I missed Monday and Tuesday of this week because I was on my vacation but I came into the office Wednesday night to help layout the pages. Then resumed back to my regular working schedule on July 3:
Thursday, July 3:
First day technically back from my vacation and there wasn’t a whole lot to do because well, it’s Thursday! Falling back into the similar routine pre-vaca, Thursdays = Copyediting, and thus I did.
The paper was really short this week (only 40 pages!) so the copyediting didn’t take long at all and by noon the sports reporter left because everything was finished.
I didn’t leave because obviously my first day back I’m not going to try and leave early, come on now.
So I ended up reading VERY thoroughly through the Edmonton Journal, the Edmonton Sun, and the National Post. I also read through the government press releases that I missed while on my vacation and so those along with the newspaper readings I was able to come up with a few story ideas for next week!
Which is awesome because I was worried I’d be coming back from vacation and then showing up at the story meeting with no ideas.
So, that was good!
The sports reporter left at noon, the other news reporter left at 1, and my editor said I could go home at 2 if I had nothing to do, which I didn’t, so I did.
Thus ending Thursday!
Friday, July 4:
Next week’s edition is going to have a ‘Community Awareness’ article which is what I’ve been doing since I started so my editor gave me the name of the organization I would be writing about and they didn’t have a website which is kind of difficult in terms of trying to get contact names and numbers. But a Google search yielded a club president name & number, which I called yesterday only to get the lady’s voicemail.
So this morning I asked my editor if I should call the lady again or wait for her to call back and he suggested I try to reach other members of the club, which is difficult as they do not have a website or a list of club members.
Apparently the club had done some stuff with the paper in the past though so my editor remembered one guy and girl’s names he just didn’t know their number so like a real journalist I went through the phonebook and called all of the possible D Smith’s and well there was only one Colleen M so she wasn’t too hard to track down, except that both the guy and the girl I received their voicemails too.
The tracking down was cool though because there was about 5 ‘D Smiths’ and after I called each number and had no luck I crossed off the number on my little notepad and it felt very Journalistic and cool. Hah!
Anyway so basically I return from my vacation to the thing I dislike most about the job which is simply – WHEN I CALL PEOPLE THEY ARE NEVER THERE AND THEY NEVER CALL BACK!!
So frustrating.
As I sit here it is now past noon on Friday and I have received no phone calls back (nor do I expect to receive any for the rest of the day).
Time for lunch I suppose.
