Megan Thornberry, a 16 year old Colyton Grammar School student from Yarcombe, Honiton, has spent a week on work experience in the WWN offices. This is her report of her week.

I was very pleased to be accepted for work experience at the Wellington Weekly because I am considering a career in journalism – an interest that was sparked by my work in writing news and magazine articles for my school. Once I finish school, I hope to go on to university and study English Literature or Law, although I am also interested in politics and history.

I spent Monday and much of Friday in the front office with Sue, the office manager, and Ellen, the office apprentice. With them I learned lots, such as, how the BMDs (Births, Deaths, and Marriages), adverts, articles, and features are processed, and how the paper is planned out, sent off to be printed, sold and delivered. I really enjoyed the variety of their work and found it especially interesting to see how the paper is assembled and to meet the different people coming in to the office.

On Tuesday I was with Alex leaning about advertising. The process of how an advert gets into a paper was not something I had really considered before, but I really enjoyed learning how to find and approach a potential advertiser, and the importance of learning about and maintaining a relationship with a business.

I found out how the different advertisements are priced and about the production team that produces some of them, as well as the uses of Facebook competitions and ‘Focus on…’ town features.

The final department I visited was Editorial, where I spent Wednesday and Thursday with Tony. I am editor of my school’s reporting team, and co-editor of the school magazine, and so I had lots of questions about how this worked on a professional level. Tony was writing the ‘From our files’ feature and an article about council tax increases, and editing the ‘Club News’ page, which highlighted the different writing styles and types of writing needed for his job. Among many other things, I found out about the usefulness of shorthand, how to write a ‘fat caption’, how stories are found and researched, and why Tony dislikes the word ’spike’ in statistical reports!

I thoroughly enjoyed my week of work experience – everyone was very friendly, and took the time to answer my questions and explain things. I now feel more strongly that I would like to pursue a job working in a newspaper. Thank you very much to all the staff at Wellington Weekly News.