Pursuing a bachelor’s degree in
Journalism and Mass Communication put forward students like me to grab
internship opportunities. As a part of our curriculum I was supposed to do an
internship after my forth semester with any media industry. After trying a lot
and applying for good ones, I finally landed up an internship with “Lokmat
Times”, a very famous English printed publication. It is issued daily and is
circulated in Nagpur, Nashik and Aurangabad.
I was very keen on interning with a
publication house because of my natural inclination towards writing. I was
hoping that I would gain some valuable perspective about reporting and editing,
and other aspects involved in print journalism. The internship span was of 30
days., and those 30 days were life changing and gave a whole new world to me
that I never expected.
The first day of the internship was
really exciting and scary for me at the same time. Till now I just read about
journalism and newspapers and the fact that I will have to work for it now was
really stressful.Luckily, I was able to hide my anxiety about the situation and
made a good first impression on my co-workers.
I was assigned under Ankita Deshkar ma’am,
my internship coordinator. She walked me through the process and gave me a
heads up as to what I can come across over next 30 days. On first day they
assigned me to write news articles from press notes/ releases. By the end of
the day, I wrote 4 news articles and 2 of them actually got published in the
next day’s issue.
Shreyash Holay, head of the city
supplement, used to give me translation work. I was expected to translate Hindi
and Marathi news pieces into English for the Lokmat Times. He also made sure I
know how to use the QuarkXPress, the software that the whole office used to
work on, how to design a page and what are the elements and components that
needs to be given major attention to.
As the days passed by I was having fun
at work and was learning a lot from all my co-workers. I came to know how print
production actually works. The news collection process, editing and finally
publishing it was a long and tedious process. The only thing that I couldn’t do
as an intern for which I was looking forward to, was going to news conference
and getting news first hand all by myself. They didn’t allow the interns to do
that but rest of the office culture was lovely and interesting.
It ended sooner than I expected but the
knowledge that I have received from that experience and the skills that I have
brushed up was much needed. Engaging myself into an internship was a great and
fruitful utilization of my summer break. It couldn’t have been better.
