I have done two internships before this placement in Nanjing Broadcast System. NBS is a local tv station. It somehow represents the voice of the local government and local residents. In both of the previous internships I worked as a marketing intern in two different start-up companies. One in Shanghai and one in London. I feel like my experience differentiate largely depends on the size of the company, the location of the company, the type of the company and the position I did in the company. It is the first time that I work in a big traditional media company. I want to see how does the news industry work and utilise the digital skills I learned at the university as a media major student.

 

Although NBS is a traditional TV station, it also developed a Digital Media Department over the past decade.

 

I firstly interned at the Journalism Department. There’s a certain routine for a news report to be generated. I worked in a program that investigate and solve local people’s complaints about pollution in the Nanjing city.

 

After the hotline operator receives the complaints from local residents. We journalists would select those complaints which are representative and worth filming. After that, we would go to the pollution point with a cameraman to film the scene and confirm the truth. Then we would call the local street office and the construction unit manager to see how does the pollution formed, who is responsible for the pollution and what actions can be take to improve the situation.

 

Since this program are holding people accountable for the pollution problem, sometimes it’s hard to interview the direct responsible person. We have to make multiple phone calls to contact the right person. People can be reluctant to show up and to be interviewed in front of a camera. So this could be tricky and this definitely test a journalist’ communicational skills and professional ability.

 

When the outdoor interview is finished, we would organise the notes we made and the clips we filmed as soon as possible. Although we might filmed a total length of 1 hour or even longer, there’re only one minute and a half to be put on the final TV program. Consequently we need to pick the most refined part to tell a complete story. Then we would use non-linear editing tools on the computer to edit the clip and do voice over. The application we use is called “sobey”, I have never used this application before but it is quite similar to FinalCut Pro so I learned pretty fast.  

After the video is edited, I still need to produce an article for the NBS official WeChat platform (we are not newspaper agency so we don’t post articles on physical newspapers). Apart from professional journalistic writing, I also need to pick the interview photos and typeset the article to fit the mobile phone format (The article on Wechat platform is kind of like the newsletter on email).