Internship Report

Giacinto Bottone

S2780224

Internship Supervisor: Jonathan Groubert

Internship Report

Eindhoven

Table of Content

Motivation ... 3

Innovation Origins... 3

MapCreator/Maps4News ... 3

Supervision ... 5

MapCreator ... 5

Innovation Origins ... 5

RUG ... 5

Evaluation ... 5

Skills ... 6

Conclusions and Recommendations ... 7

Motivation

Choosing this internship was not easy. I looked for months different internships related a bit more to the kind of journalism I was interested in doing (video journalism); however, this was not successful. Hence, when the opportunity to do the internship at MapCreator presented itself, I grab it, and when with it. Furthermore, I saw several benefits in the internship: the possibility to expand in the field of data journalism and develop and learn further skills related to the field, working in an environment different from a traditional newsroom, among others.

I ended up with a combined internship at MapCreator and Innovation Origins after the University expressed concerned that the former company would not be journalistic enough for this program; a concerned that I also shared. So, the possibility of working both for MapCreator and Innovation Origins was presented to me, and I went for it. It seems like I would have the same benefits I saw with the MapCreator internship plus more training as a traditional journalist and polishing my writing and investigative skills.

Going into the internship, I went with the idea of also trying to fit my main interest, video journalism. It was a bit disappointing that I did not manage to do this; although, overall, I am very satisfied with the outcome of my internship. Before starting it, I saw the internship more as a mandatory class I needed to fulfilled to get my degree, something that needed to be done before I could move on to do the things I like (video, PR,

communications). However, during the experience, I found myself longing to write more journalistic stories and to do more journalistic work, not only on video form but also in writing.

Innovation Origins

Innovation Origins is an independent news platform that focuses on any innovation. It conforms to a tiny team, which is not all present in Eindhoven (hence I did not meet them all). Most of the team member current in Eindhoven are Dutch, and the magazine focuses a lot on Dutch innovation.

As an intern at Innovation Origins, my main role was to find and pitch stories, interviewing people, writing the stories, and doing the research. I was present at Innovation Origins only one day a week, on Mondays during the editorial meetings. These meetings were held once a week; during them, we would pitch stories and discuss the state of old stories. During these meeting I always – or at least at the beginning - tried to pitch at least a couple stories to the team. However, I did have quite some difficulties adjusting to the style of news of Innovation Origins. I came with a more hard news mentality, and it became quite difficult for me to get out of it. Thus, a lot of the stories I pitch were no suitable, and I became somehow frustrated. After this, for a while, finding stories became a bit difficult for me. Looking back, I should have found a topic that truly interested me and try to dig deep in it and built stories around it as I believe part of the difficulties I had was the fact that the innovation topic was a bit alien to me.

During my time there, I was supervised by Frans van Beveren. All my pitches and ideas would go through him, and he would accept them or reject them (especially if they happened outside the editorial meeting). Afterward, when pieces were ready, he would read them and give me feedback and publish them. The system changes a bit during my time there as I felt they were also trying to figure out a better system for publication. By the time I left after I wrote the pieces, I would put them online on an Excel file; someone would check the grammar and schedule it for publication.

The MapCreator team was formed out of approximately 20 people, out of which at least 7 were interns. This mixed with the different backgrounds we all have, built for a very intercultural, young, and vibrant workspace. As I was doing a combined internship, I was present at MapCreator only four days a week, full time. So, from Tuesday to Friday from 9-5pm I was at their offices. My supervisor for this internship was Christian Erades, COO of the company.

As a data/visual journalist intern, my tasks were a bit vague. My role was related to the collection and analysis of data. I would gather any data was need it, analyze how to arrange it best and then visualize it into a map.

However, I did not have a project or a clear-cut goal. Every task that I got was very related to a particular customer and their needs. Hence, it was very irregular. Furthermore, most of the time there was no final

product; after the research and the visualization I would go to a superior, show what I have done, explained how I collected and arrange the data, and most of the time it would end there.

Other roles were related to checking the existing data at MapCreator. So, if I see any mistake regarding polygons, city, or country labels, I would work with the developers to get them to solve. For example, we worked together in solving the US map, the Belgium election map, the European Union map, the Venezuelan city map of Caracas, among others.

Additionally, now and then I would help a bit the marketing team with a video or a picture. I would use Adobe Illustrator or Premiere Pro to create them. While I was happy to make the videos, there were a few things that were not optimal. The first couple of videos, I created a main video; the encoding of the video needed to be adapted to each social media for optimal visualization. However, without consulting me, videos were constantly uploaded without doing the propping encoding resulting in very low-quality videos, with black bands to the sizes and in most cases they were pixelated. I tried to fix them, but since they were already uploaded, my efforts were in vain. After what I saw how they uploaded the first two videos, I would send to the marketing team the videos with the right encoding already so that I would send then the 3-4 videos ready for upload in the different social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Linkedin). However, this only happened once or twice. The fact that they do not care much about quality was something that bothered me. The marketing interns would make small screen recorded videos for social media that would end up with very bad quality, and they would still make it online. I was rarely asked to do a video for social media. I also helped fix some pixelated videos on YouTube (some of them could not be safe, and the ones with improvement have not been uploaded yet on their YouTube channel).

