The Newsroom 7.0

It was 09:45 on a Wednesday morning. The excitement of seeing familiar faces had waned and I had already missed two deadlines. All I wanted to do at that point was sleep. Sleep for longer than five hours.

First week back in the newsroom has been nothing sort of exhausting. Gone are the days of sleeping in, late lunches, series marathons and groove. The break was very, very good to me. I had about six and a half weeks to do the things I no longer had time for when I started this course.

The week started early, the Friday before this Monday – with news conference. We needed to plan well in advance for our 12 page edition, which came out this past Friday. We had a lot of content, which made for stabilised stress levels (mostly).

Along with trying to do this ‘little’ producing a paper thing, we started with feature writing classes. We have been told that this part of the course is one of the most difficult. I had hoped these are just scare tactics, failure doesn’t look good on me. But on the real I am quite keen. I feel like feature writing will make me write creatively and in a way that is less insular than I do on these interweb streets.

Back to the newsroom – I was rusty AF. I wrote one story on newly signed work contracts by Wits cleaners – that wasn’t too bad I rate. My design work on the other had was horrendous *shaking my head at myself* It reminded me that being good requires practice – lots of it. Something which rang true with the photo’s I took this week – the photography work I did in the holidays has made me polish up my skills behind the lens.

My favourite shot was of Albert, a Witsie with ‘the calling’ – a colleague wrote about his story. He had such a great story to tell and I am glad that I got to capture an essence of his lively spirit with the photo(s) I took.

Last night I learnt that there might be nothing more trying than trying to take photos in a dark club. Without a flash or one of those fancy lights hitched onto the camera. I love my Ruby (my Nikon D5100) but there were points last night when I looked at people’s Canon 7D’s with longing.

All in all it has been a great week. It has been tough getting back into the swing of things but I have five fresh days coming up to try again.