Tuesdays at DWPub tend to be busy with meetings. On a weekly basis, I meet up with Daryl Willcox, the founder of the company, to talk about our new online portal in Germany. We discuss the blog which we decided to launch to provide a platform for discussion of relevant topics in journalism, and to further reach out and interact with our users in Germany. I go over the final steps of the blog which is supposed to go live today, and we discuss some ideas to promote the launch that will involve coordination with our PR agency in Munich.
It’s 12:30. My French colleagues have organised a lunch for their team and the German team. We have pizza together in the company’s meeting room and are briefly joined by our boss. Some IT colleagues come in to snatch up the last few cold pieces.
I go back to my desk and exchange more emails with our PR agency, German team members and an IT developer to discuss final tweaks and touches to the blog. At 3 pm, light, camera, action: the blog goes live.
Hello blog. The internet world has been waiting for you…
At 4 pm, I meet up with my colleague Mandy and our intern Christina. Mandy started at DWPub as an intern, but was recently hired on a full-time basis. Christina is a business school student and joined the team two weeks ago for a six-month internship in media research and marketing. I explain some business and marketing aspects of the German operations to them and tell them about our clients. I ask Christina to request a free trial of our services via our website and show her what her request looks like when we receive it, and what steps we would take if it was a real enquiry. Like all our interns, Christina will take on her own projects, so I try to give her an overview of as many aspects of the business as possible.
I’ve been coordinating the company’s German internship program for the past 2 years and supervised six interns during this time. My responsibilities include the recruiting and supervision of interns, as well as all administration involved in the handling of internship funding programs. I enjoy this aspect of my job because it keeps me connected to university life. Working with interns is also a great way of “recycling” my teaching experience (although I hope I’m not lecturing them too much). Since I moved into the role of Business Manager, I will gradually hand over the coordination of the internship scheme to Mandy. Some of our former interns are now working for us as freelancers from Germany, so I still communicate with them on a weekly basis.
I go through my emails one last time and shut down my computer. In the next few days, I will be focusing on communicating with journalists about the new blog. But first home to write for Michelle’s blog.
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