Nanfang Metropolis Daily, published by Nanfang Media Group, is the newspaper that I read accompanied with my grow up and also is a very well-known newspaper in China. This media group is one of the top news groups in China, and working here was a great way to enrich my CV as well as to learn how formal news platforms operate in a way that textbook knowledge cannot convey, and to get an on-the-ground insight into the Chinese media industry. I found out that the company was looking for interns at the beginning of 2021, and after reading the requirements for the internship, I found that I met all of them and tried to submit my CV. I was lucky enough to get a response from the department head and was asked to come to the company for an internship interview. I was asked to provide a portfolio of my work and then the interviewer asked me about my creative ideas based on my previous works and skills in Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere. Luckily, I passed the interview very quickly and was able to become an official member of the internship.
Around the end of June 2021, I was able to join the team as a full-time intern. My main role was as a trainee journalist. I was working for N Video APP, which is a department of the Nanfang Media Group. And our team was responsible for two sections. One section was for current affairs news interviews and one section was for Cantonese dialect promotion. And I was mainly responsible for the content of the section on Cantonese dialect propaganda. Each week, we need to produce one or two videos. From pre-planning to post-production and publishing, we had to do it independently under the guidance of our leader. At the beginning, I started with planning and writing, which was my favourite part of the job. I designed a topic by constantly searching for new elements, new hotspots and then combining them with the publicity and knowledge of Cantonese. Then I designed some elements that can be interacted with passers-by and wrote an outline of the interview. After writing it, I would take it to my leader for review and approval, then I would go out to some busy streets with another intern to interview passers-by.
We usually had one person doing the photography and one person doing the interviews. I usually did the interviews, first looking for suitable passers-by on the roadside to go up and communicate with them, asking them if they would agree to our interview, and then starting the formal interview. Interviewing is the most challenging job for me because one needs not to be too shy to ask a lot of passers-by if they are willing to grant us an interview, and in many cases, they will be rejected, sometimes we may keep changing addresses in the middle of summer and wait for a day to get only 5 people to interview. There are also many techniques in interviewing that I have picked up through my weekly training. I need to guide the passers-by to make them say more interesting and funny things. And I need to capture the reactions of the passers-by, which can be used for the post-production editing. It also requires patience to explain things to them, and sometimes I meet some people with less patience，luckily I met a lot of nice people to accept my interviews.
After the interviews were done, I need to back to the office for editing. We used to edit at around 3 days, then published the video at Friday. I wasn’t particularly good at editing before, and it was during this internship that I gradually got the hang of it. The first video took me five days to edit, and both my partner and I felt very embarrassed that we had slowed down our work because we were not familiar with the editing software. Later on, as we continued to hone our skills, I became more and more familiar with it and was able to edit independently. In our group’s producing, we usually added some animations and special sound effects to emphasise the interesting points. And need to choose the background music and put in subtitles to make the video more completely. Then after the editing was complete, the promotional poster needed to be created in Adobe Photoshop. Our posters were usually made by keying out the interviewed passers-by, with captions and stickers. At first, I was not very good at using Adobe Photoshop for keying, and I was even bad at it, but I became more and more familiar with the software as I continued to work on it. Now, I can made a lot of posters independently using Adobe Photoshop.
I think I have acquired interviewing skills, editing skills and poster making skills during this internship. I felt like I was applying the skills I had learnt in school classes to my work, I know how the audiences feel and how to produce news. And having worked continuously for 2 months at a time, I felt like a professional worker for the first time. But it was a lot of fun for me, I met a lot of great colleagues, we came from different cities, different schools and different majors, but we all worked together and we are still in touch.
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