»5th March 2009

T&A IV: Paragraphs & Spots



Fourth day at the T&A involved hanging around with the features team. Getting in early at 8:45am didn't particularly do me any favours as David only got in at about 9:30am and I was only actually sent over to Features after about another half hour.
Features was basically just around the other side of the L-shaped office though it might as well have been a different office considering how much more untidy the newsroom area was than either Features or the Photography office. Once at Features I was shown around the rather impressive archive which stretched way back. After picking up a few recent issues which had examples of the Comment piece I had to write I was set down at one of the desks and sent on my way. I had to come up with an idea for a general comment piece and rather unsurprisingly, the first and only idea I bothered considering was The Job Centre. This seemed to pay off because I actually arrived at some kind of half decent argument after I had the piece written up.


In the sequel you're supposed to be able to build new shopping centres too!

For lunch I took the opportunity to have a walk around Bradford and managed to find the area where there are actually shops. The most surprising thing about the shops was that there were two Games, a Computer Exchange and a Gamestation, but only the one music shop, Zavvi, which of course was closed down.

Back at the office I had to quickly stick my piece into Word to make it look more like I was arriving at some kind of 'finished' state. Emma, who had set me up on her login and who had explained the piece to me had actually brought me work over for me to do. This was most unusual, for most of the week I've been trying to get any scraps of work to do to get in some practice. One of the features guys, Jim, came over to me and offered to go through my piece with me which I was kind of apprehensive about but once the printer had actually started working he went through the piece and basically cast his experienced journalist eye over it and showed up a lot of ways in which it could be improved. He said he liked what I was saying about the Job Centre, talking about my own experiences. After cutting some unecessary bits from the piece and adding some more developed points, he gave me a second in-depth pass of the piece and this time really journoed it up, cutting unecessary words; more direct, efficient language; and breaking up the paragraphs in a major way. It was really satisfying to get a really thorough going over of what I'd done, I think I picked up a lot of new things. It was interesting seeing how different the writing style needs to be, the purpose it serves to the audience etc.


'If the face is square-on, there's really no limit to what you can do.'

It was getting near half four and I still had to get a photo of myself done. That's right, I even get a picture for this piece. It was a real step up from my first printed thing in the paper which was the Diamond Wedding story and which I found out today had been pretty heavily edited to say it was only ~170 words. But no, this one was to be prestigious and it was revealed that they take public submissions for that particular column, so I should have the chance of getting printed there again if I try to send something else in in the future. At the photo department, rather bizarrely, the photographer stood on top of a desk to get the angle, and it did turn out well. My second day as a model and I had already succumbed to the Photoshopping crutch. The photographer was in his fifties and had a South African accent. 'Do you want me to retouch it?' 'Sure, go for it.' He really did find a lot to do and was amazingly fast, a couple of spots gone, bags under eyes softened, skin evened, contrast adjusted. After my crash course on Photoshopping I made another swift exit, it now being about ten past five.

It's the last day at the T&A tomorrow and it appears set to be another random day with seemingly nothing planned at the moment. I think I might actively busy myself and just try writing anything up seeing as I'm unlikely to get handed things to do like today.


Extar, over, out.

Chong Li vs Frank Dux