Welcome back to your regularly scheduled appearance of Ali in the newsroom. It’s Wednesday so I am back for my second GA shift in a row.
Today was a long, long day. All I did was make endless phone calls and made no progress. I was working on two stories: a reaction story to the new public health orders and the campaign finance story.
Unsurprisingly, no donors or owners wanted to talk to me about campaign donations or COVID measures. I made 20 some calls, and left probably 12 voicemails and 4 messages with assistants. I got very few comments and even a few rejections from the few people I did reach.
It was exhuasting.
I did manage to conduct a few interviews in concerns to the finance story, and scheduled another for tomorrow. I also finished writing up the rest of the report. Tomorrow, I’ll send it over to Scott.
By some miracle, and good reporting, I was able to finish the story I began yesterday. I wrote a reaction piece about how citizens and business owners felt about the new health order. I contacted a public health spokesperson. I also spent all day yesterday and today calling businesses in the area, as I mentioned in my post yesterday. I was finally able to contact some. I also contacted another citizen off of Facebook and got a great interview with him. I was very conscious of what sources I tried to use and didn’t include any students. I then pieced together the story with the help of ACE Skylar. We edited it again and again and again. Finally, it was done.
And with that I called it a day.
Some days make me love what we do and excite me about my future career. Some days, today, reminds me that even the dream job has some down sides.
P.S. On a side note, in the midst of my last couple of stories, I wrote a paper for my intensive writing course. Both the teaching assistant who graded it and the writing center tutor were confused as to why my paragraphs looked the way they did. I realized I had spaced it out in a journalistic fashion with a ton of small paragraphs, rather than with longer idea bound paragraphs for formal papers.