News Reporting Intern

In this task you will write a full news report using only information that is already available to you online, so the entire assignment can be completed from home without visiting any office or meeting anyone in person.

Begin by choosing one news development from the past seven days.

It can be national, state level, or related to your own city, but it must be something covered by at least three separate publications so that you have enough material to work with.

Read all three versions of the story carefully and note how each one opens, what facts they agree on, and where their details differ.

Next, build a fact sheet in a document.

List the confirmed facts, the names and designations of every person quoted, the dates involved, and any numbers or official figures mentioned.

Mark clearly which publication each fact came from.

Where two reports contradict each other, write down both versions rather than picking one.

Now write your own news report of 400 to 500 words.

Open with a lead paragraph that answers who, what, when, and where in a single tight sentence.

Arrange the remaining paragraphs in descending order of importance, so the least essential detail sits at the very bottom.

Attribute every claim to its source using phrases such as according to or as reported by.

Do not add opinion, prediction, or any detail you could not trace back to a published source.

Apply the cut test once the draft is done.

Delete the final paragraph and check that the report still stands as a complete story.

Repeat this with the second last paragraph.

A correctly structured news report survives being cut from the bottom, because editors routinely trim stories to fit space without rereading them.

If removing a paragraph breaks your report, the structure is wrong and the material needs reordering.

Finally, write a short editing note of about 150 words identifying the one fact you could not verify across all three publications, explaining how you handled that disagreement in your copy, and stating which single additional source would have settled it.

Submit a PDF containing your fact sheet, your finished report, the cut test results, the editing note, and the links to all three publications you used.

This task teaches interview preparation, which is the part of interviewing that decides whether the actual conversation produces anything useful.

You will complete it entirely from home using publicly available material, so no real person needs to be contacted.

Start by selecting one public figure who has given several recorded interviews that are freely available online.

This could be a sportsperson, author, scientist, entrepreneur, civil servant, or artist.

Watch or read at least three of their existing interviews from start to finish.

As you go through them, build a research profile in a document.

Record their background, their current work, the positions they have taken publicly, and the questions they have already answered many times.

This last part matters, because a prepared journalist does not waste an interview asking what has been asked before.

Now write a set of fifteen interview questions.

Group them into three sections: opening questions that establish facts, middle questions that explore reasoning and decisions, and closing questions that invite reflection.

Every question must be open ended, so avoid anything answerable with yes or no.

At least four questions should be ones nobody appears to have asked this person before.

For each of your fifteen questions, write the answer you expect based on your research, then write a follow up question you would ask if the subject gave a vague or evasive reply.

The follow up matters more than the original question, because experienced interviewees deflect routinely and the unprepared interviewer simply moves on to the next item on their list.

Next, study the interviewer rather than the subject.

Return to the three recorded interviews and examine how each interviewer handled the moments where the subject avoided answering.

Record which approaches produced a real answer and which let the subject escape.

Note how the interviewer opened, how they moved between topics, and how they closed.

Finally, write a preparation note of about 200 words setting out the single question you consider most important in your set, your reasoning for placing it where you did in the sequence, and what you would do if the subject refused to answer it.

Submit a document containing the research profile, the fifteen questions with your reasoning for each, the expected answers, the planned follow ups, the interviewer study, the preparation note, and links to the three source interviews.

Press releases and official statements are written to present their author in the best possible light.

A reporter's job is to extract the news from them and supply the context the statement leaves out.

You will practise exactly that in this task, working only from documents available online.

Choose one official announcement published in the last month.

Government ministry press releases, regulatory notifications, and listed company announcements are all suitable, and all are published openly on official websites.

Read the full statement rather than any news coverage of it.

In a document, separate its contents into three columns: verifiable facts such as dates, amounts, and decisions; claims that sound factual but are not proven, such as predicted benefits; and promotional language that carries no information at all.

Next, identify what the statement does not say.

Note any obvious question a reader would want answered that the announcement avoids, such as cost, timeline, who is affected negatively, or what happened to a previous similar promise.

Research these gaps using older published reports and official records, and write down what you find.

Now write a news report of 450 to 500 words.

Lead with the actual decision rather than the self praise.

Include the relevant facts from the statement, attribute them properly, and then add the context you researched.

Clearly distinguish between what has been decided and what has merely been promised.

Pay particular attention to the verbs you use.

Official statements rely on words such as aims to, is committed to, and will explore, none of which commit the issuer to anything measurable.

Your report should describe precisely what has been committed and what has only been aspired to, because readers consistently come away believing a promise is a decision.

Next, compare your report against the coverage this announcement actually received.

Read two published reports on it and record what each took directly from the statement without question, and what context each added.

Write a short assessment of whether the coverage served readers or simply relayed the announcement.

Submit the three column analysis, your gap research notes, the finished report, the coverage comparison, and a link to the original statement.

Reporters are usually assigned a beat, meaning one subject area they follow continuously so that they understand it better than a general reporter ever could.

This task puts you on a beat for the duration of the assignment, using only sources you can reach from home.

Choose one beat from the following: school and higher education policy, public health, urban transport, environment and pollution, or consumer affairs.

Pick the one you find genuinely interesting, because you will be living with it for several weeks.

Begin by building a source list.

Identify the ministries, departments, regulators, courts, and research organisations that produce information on your beat.

Find their official websites, press release pages, published reports, and data portals.

Add the three or four journalists who cover this beat well and note where they publish.

Save all of this in a document as your beat file.

Over the assignment period, monitor these sources regularly.

Keep a running log of every development with its date, source, and a one line summary.

From your log, select three developments that are genuinely newsworthy and connected to each other.

Write a news report of 300 to 400 words on each.

The three reports together should show a reader how the situation moved over time, so your third report should be able to refer back to the first.

Alongside the reports, build a background file of the kind reporters keep for their own beat.

Include the key terms and what they mean, the main organisations and who heads them, the relevant laws or rules, the recurring arguments on each side, and the figures a reporter on this beat should know without looking up.

This file is what allows a beat reporter to write quickly and accurately when something breaks.

Then identify the stories nobody is writing.

From your monitoring, list three questions about this beat that published coverage consistently fails to address, and state for each where the answer would be found.

Submit the beat file, the background file, the complete log, all three reports, the list of unasked questions, and a one page note explaining why you selected these three developments and what you expect to happen next on this beat.