Job Shadows: What You Saw, Part 3

Here's a sampling of some of the various job shadows done by you all (this will be updated as job shadow reports are turned in, so please check back frequently). Take a look and see what you can learn from everyone's visits. There's a lot of good stuff here to help you decide what you want to do with your lives; what you need to be doing to get there; and what to expect when you do get there.

Please give each one of these a quick read as they come in, will you?

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I think watching TV shows like Newsroom movies like All the President’s Men can make newsrooms seem like they’re exhilarating and energetic. That wasn’t the case at the Lansing State Journal.

It was a Friday morning and the whole newsroom was pretty quiet: people making phone calls, checking the web traffic, finishing stories and starting new stories.

I sat with Kate DuHadway, the Active Lifestyle reporter at the LSJ and the first few hours with her were the same way. She finished up a story about aerial yoga and had me copyedit it (just to make me feel special, someone else had already copy edited it). Then we worked on her next story about incorporating exercise into your daily life. I watched as she wrote, and rewrote, again and again, her lede and her nut graph. It made me feel a little better about not always having a stroke of rhetorical genius every time I go to start one of my own stories.

She started at the Lansing State Journal as a social media manager and started her own local social media campaign called #MoveLansing. Her Instagram, Twitter and Facebook pages that correspond with the hashtag allow her to get sources for her stories and give her a direct audience of people who are interested in exercise around the Lansing area. I used to think that doing social media would be a simple job. But after my discussion with her, I realized that it’s harder than you might think to get people on board with a campaign like that (the Facebook page has 30 active members and was only started at the beginning of September).

Kate and I walked around the streets of Lansing looking for more sources for her exercise story. She stopped people and asked them how they incorporate exercise into their daily lives and asked if she could take a photo of them.

My experience with Kate was very eye opening, but not in the sense that I learned something magnificent and new about journalism. I was actually surprised to see how simple it can be. What we are doing in class is pretty much the same as what we’ll be doing if we work in a newsroom, except we’ll have less time in a regular newsroom. I felt affirmed that if journalism is the path I end up taking, that I am on the right path to succeeding in that field.