General News
22 July, 2025
Learning to be a journalist
Reflections of The Addy's latest work experience student.
Last week, The Advertiser welcomed year 10 Maryborough Education Centre student Kam Thomas for work experience. During the week, Kam spent time in the newsroom and learned what a week as a journalist can be like, along with a host of other tasks across the business. This is Kam’s reflection of their work experience week.
During my week at The Maryborough Advertiser as a student on work experience, I found my initial expectations to be completely parallel compared to the reality of the paper.
The different aspects of writing, photographing, editing and inter-viewing were exciting and I learnt so many interesting things. I was greeted with happy faces and kind personalities across the entire board.
What I mainly enjoyed was tagging along with Sam and Niamh in car rides or walks to interviews. On my first day at The Addy, I was extremely nervous and awkward when meeting all of the people in the office. But as the hours went by, I found myself becoming comfortable in the warm and chilled-out atmosphere.
Initially, it was challenging to find tasks to do. It was when Riley gave me the task of looking through the large books filled with all of The Maryborough Advertiser’s old newspapers and comparing their formats to newer papers, then the ball really got rolling.
My favourite moments here at The Addy were definitely when Jonathan let me use his computer to play around on Quark — a special app that everyone uses to format the newspapers with ease.
When I tagged along with Niamh to Parkview Bakery on our lunch breaks we had enjoyable, deep conversations that were mainly surrounding the topic of school.
Getting lost while trying to find 125-year-old Sugar Gum trees that were planted in the 1900’s as a commemoration of the Boer War with Sam was particularly fun.
I had expected my time here to be boring and a waste of my holidays — but the more time I spent here, the less I wanted to leave.
Riley taught me how he edits everyone’s stories, Niamh taught me how to pick through photos and send them over to Riley to have a closer look, Jonathan taught me how to format a page of the sports section in the paper, Sam taught me how to confidently speak and interview anyone of different ages and genders and Janelle taught me how things work in admin.
All of this is only the surface level of what I learnt and I’m sad that it’s already over. Being at The Addy helped me not only have more experience on a resume, but it helped me with my confidence and it allowed me to finally choose what I want to do with my future — be a journalist.
Had it not been for the amazing team here, I wouldn’t have grown the way I have. So, I thank Michael, Riley and the rest of the team for allowing me to do my work experience here. And I hope to continue to see all of their faces down the street or even at my school, interviewing and taking photos of students and teachers.
— Kam Thomas, year 10 work experience student