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I began my experience at North Country Public Radio in February of 2024 as an independent study. I spent about eight hours a week at the station developing essential radio journalism skills like recording, interviewing, writing for the ear, and audio editing and production. David Sommerstein and Monica Sandrezscki, my primary supervisors, gave my co-intern Zach and me lots of fun and challenging exercises to build our reporting skills from the ground up. I remember one of our first projects was producing a Vox populi, man-on-the-street style story with interviews from North Country college students about the strange winter weather we were experiencing at the time. I also spent a lot of time during the semester writing pieces of copy, which are short, usually 30-second stories with no interviews or voicing. Learning how to write copy is an invaluable exercise in writing for the ear because it requires you to take a longer news story —often a print one— and make it as simple and understandable as possible, but maintain the heart of the story and keep it interesting for the listener.
I thought the intra-semester aspect of the internship was very beneficial because when I began working full-time for NCPR in June, I was able to hit the ground running with most of the technical knowledge I needed to produce my own stories from start to finish. The eight weeks I spent at the station in the summer consisted of helping with daily news coverage for the next morning’s newscast while ideating, writing, recording, and producing a range of feature-length audio stories in my free time. If I had to define what my “beat” was, or what particular issue I reported on enough to become an expert in, I would say it was the environment and climate change in the North Country. However, I have a lot of diverse interests as a journalist, and I intentionally went into this experience not wanting to limit myself. I wanted to explore lots of different beats and styles of audio storytelling, so I challenged myself by picking up stories about topics I had very little background knowledge of. One of these off-beat stories, a music-y feature I took on about a prodigious bluegrass fiddler who came to the Norwood Village Green concert series, ended up being my favorite story to produce all summer. I also was particularly proud of the last story I produced for NCPR, a cumulative, many-voiced feature about the status of composting programs in the North Country and the future of food waste management in this region.