Week seven of Internship

Week seven of my internship was a slow one...to begin with anyway. The first two hours were spent playing phone tag with my interviewees, but I chose to use this time to re-work question and do whatever research I could. I had three stories to complete for The Guide and one for Savvy. The Guide stories were an interview with a pianist who was performing two shows in Townsville, a local DJ who won the coveted opening spot at Godskitchen Worldwide and a profile of local band who were entering battle of the bands.

Now, the only probably with band and DJ interviews is that the likely hood of them answering their phone at 9:30 in the morning is slim, at best. Needless to say I left voice messages but continued to ring every 20/30 minutes anyway...just in case. I knew I had to go out with a photographer at 2pm and I had to ring the pianist at 11am (as this was the only time he was available) so I had to try and organise my other stories around these factors. As fate would have it, at 10:50 the local band returned my phone call! I apologised and asked if it was ok if I rang him back in 15 minutes because I had another interview lined up, Lucky he was a very mellow guy so that didn't bother him at all.

The interview with pianist went great and he gave me some great quotes. So, I rang the local band back to discover that my interviewee was in the middle of ordering Subway - but he wanted to do the interview anyway...DO NOT DO THIS! A few minutes into the interview I knew this was a mistake, I don't know if my interviewee was just shy or if he was simply more interested in his lunch then doing an interview. It was one of those situation where I would ask a question like "So are your lyrics taken from personal experience or are they more general?" and he would respond with "Yeah, some are taken from personal experience and some are general."
I got the impression that normally he would have been a good interviewee, but I just rang at the wrong time. Fortunately I have another person I am going to interview next week to get some background info on the "battle of the bands" comp, so I am going to combine the two lots of information and I am sure it will turn out fine.

The DJ I had interview was much more giving. She had a really vibrant personally and gave great quotes, so writing her story was very easy. However, I have to admit that while I am a BIG music freak I have absolutely no interest in techno/DJing. This was very obvious as she was talking about House Music vs Trace music and who her influences were. I had to ask her about seven times how to spell the names of the DJ's she admired...despite what you have heard ignorance is not bliss...but besides that I really did enjoy the story -both the interview and the writing of it.

In the afternoon I went out with the photographer (yes out into the real world!) to do the "5 minutes with and "A guy's view" for Savvy. We went to the JCU creative Art building as the Photographer was also taking pictures for another news story. Honestly, I was feeling a little nervous about going up to complete strangers, but honestly the hardest part was the first 10 seconds when you go up and introduce yourself - after that it was smooth sailing. And as it turns out, Uni kids are more than happy to talk to journo's - if it means they don't have to work on their uni assignment for 10 minutes.

I ran back to the bulletin, put the finishing touches on the DJ story and then quickly wrote up the four Savvy interviews I had done. While Week seven began slowly I was in a made rush by the end of the day to get everything done. I did really enjoy this week however, because I was really feeling the pressure of time - something I haven't felt most weeks.