Day 1

Couldn't sleep last night because of jitters (well, *I* wouldn't call about 2 hours "sleep"), so just stayed up until I had to be at the station. Extremely nervous pulling into the lot - in fact, I drove past the studios and had to make a u-ey and backtrack about a block.

Took a couple of deep breaths, walked to the lobby phone and called the desk "Hi, this is Tim Lankford...I'm XXX's summer intern." And what do ya know, I beat the boss in to boot!

Didn't do to much other than observe today...but here's a weird nugget: Time actually speeds up at a television station. It's true. We got started, I would say, no later than 2:10am on getting the information together for XXX's forecast and literally 10 minutes go past and we're having to rush to put graphics together because it's suddenly 3:05am.

And, seemingly, 10 minutes after that, the floor guy is giving the countdown for the show to start and we're off and running. Three hours of local news goes by in an instant and it's time for the network morning show.

But it was probably the most interesting three hours I've ever witnessed. Of course, it was a relatively slow news day, being a holiday, but an incredible amount of fun. The male morning co-anchor (a very nice guy who introduced himself to right away) was flying solo today, so it was just me, XXX, the anchor, the producer, floor director and overnight assignment editor (I think that is her job, but which apparently also includes running the teleprompter, apparently). When XXX or the anchor weren't on the air, they were chatting back and forth and cracking jokes. Those jitters I mentioned earlier quickly evaporated and I don't think you could have paid me to wipe the silly grin off my face.

And we actually had *weather* to talk about this morning. For a minute or two, I thought I might be pressed into service, to run the radar behind-the-scenes, as a thunderstorm cell looked like it might go severe at a point or two. Never happened, though, but I felt like I learned a lot watching XXX interpret the data to me.

Later as the dayside reporters started to arrive, the newsroom (which doubles as the background to their anchor desk) became very lively and I met two or three of the reporters and the News Director and sat in briefly on the morning editorial meeting.

Back tomorrow for day 2, but it looks like I will be working Wednesday, Thursday and Friday and coming in for an hour or two on Saturday and Sunday to help the weekend morning guy out (the station canceled the weekend morning news a few months ago, but he still does the Network weekend show cut-ins and then reports for the evening shows) and make sure that XXX's trend data is complete (which also goes towards the paper he is researching and wants to complete this summer) for Monday morning.

It really is more than I ever expected and I think it will aid me in so many ways down the road that I know I made the right choice by taking the internship.