Just call me Lois Lane . . .

I started my internship at the Sea Coast Echo newspaper today.  The Sea Coast Echo is a smaller community paper that focuses mainly on Bay St. Louis, Waveland, Kiln, Pass Christian and Diamondhead communities in southeast Mississippi.  It was totally awesome.  I love being able to write and contribute! So here are some things I did not know about writing for a newspaper and news biz:
--journalists don't get paid much (I actually never thought much about it before)
--sometimes there's a lot of sitting around and waiting when you're all caught up on your stories
--everything, everything is done on a Mac (I'm a PC but it's cool)
--the writers smoke a lot (okay by me)
--they all love what they do because they certainly don't do it for the money!

The editor, Geoff, has been soooooo nice in showing me around and teaching me how everything is done from the writing to layout to printing.  It's all so interesting and I think will be hugely impressive to my students!  I'm taking lots of pics.

Now I'm used to writing "academically" when I write non-fiction.  Having never taken a journalism course (which is actually surprising since I think I've taken every other course possible when I used to be a professional student), I didn't know about the "inverted pyramid."  This means the story is written by starting out with an attention grabbing sentence and load the first few sentences down with the important info.  The fluff and nonessential extras go at the end since the average newspaper reader skims and scans and only reads the first few sentences anyway.  Did not know that!  But makes sense.

I worked on three different articles today.  Two had to do with education and local school events and one was about a local woman who was recently appointed by the governor to be the director of the Office of State Public Defender.  I had to call her, interview her, get quotable comments, and ask for a photo!  I also had to get some commentary for one of the other articles, too.  So cool because I'd never done this before and I love, love, love getting the opportunity!  Finally, I'm also working on a year in review for all of the local area schools for an annual publication that will come out next week.  I'm so excited!

I so want a fedora with a little PRESS paper sticking out of the band.