Week Three on the Job

Monday was an exciting day. My boss sent me out with a journalist to interview people myself. They wanted to do a story on tourists and it was up to me to interview them in English. We went into town and had an hour to interview as many people as possible. I struggled to differentiate between natives and tourists, but my fellow journalist was a native who guided me. We were able to interview about six people in that hour.

What was hard for me was how different these public surveys are in Italy than America. Typically, I would take someone's full name, and make sure it was spelled correctly, to put in a caption on the show while they talk. Maybe it was laziness, but the lead journalist with me had no desire to take their names; it would have been up to him during the interview process to add the captions.

It was interesting to me to see how many people rejected an interview. I could not help but think back to my mission and all the rejection I experienced in Tokyo. Some people just reject anything and everything offered to them by a stranger; It was just up to me to ask as many people as possible to get as many "yes's" as possible.

I had to learn how to approach people in a friendly way, but also how to take rejection gracefully. People always feel a little guilty when they reject anyone, but it was up to me to reassure them that it was okay to say "no."

At the end of the hour, we returned to the station to begin translating. I typed everything up in Italian for Italian journalists to read and record later, to dub the video. I wrote the translation in the same way I would write the script for a newscast; I added ellipses where the interviewees paused so that the dubber would pause in the same places. I wrote out numbers. Essentially, I typed it up in a way that would be easy to read.

This was the week I posted the Instagram and Twitter usernames and passwords on the bulletin board in the editing room. Now the next person who wants to login to Instagram or Twitter won't have to ask the whole newsroom to find them like I did.

Earning these blue check marks has become a nearly impossible task. Even though it is the policy of Twitter and Instagram to give blue marks to journalistic accounts, the whole process has been so abused that it is has become very difficult to get. The link to apply for a check mark on Twitter is down completely. Instagram has no such link in the first place. So this goal of mine has come to a standstill. But I will continue to follow up on it.

I had previously believed that I could clean out our Instagram following in an afternoon. However, part of the way through, Instagram temporarily blocked me from unfollowing accounts because it was suspicious behavior. So in the end, weaning down the accounts we follow took three days.

On Facebook, my response time has averaged 24 minutes. Before I started managing the social media, the average response time of the native Italian speakers was 33 minutes. Reaching that 15 minute response time seems like a totally doable goal.