Listen to Cameron (2020) talk about her internship as a staff reporter at a local newspaper this past summer.

Stephanie: You're listening to Gear Up, the Duke Career Center's student produced podcast showcasing real student summer internship experiences. My name's Stephanie. And today we're talking to Cameron, who worked as a reporter this past summer at a local newspaper.

Cameron: My name is Cameron. I am a senior and a political science major with a policy journalism and media studies minor.

Stephanie: And where did you work this past summer?

Cameron: I worked at the Asheville Citizen Times, which is the only daily newspaper in Asheville, North Carolina. So it's in the western part of the state and it's a USA Today paper. So we're under the guise of Gwinnett, which is a massive newspaper company. They own a ton of newspapers across the country and they also own USA Today, which is a nationally syndicated version. And so I was just a staff reporter like anyone else. It wasn't really an internship. It was just more like I came on staff for three months. So I did breaking news reporting, education reporting, all sorts of all sorts of stuff.

Stephanie: And how did you find out about this position?

Cameron: I had a professor of mine in the PJMS department reach out to me and asked me if I wanted to do the internship. He knew that I had come to journalism kind of late and hadn't had much newsroom experience. And so he graciously offered me the position and connected me with the editor at the Citizen Times and from there it was history.

Stephanie: That's cool! What exactly were you doing day-to-day? Like if you just walk us through a normal day?

Cameron: Yeah, sure. So it's hard to walk anyone through a normal day in journalism because it's different every single day. Some days I'd work from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. and some days I'd work half days. But basically a normal day I'd come into the office at like eight thirty and I'd get in there and we'd have a staff meeting. So our editor would call us all together and each of the reporters would keep the newsroom appraised of what they were working on. So we had one reporter working on a big corruption trial that was happening during the summer. There was a big murder trial that was happening that I helped out on. And so for the first few weeks, I was just kind of listening to what they were saying. And then I eventually started pitching my own ideas. And we didn't have an education reporter over the summer. So I did a lot of education reporting. So half about half way through the day, I would be I'd usually be gone doing some kind of interview or walking around trying to see if I could find pick up stories, talking to people, and then I'd come back to the office and write my stories with my editors right by my side so it was easy to just get their attention and have them look over my story. A little bit different if I was working the breaking news beat. I'd come to the office at 6:45 a.m. , 7:00 a.m and I would go through all of the arrest warrants and search warrants from the night before in the police office, and then I'd write up any of the interesting ones. So it really depended on the day. But that's how journalism is it's always different.

Stephanie: Yeah, which is nice. Honestly.

Cameron: It's so nice, it never it never was boring.

Stephanie: So how did you like kind of the culture of working in a newsroom of your coworkers? It seems like a very specific sort of company culture, so it totally is.

Cameron: It totally is. Yeah. I mean, it's very different from your typical corporate company culture. And even like working in an NGO, I think it's different. I've worked in a few NGOs. It's a very communal place. You are always talking. It's never quiet. I can't imagine a time when people aren't talking whether that means talking on the phone to a source or just talking to each other. It is so much fun. Everyone loves goofing off and having fun and talking abou