As I was working only four days a week, I would always miss Mondays. This day is the day the MapCreator team would also hold their re-cap and plan meetings. I was never present in one of them. This resulted in me being a lot of time misinformed or not informed at all until very late into projects or deadlines. It also affected my involvement in the company, as I was never up to date with the new goals and new tasks.

Additionally, my role is the company was too vague, and I felt that they did not have a plan for me. I honestly never got a real assignment or goals, so I had to make my own. So I tried to organize as much data as possible, I decided to come up with creative solutions for data problems, etc. But, as mentioned above, they would rarely be used. Most of the time, I was useful to research some quick data needed (countries members of the UN, gas stations working on a country…) or to spot some mistakes. However, these tasks were sufficiently recurrent to justify my place in the company.

The notion that they did not have a plan for me was intensified by the fact that I did not have a workstation. Most of the team, the whole team was sitting in the working area, and I was sitting by myself in a space. Only when one person would no come to work, I would take over their place and sit with the rest. While this sounds quite negative, it was not as bad as it sounds. My whole point here is just to emphasized how my role in the company was not much developed by them.

Supervision

MapCreator

At MapCreator, there was barely any supervision. Only my second week there I had a meeting about my role and checking how things were developing. After then, no actual guidance was giving. Instead, you are treated as an expert on the field, in this case, data journalism. This is good because it pushes you to produce the best work, and you feel how people trust and rely on your word. On the other hand, you are learning by trial an error; no real guidance is given.

Innovation Origins

At Innovation Origins, there was a bit more supervision, and the communication and the monitoring at Innovation Origins were more organic and smooth. I would get feedback in most of the stories I wrote, the same with all the pitches I did. I must admit, however, that feedback was never extensive and most of the time in reference with a couple of words misspelled. In occasions, it happened when an article would be corrected, and I would only notice when it was published; as I would not get any comments on it.

RUG

The University supervision was highly appreciated. My supervisor contacted me as soon as we got assigned to each other, and we held a short Skype conversation. After that, he was in contact regularly (most of the time remind me to upload the journal entry), and he would always give me useful comments and questions in my journal entries. I thought the interaction was excellent and highly sufficient. I did think that the required seven journal entries were a bit much as, at least in the particular case of my internship, it became highly repetitive with not much new information to add.

Evaluation

In spite of any negative aspect, in the end, I honestly had a fruitful experience, and I feel like I learn much more than what I was expecting in this internship. I not only got to put in practice several of the skills that I

developed during my masters, but I also gain new knowledge and experience.

The writing skills and research skills that I gained during my Masters served me well in my internship. At MapCrator, my main tasks revolved around researching, and I used several of the research practices used during the masters. Besides this, all journalistic skills were also highly useful in both internships. From the academic part, I used the data organization skills I gained, which I had to develop much further during my course. While I use a lot for the knowledge gained in the Masters, the interaction between the courses I followed, and the practice was not particularly strong. Data journalism was not something that was explored at all during the master; hence, it was a challenge when they expect me to be an “expert” on the field. Additionally, the writing used at Innovation Origins was not, particularly what we practiced in the Masters as it is a new platform that does not follow a “hard news” mentality and that it uses SEO in its writing. SEO was something that was not explored during our classes, and it is something that seems to be very prominent in digital journalism writing.

Additionally, I do think that the master could have also benefited from a course or two on statistics. For a study that works so much with quantitative data, I did not know much of how to interpret or read it correctly. Getting acquainted with the language of statistics and some basic or intermediate processes would help any journalist that needs to work and interpret data of any kind. I believe this is necessary not only to collect and analyze data but also for reading the business report, government data, research results, et cetera was very challenging.

Skills

As I have mentioned before, I do think there are several skills that I gained during this internship. I always had to have a problem-solving mentality as I was constantly faced with issues that I did not know how to tackle at the beginning. For example, how to collect some data that was utterly unknown to me, work with developers to analyze when the code of geographical data is correct or incorrect to create the visualization.

I got to learn an experience first hand the journalist life, through editorial meetings and pitching ideas. I was forced to develop my skills looking for stories and recognizing potential interviewees. As of now, this is something that I am still working on, as I believe that I have much more to advance.

