Duties and Responsiblities

What are some of your duties and responsibilities as an intern? How are interns supervised? Is there an established intern training plan in place?

NBC Bay Area gave my a wide range of duties so I was never bored. Most of the time I worked on the news desk. This meant searching for new stories, answering phone calls, calling PIOs(public information officers) from police and fire. The most exciting time to work on the desk was during a breaking news story right before the broadcast went was set to air. There were times a fire would start at 4:50 p.m. and the newscast would be scheduled to go at 5 p.m. In other words, everyone on the desk would be scrambling for information and footage. Some people would call it stressful, I call it exciting.

On some days I would be lucky and I received the opportunity to shadow a reporter. I got to cover a school fire, a death in Afghanistan and a few press conferences.

Interns aren't very supervised. Our supervisors sit at the desk with us and when they need something done they ask us. Supervisors are usually very busy they are not paying attention to what the interns are doing. However, before my internship began all the interns went through safety training for the satellite trucks. The training was about three hours long. All other training(how to use the phones, iNews) was done on the spot. In about two weeks all the interns were proficient in using both software and phones.