My PCIJ experience

Waking up at 7:00 in the morning on a summer felt like it’s just an ordinary school day. I had to commute everyday from our house to Scout De Guia in Quezon City for my OJT at the PCIJ. A typical day inside the office would start by our supervisor giving us papers to encode. Usually, these documents include the Advertising Contracts and the Detailed Electoral Expenditures of the presidentiables of the recent election. Aside from encoding, we also do transcribing. We transcribe some of the interviews conducted by the reporters of PCIJ. We also transcribe our own interviews for the articles that we write. For our major project at PCIJ, they assigned us to do two articles. We proposed a lot of topics and we consulted our supervisor about it. Everyone agreed to do the story on the college life of presidentiables. We chose the top three presidentiables namely Noynoy Aquino, Manny Villar and Gilbert Teodoro. Since we are ten interns, our supervisor divided us into three groups. Each group was assigned one candidate. We had to search the internet to find the contact details of the classmates/batch mates of those three candidates. We also visited their respective Colleges to look for a copy of their yearbook and some of their old photographs. Our group was assigned to do a story about Noynoy Aquino’s college life. This classmate/batch mate of Noynoy so we had to find ways just to reach them. Thanks to Facebook for helping us with that! :) We searched the site for names of possible classmates of Noynoy and luckily, we found some. We sent them a message informing them that we are doing a feature story about Noynoy and fortunately, they agreed to grant us an interview.

The second topic that was assigned to our group was about political jokes. We had to do a story about the role of political jokes in the Filipino setting and how they shape and influence the perspective of Filipinos. This article was easier to do than the first. We also had to do interviews but this time, we found it simpler since we already know the process from finding contacts to producing a story.

I preferred to stay at PCIJ for the election coverage. I was with my supervisor Ms. Karol Ilagan and my co-intern Katreena Cosme from the University of Santo Tomas. We were assigned to go to Mandaluyong and Pasig. We went to Rosario Elementary School in Pasig and Andres Bonifacio Integrated School in Mandaluyong. We did a few articles about our observations on the process of election in those particular places. I took videos using the Flip camera of the office and those videos were uploaded on the blog site of PCIJ. Some of the photos I took were also used by PCIJ in their reports.

I really enjoyed my stay at PCIJ. The people were very accommodating and helpful. My co-interns were cooperative and fun to be with. I learned a lot of things about journalism and I had fun while learning it. PCIJ taught me how to write a story that can really influence the mindset of its readers. They trained me how to creatively bring to life every story I make for the readers to visualize and understand the story better. They gave me the chance to be published front page in one of the leading newspaper publications in the country and this is really one thing I will never forget.

My experience with them made my summer more interesting and worth to remember. :)