gifts to the employees and then Mr. Rothrock had to leave to continue with the preparations for the opening of the second Cra – Z – Brain location.

Laser tag with my campers!

In the afternoon, I led a camp game. Considering it was the last day of camp and most of the campers track back in on Friday, they were very well behaved. After the game, we cleaned up the camp and set up for next week, and I said my final goodbyes. I really enjoyed my experience and am so glad I had the opportunity to experience something like this!

 

Skip to toolbar