First week of the new job

The first week at my new job has exceeded my expectations in terms of how quickly I’m adapting to the place. My first story—an obituary plus—was good enough that they decided to put in on the front page. Here is a link to the West Bend Daily News, although the headlines change daily.

The paper had already done a story on the said deceased guy a year ago, and so I was under pressure to “find something new” about him. I did. The next day the editor-in-chief stopped by my desk and said, “Congratulations—your first story made the front page.”

But I was still a bit nervous about how my next stories would be accepted. I finished two yesterday; the second story was about an Olympic official (and I can see by the headlines that it too made the front page), and the third was about NASCAR, of which I knew nothing about.

Again, the EIC came up to me after looking over my work and basically said, “Good job.” The edits were extremely minor; I could barely tell the piece was edited. That was a load off my shoulders. The second-in-command—Dan—edited my third piece and again, hardly any edits needed to be made.

I had to work a little this morning, taking pictures and getting quotes, but they told me I could write the rest of the article from home. I’ve already written most of it, although I have yet to download the pictures. And speaking of pictures, I’ve already learned a lot more about Adobe Photoshop. Whenever I have spare time, I plan on having Dan teach me Quark, which is a really good program to know for anybody interested in journalism and public relations.

This job will turn out to be a great boost for my career, whatever I decide to do.