NOTES FROM THE FIELD

Samarth Arora, of Grade X C, was fortunate to get the inside scoop of the process that goes into the making of the daily newspaper as part of his internship with NIE. Read on to hear from Samarth himself…

I found the internship program very interesting. Our instructor was Ms. Ruth Dhanaraj who is in charge of the “School is Cool” page of the NIE newspaper.

Day 1

We were first introduced on the purpose of our visit to the Times Group. We were given a brief introduction on Journalism. Journalism has two basic fields viz., reporting and editing. We were given information about how a reporter works. We were given an example of how a reporter collects facts and shares it with the Editors.

Day 2

We clarified our doubts about reporting first and then continued with the next topic, ‘Editing’. Ms Ruth gave us the timings of the Editor and told us about the hectic schedule he/she generally follows. The Editor’s work is to edit reports and publish them in the newspaper. The newspapers start getting printed at the printing press at around 9;30 – 10:00. We were also given a fun homework assignment to write and edit a passage on any topic we liked.

Day 3

We were given information on how the printing press works. ‘What are ‘Deadlines’?’, ‘What are the different versions of a newspaper that get published to different parts of the city?’ etc., were some of the questions that we discussed and found answers for. We were also introduced to feature writing. The people who report on or review movies, restaurants are called feature writers. They do not have deadlines and are called on if there is a shortage of regular news.

Day 4

We had a review of everything we had explored in the previous three days on day four. This was accompanied by loads of questions and clarifications. We were also given examples on how newspapers extend their availability to the public. Reviews on movies and eateries published in the newspaper were also discussed.

Day 5

On the last day, we were taken to the printing press of “The Times Of India’, “The Economic Times” and the other supplements in Nacharam. We learnt about the three parts of printing – the pre-press where the aluminium plates for each page is produced, the press where the actual printing of the papers take place, the post-press where the packaging of newspapers takes place. It was fun to be on the field and get an inside perspective!

Samarth Arora

X C

DRS International School