I SPENT four days at the Monmouthshire Beacon on work experience and during my time there I learnt a lot about new techniques and began to understand some of the techniques which they use.

I chose work experience at the Monmouthshire beacon as I am interested in journalism from my studies in school.

On my first day we went to Haberdashers’ Monmouth school as they were taking part in an attempt to help Jamie Oliver break the Guinness world record for hosting the largest cooking lesson. Whilst we were there, I helped get some content for an article and a video.

Then when we headed back to the office, I helped draft an article on Little Mill villages hall 90th anniversary.

On the next day I learnt a lot on how to structure a story and the techniques they use. One of the techniques is the inverted pyramid and this is where the story will follow an inverted pyramid shape.

The beginning of the story will hold the most valuable information, then in the body it will hold some crucial information and details then at the end of the story which is referred to as the “tail” will have extra information about the story.

I had the opportunity to try to write some more articles, one of which was about ice cream. For this story we put a poll up on Facebook asking what people’s favourite flavour of ice cream was. 

From this poll I was able to include some local statistics into this story and link it the community, so they were involved in the article and localise it to Monmouth. 

The next article I wrote was about what walks you can take your dogs on this summer. I went off and did my own research for this article, so it was a fun way for me to learn more skills in journalism.

I looked at lots of different walks around the Monmouthshire area that would be most ideal to take a dog, looked at the distances and where the walk can take you.

On one of my last days doing my work experience I went out in Monmouth town centre taking photographs of the surrounding areas, some of the photos we took were the wildlife around the town. We took photos of Monnow bridge and the river, which I later included on my newspaper mock up-front page.

Before creating my mock up-front page, I analysed some past newspapers and picked out any techniques they used and how they structured the stories and identified what language they were using.

I then tried creating some headlines which went along with the photos I took, which I ended up putting on my mock up-front page.

I have enjoyed my time at the Monmouthshire Beacon as it has given me more of an insight on journalism and how to structure the stories, edit them and see how newspapers are evolving to appeal to some younger audiences like creating a TikTok page.