Two nights before day five, I decided to stay up until 7:00am playing video games. A friend of mine and co-worker at the ETC Center at Texas State, got me hooked on World of Warcraft. I’ve heard this game can be addictive, and it’s because it’s such a vast universe with so much stuff to do. Anyway, although I didn’t stay up late playing games the night before day five, I had inevitably thrown my sleeping schedule off so I couldn’t fall asleep until about 4am. If there is ever a lesson in all of this it is that I will not be doing that again! Although I felt like I functioned okay and still put out solid work, it just wasn’t fun running interviews and remaining alert in my sleep deprived state.

When I got into the office and settled in, I immediately started going over my notes while I waited for Derek to come tell me what he wanted me to do or cover for the day. I knew that I needed to get a hold of the Agricultural Extension Agent to finish up my pecan story. Remember how I had mentioned in the previous post about contacting him on Monday, outside of the internship? Well, I decided to just wait. I didn’t want to get in trouble for working off of the clock, since there is a time-clock thingymajig that we use. I also knew that I needed to see about getting a hold of the contact for the sensitive story again.

Derek and I were on the same page, because he walked by and asked me about the contacts for both of those stories and to try to get a hold of them. I called the Ag Extension Agent, but he wasn’t in a position to talk, so I gave him my office number to call me back when he was free, which he had said would be around lunch-time (it was around 11am-ish, so an hour or two away).

Derek came by and asked if I could cover a story about a job fair going on right then at the Seguin Coliseum. He was going to be the photographer so he would be coming along too. I told him that the Ag Agent wouldn’t be calling back for a little bit, so we could go ahead and knock that story out now. So we prepared to head out.

I texted the Ag Agent my cell phone number and told him that I would be out of the office if he could call that one, just in case he called before I got back.

Derek and I took separate cars because Derek’s house is near the Seguin Coliseum and he wanted to grab lunch at his house after, so we would be splitting ways after the job fair. I followed behind him to the Coliseum.

When we made it and got inside, Derek introduced us to people at a booth and asked if we could talk to the people in charge of the Fair. We were directed inside to a large room about the size of a high school gym, and stopped at the first booth on the left. Here, Derek and I split ways. I met with the showrunner, Ashlynn, and her and I went outside the room into a hallway for an interview. Derek went off to get photos.

The interview went really well. It wasn’t a very long interview, but Ashlynn gave some great answers and a lot of info about the event. Afterwards we talked for a few minutes. She was a recently graduated mass communications major and journalism minor, I don’t think at Texas State, but she said that she always gets excited about meeting other mass comm and journalism people. I told her about how I was interning at the Gazette and really liked it. After our short chat, I thanked her for letting me interview her and headed back into the gym/room.

There weren’t a lot of attendees, maybe somewhere between 8 to 10 people. They all looked busy talking to people at the various booths, so I patiently waited near a small group for someone to finish. The first person to finish was a very serious looking lady. I introduced myself and asked if I could interview her for my story and she said yes. Her interview didn’t really go that well, although I handled it pretty well. She gave very short one to four word answers and wouldn’t elaborate on anything. Her interview only lasted a minute or two before I decided to wrap it up and move on.

Everyone else was busy, so I went over to a construction company booth that didn’t have anyone visiting them at that moment and decided to talk to the booth people to get their take. Their interview went really well. I spoke to one lady while another talked to an attendee who came over shortly after I did.

After them, I found two people to talk to who were just looking at the booths and not engaging quite yet.

They were from San Marcos, I believe Gary Job Corps, and help graduating students find jobs. They were there to build contacts and come out to fairs frequently. Their interview went well.

After their interview, I went over to another booth and had a fantastic interview with the guy behind the booth about his company being at the fair and people applying, I believe the place was called Loves (it is a truck stop place).

Derek was pretty much finished at this point, and I had five interviews finished, which was way more than I needed for the story, so we decided to head out.

After we walked out, Derek said he had some trouble getting photos because people kept stopping to look at the camera, even after Derek had told them to act natural and ignore him. I chuckled and told him about the first lady I interviewed hardly giving me anything. But both of us eventually got some solid stuff.

After we reached our cars, Derek headed off his way and I prepared to leave the Coliseum. I pulled out my GPS and set it for the office. I’m still not familiar with Seguin, so I didn’t know how to navigate myself back there, but the GPS could do it. My GPS was acting a little wonky though and at first put me in the wrong direction. After I turned back to the correct way, it navigated me correctly to the Gazette’s office.

Back at the office, I poured into my interview recordings and notes and set out on writing my story. I had it mostly finished around 2p-ish. The story came out well, but there were some learning points with it as well. Things that I won’t forget next time. For starters, although I remembered to get everyone’s name and have them spell it, I didn’t ask where they were from. The story was okay without it, but I think it would have been way stronger if I could have said they were Seguin residents or from San Antonio or where ever they came from. In the story, I just referred to them as attendees. Nobody at the paper said anything about it, but I just feel it would have been better. Any future stories that I write, I will be sure to ask that info.

Also, I wished that I had talked to more attendees. I wanted a voice of someone actually being there looking for a job, but the only person I really had doing that was the serious lady with short answers. The people from Gary Job Corps were definitely included in the story, but they themselves weren’t looking for jobs. I ended up having to go with the serious lady and use a quote from her that was very short, “I’m just looking for a job.” It worked, but I really don’t like including quotes that short. Derek and the others didn’t say anything though, so I think they were okay with it too.

After I finished writing the story, I noticed that it was past 2p and I was getting worried because the Ag Agent still hadn’t called me. I wondered if he forgot or if he was just taking a very late lunch. I started writing a text to send him that I would be free the entire day if he wanted to call me later, if it would be better for him. But before I could finish I got the call from him.

The call came in on my cell phone and I had the choice of recording it. As I’ve said previously, one thing that I would like to become proficient at is interviewing over the phone without recording, because the other journalists at the Seguin Gazette do just that. It was tough, but I did furiously write down info that he gave. I don’t think the quotes were as good as when I record them though. I can’t write as fast as some people speak and so most of the quotes I could catch were way shorter than I normally include.

After the interview, I set on finishing up the pecan story. I finished it around 3p. I emailed it to Derek and put the Job Fair one in the Friday folder on the editorial drive. There weren’t any pages to proof, so I sat there for a few minutes waiting for Felicia to finish a phone call. When Felicia finished, I asked her about the sensitive story. She said that the contact did call her back earlier in the week but gave her the number to someone else. She tried to find the number in her notebook, but couldn’t locate it, so she gave me the number to an office and told me to ask them about who to talk to for it, and that should get me to who I needed to speak with. I did just that and was eventually lead to the director of (redacted). I left a message for Director and gave them my contact info, not much more I could do for that.

There wasn’t really anything else to do at this point but wait for the pages that needed proofing. I probably waited around for a solid hour or hour and a half, just sitting at my desk re-reading the same Budget email that Derek had sent out. I wish there was something I could help with in the office, but the problem is that everybody has their own work, like stories they are writing and such, so there’s no way to really help with that.

Around 4 or 4:30p ish, I got a lot of pages to proof. I found some AP and GSP errors and marked them. After I was done, Derek said that if I had finished everything that it was okay if I went home. So off I went! Thus concluded day five.