Intern Diary: News writing at The National

In April, I did my first ever work experience writing for Scotcampus for two weeks in their Glasgow office. This internship was great because the editors at Scotcampus really gave me the creative freedom to come up with my own ideas and write in my own style. I honed my writing skills, I learned a lot (including a few techy tricks and some surprising grammar revelations) and developed my ability in writing good quality articles to meet a deadline. I have been writing for Scotcampus since around January this year so I was fairly clued up on the style of articles, set up of the website, desired content etc. and I had a head start going into the internship. But this month, I stepped into unfamiliar territory by doing work experience in news writing for The National, the Scottish national newspaper that supports an independent Scotland.

At the start of my degree, I wanted to stay as far away from journalism as possible. I, like most people, had a preconceived idea of what I thought journalists did and how they did it but when I started learning more about it at university, I realised my perception of the field couldn’t have been further from the truth. As time went on, I became a little disenchanted with the areas of my course I was expecting to enjoy the most and ended up throwing myself into journalism, writing articles regularly for anyone who would publish me. Writing feature articles and opinion pieces comes quite easily to me and I love writing them but the area of journalism I was least comfortable with was definitely news stories. There’s a certain formula to news writing that can appear straightforward but in fact it is quite technical and almost mathematic in its structure and I’ve always lacked a bit of confidence in that area.