The day I started working here was a pleasant and fun working experience for me although, diverting from my previous job to this one was a bit of a challenge. However, as time went by I got the hang of it through everyone’s help and assistance. Till this day, I still enjoy what I’m doing and what gets me excited about the Journalism field of work is that we work with different people, events and schools every single day and that’s what makes the job fun and interesting, though there are deadlines to meet, which causes us to work under pressure, I still manage to do my work accordingly.
Juggling office work, work events and being a Mom to my beautiful daughter Adea (6) at the same time is a bit challenging, but I try my best to be a 100% present for all the occasions, as I’m doing everything for her and also making sure that my work is up to standard. Unlike the other general 9-5 jobs, where one has to do the same thing over and over again, in journalism I get to explore different fields such as doing/writing lifestyle articles, sports, community, schools news, hard news and interviewing icons like Julius Malema or covering serious events such as conferences and State of the Province Addresses (SOPA). That’s what makes my job interesting as I work on totally and extremely different news that also have a different style of writing and words. In my daily thoughts, I would always wonder who will be calling me next for me to do a story on them or what event am I covering next, it’s always interesting.
My own understanding when I type stories, be it hard, soft, community, schools or sports news, I always channel/switch my mind into that specific situation or specific story so that I put my concentration on how the reader would understand it if they had to read the story I typed. For example, if I write hard news, I have to consider the style of writing I’m typing the story in, I have to make sure that nothing in the story/article sounds funny, offensive or sounds like I’m taking sides, I always try my level best to remain as neutral as I can without offending anyone mentioned in the story. If I write soft news, I have to make it sound interesting and fun for the readers to enjoy.
So far, Journalism has introduced me to so many things, places, people and events. Though I enjoy writing lifestyle articles more, throughout the one and half years that I’ve been working here, I’ve learnt that as individuals, one has to learn to get out of their comfort zone and do something different for a change because you may never know what your good in/at. That way, we learn new tricks we never knew existed. As a Journalist, I’ve learned to be more open, make more friends, be more social in order to be able to collect information from different sources around our city, write and distribute the news and other current information to the public.
