How is it like to work as a journalist

Since around two years I am working as a freelancer for my local newspaper now. I want to share this experience with you. My first step of becoming a freelancer for me was it to have a two week internship in the newspaper. So the workers could check on me, see how is my writing skill, how reliable am I, how can I deal with working on my own. With the help of this internship they could see if I fit into their company ad I could see if this job fits to me. And it did.
After doing my internship my work as a freelancer could start. When you are a freelancer in my newspaper they call you when they need your help and ask if you have time to go to on events for them. It is always different topics that you are dealing with. I went to a cabaret evening, to concerts, to the weekly market, an event in the library etc. The most interesting part for me is it to prepare the interview questions and ask them to the people. When you have a certain contact person interviews are usually easier, when you have to improvise and find persons that want to talk to you about how they are feeling about the event or something it sometimes can be hard. Sometimes people get really annoyed or even angry. But I think that’s part of the job, this is the challenge. It’s a thing that you learn from. Especially these situations help you to get more self-confident and grow with your work.
Being a freelancer at a newspaper is not something for everyone I would say. To work as a freelancer you have to be passionate about writing, you have to be creative, open-minded and good at adapting to new situations. Probably the hardest part is it to write the text after having an interview. For me the most difficult thing is it to find the right introduction. I always got told: “The best is to start with an interesting quote or a visual scenario, so that the readers can see the situation in front of their eyes.”
After a while I even got more tasks at my local newspaper. They started a new page, which target group should be kids and teenagers. Me, another freelancer and one of the editors tried to manage this page together. We met once in a month and talked about how to design the page, which topics we can write about and who is able to do which task. For me this was an interesting work, especially because I was asked to bring in my own ideas. I enjoy the work every time I have an interview appointment. In my opinion the job is great, because it is flexible and diversified. I don’t see this as a job or as a duty, for me being a freelancer is like a hobby.

Tatjana Thüner

Projekt je financiran s strani Evropske komisije. Vsebina objave odraža izključno stališča avtorja. Nacionalna agencija ter Evropska komisija nista odgovorni za kakršno koli uporabo informacij, ki jih objava vsebuje.

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