This week was a lot less exciting than last week (content wise).

My pitch at Monday’s news conference was boring to say the least (the very least). I might have been too tired to care at the time. Luckily a semi-interesting story fell right into my lap the very next day.

I was tasked with doing the follow up article to one of the sexual harassment stories we covered last week. There was an ethical issue that we had to deal with, which led to me taking over the story (full details here).  I don’t want to comment on the reasons for and the reasoning behind the decision made but I will say I was grateful to get the opportunity to dip my toes in this particular issue.

I was not an integral part of the sexual harassment exposé’s last week, which I mentioned made me feel a little left out. But then again I didn’t go out of my way to be on that train. All I did in that vein was sit in on one of the interviews with an alleged harasser. I went along with a colleague to “hold the recorder” as she conducted the interview. Despite my brief I ended up butting in to ask a few questions. That’s all I did last week to add to the teams efforts.

Anyway I digress. I went off and interviewed the head of school to ask a few questions about what the school was doing to deal with the allegations. I was impressed to find that over the weekend they had come together to figure out ways that the school could begin to mediate the situation. There is nothing the school can do to deal with the allegations, for example they don’t have the authority to launch a formal investigation.

I then went on to speak to the alleged victims to get their comments on how things were progressing and to find out what their next move would be. It was a fairly standard piece to write – or so I thought. There was a bit of an issue with the way I phrased things and small words I overlooked when paraphrasing. Things so tiny to me that they bordered on nonsensical, but in the grand scheme of things, actually made a huge difference when I corrected them. This taught me to think beyond my own understanding of things. I assumed that people would read it in the way I intended them to and that is rarely ever the case.  Lesson learned.

A much cooler thing I learned this week was how to design a page. I had never considered this component of production. I suppose I imagined – let me not lie I have never ever thought about how and why a newspaper page looks the way it does. It has never occurred to me that ad’s need to be placed and locked in a boarderd box, that bylines and headlines need their own custom styles and that it is not a simple process of copy and paste.

We had a design workshop on Tuesday. A workshop I couldn’t afford to be productive in because I had an assignment to finish and an article to pen. Luckily I catch on quite quick, which saw me designing a whole page by myself the next day. I did need help here and there but I did do a lot by myself. That was my proud moment of the week 🙂