I expected the internships to be much more guided and they are both no quite like that; which has forced me to be more proactive and look for projects to do or articles to write on my own. Also, to set deadlines for me and to learn to organize myself productively. On the other hand; more guidance could have also been beneficial. Especially at MapCreator; where everything happens highly independently and the projects depend on the demands of the clients. This is not a bad thing; since you are being treated as an ‘expert’ on your field rather than an intern; but as mentioned above, this has its downside.

Overall, I am quite satisfied with the internship. However, having finished it, I think the combined placement is not a smart thing to do if there is not a more significant overlap between the jobs. With such a difference in each role, I think it limits you more than it helps you. While the idea at the beginning was to try to mix both parts as much as possible; shortly after the start of the internship, this proved quite tricky. I wanted to use maps on the stories I wrote for IO, but almost none of the stories I did were map fitting, and eventually, I was more concerned with finding a story than finding a story where I could use a map. But at MapCreator, I still do not see how I could have mixed it more with Innovation Origins beyond what I did. Of course, this can be the result of how I approached them, and someone else might have different effects. However, for me, it was challenging to be 100% in one job or not falling behind. Overall, I considered it to be a bit more challenging and limiting than expected. Additionally, the fact that you are not physically present all the time does have an impact on how you are being perceived within the company; maybe it is not conscious, but it happens.

Looking back, I think that Innovation Origins offered me more journalist growth than MapCreator. However, I do see that being there one day a week was nowhere near enough. I could not keep up with work with only this time at their office. It is fair to say that the people at MapCreator were very relaxed with me about letting me go to interviews and making phone calls for my other internship. However, the fact was that I was there four days a week and at IO only one day a week.

So, I do think that in the future if a combined internship is done, it needs to be very clear beforehand what the role of the intern will be and how it will be done. I also think that a strong reason needs to behind a combined internship.

However, I think I fulfilled the goals that I set myself up at the beginning of the internship. I am way faster at researching information and solving any data or fact related issue. Additionally, I developed my writing and interviewing skills, both English and Spanish. I am much more able to talk people on the spot than I was before, something that I own to this internship.

Conclusions and Recommendations

As mentioned several times, I think this internship was fair to finish the Journalism Master. Concerning the organization of the placement, I do believe some improvement can be made to help international students get better internships. The reality is that we do not get any support or guarantee of an internship, unlike the Dutch students; which considering how difficult can it be to get an internship with the specific requirements of this master can be a bit unfair. I also think having the security that the University will help us get the internship can benefit both the quality of the internships we get (which will automatically benefit the quality of the education we get) but also our state of mind and stress.

I have to mention that I did receive support from the University once I found the MapCreator internship. Mainly to make it work, as this was not journalistic enough. However, this was the only internship I was able to see during the very frustrating process, and if I had had other options, I might have gone for something closer to what I wanted to do and to what I wanted to learn.

I think the University relies too much on the idea that we will all go back to our countries and do our internships there, which is, in a lot of cases, not right.

Additionally, I also think that the program itself makes it challenging to find an internship. The reality is that when we finish our classes, we do not specialize in any form of journalism. We have only experienced all of them briefly. In some cases, we only did one story, and that was it. I think that going to the internship search with a stronger background in a specific area can be way more beneficial. Because for example, when looking for an internship in radio or T.V., exclusively with the portfolio that we developed in the Master is almost impossible.

This aside, the Master does prepare you for the professional life and especially to be able to write. It also gives you a taste of the interviewing process, and it makes you quite well for this.

To me, this internship was very successful in terms of what I got from it. Not only the skills I developed, but it also helped me discover what kind of journalist I want to be. Or even, if I want to be a journalist at all. It might sound very negative but in reality it was not, I got to work with great people and learn a lor. I also got to decide what I learned which is a benefict I do not think most people have. I mentioned a lot of negatives because I do think that an internship like this (two roles combined) can be highly beneficial for a student, but if some of the things are mention are in place maybe there is much more to get out of this kinds of internships.

Work

. Online Stories: https://innovationorigins.com/alcohol-induced-brain-damage-continues-during-the-first-weeks-of-abstinence/ https://innovationorigins.com/ciclogreen-the-startup-that-rewards-your-sustainable-mobility/ https://innovationorigins.com/start-up-of-the-day-conquering-the-world-of-maps/ https://innovationorigins.com/start-up-of-the-day-treating-the-environment-with-nanotechnology/ https://innovationorigins.com/in-conversation-with-the-female-tech-heroes-parters-we-need-role-models/ https://innovationorigins.com/students-from-all-over-the-world-compete-in-shell-eco-marathon-event-in-oss/ https://innovationorigins.com/green-tech-db-visualising-sustainable-innovation/ https://innovationorigins.com/new-study-makes-progress-in-solving-the-mystery-of-migraines/ Additional:

A lot of my work was done on excel sheets and video forms.

Social media images built from data maps/or data maps would end up like this on the final product (after going through Illustrator): (Some maps where dynamic on the web)