By: Editorial Staff Northwestern University senior James Pinnick spent 11 weeks last spring as an intern with LATimes.com, the Web site of the Los Angeles Times. During his internship, Pinnick kept a journal of his day-to-day experiences as part of an assignment through the Medill School of Journalism. Here are some highlights:
March 30: Edited photo captions and links on the site this morning and finished updating feedback form for the Web site. Note to "News Media" class: HTML is still very important. Don't rely on some graphic-based program to do your coding. Also, was assigned a package on Frank Sinatra. Must design a way to put together lots of different information about him, including biographical material, news stories, and sound files of him singing.
April 2: Paula Jones dismissal broke. Was neat to be in a newsroom when something happened. Had a meeting to discuss how we should handle it. Since we are Internet-based, interactivity is important. After getting the story up, we set up a poll for users to vote on, then a bulletin board for them to comment on.
April 14: Am helping make a package for the final Seinfeld episode. Picked out archived stories and put them in a template. Server for the photo database was down, so I'll have to add pictures tomorrow.
May 11: Entertainment editor is away this week, so I'm covering his responsibilities. Must find out what the Entertainment section of the paper is featuring tomorrow. Then pull the story when it is sent ready to be printed and put it in a template. Next I find photos that go with it and get them cropped to certain widths. Then I layout the section.
May 14: I was here until 2:30 this morning putting up the transcripts from the Governor's Forum. Put up an index page that looks like an outline of the event. The page has a few quotes on the side from the candidates. Threw in some tables and mug shots of the candidates to narrow the text a little.
May 18: Sinatra died. It was neat to see the total team effort to get the thing up. Six or seven of us pulled it together and got it up by about 7 p.m. CST. This might be the Web, but it still has that breaking news excitement. Lots of adrenaline and caffeine.
June 2: Election day. Started at the polls at 7 a.m. PST. I was given the digital camera and a DAT recorder. I interviewed three people, asking them why they voted. The first guy gave a nice interview, but I didn't record it correctly. In the end, I got six interviews. Only two were good. A photo editor transferred my photos for me and fixed them up. Someone else helped me get my interviews onto the computer. Then I wrote a story.
University of Missouri's Stan Dorsey
?(James Pinnick) [Photo & Caption]
?(Editor & Publisher Web Site:http:www.mediainfo.com) [Caption]
?(copyright: Editor & Publisher March 20, 1999) [Caption]
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