By Vincent Christiano III
When I was accepted in the spring to do a fall internship, I was thrilled to learn that I could have an opportunity to work with real professionals in the communications and journalism field. Less than a week after finding what I thought would be my placement, everything was put on hold because of the COVID-19 outbreak, and it took almost the entire summer to sort out where I would be able to find an opportunity in the fall.
Finding a Spot
Thanks to Dr. Irwin, who was in contact with several different people at once trying to find a spot for me, I was able to find a home this semester at Buffalo Rising, an online magazine/blog hybrid that specializes in emphasizing the sometimes under-appreciated, grass-roots environment in Buffalo and Western New York. While the company has a relatively small team of employees, my first interactions with them made it feel like it was more of a family than a group of coworkers.
This made me feel a lot more comfortable in the first couple meeting with the company’s leaders, and they have been more than welcoming.
Getting Started
While I had originally planned on working in the fall in more of a sports capacity, the internship at Buffalo Rising is set to take me in a different direction on the content side, taking me a bit out of my comfort zone away from the sports world. While I was originally hesitant, it has turned out to be a great way to broaden my horizons while working on my technical skills, like editing and recording.
While the folks at Buffalo Rising find new projects every day, I hear about them when I have the chance to sit in on their morning editorial meeting on Zoom. They brief everybody on project status, and the conversations are continued throughout the day on Slack, which is a messaging app used by a lot of businesses to organize their projects and employees into the appropriate digital conversation channels.
First Project
One of my focuses this semester is to develop my podcasting abilities, and Buffalo Rising is going to be giving me a really interesting chance to do just that with their growing podcast. While they iron out the details of that project, I’ve been getting started by shadowing some of their multimedia projects, sitting in on interviews and coming up with questions. These interviews, like the one I will be sitting in on next Wednesday with a balloon sculpture company, will be turned into a short video story posted onto the website. They said that eventually I will have the chance to spearhead one of those interviews, to create and edit some multimedia content for them.
While I’m excited to get more involved, first and foremost I’m thrilled to have been given an opportunity to even have an internship this semester, because so many places aren’t taking interns due to the virus. Feel free to check out Buffalo Rising’s website, www.buffalorising.com, to see some of the awesome content they’ve put out already.
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