After my lunch break, I went out to a celebration event at the Royal Wootten Bassett school because of an opening of a sixth form part of the school. I was shadowing over the Assistant Editor who was there taking pictures and interviewing the head teacher and a few students. We were then taken on a tour around the newly opened sixth form building. 

On the next day, two of the reporters were in, so I was introduced to the rest of the team. The overall atmosphere of the office was very relaxed and everyone was really nice to talk to. I didn’t handle any of the big or breaking stories so I was just doing publishing articles to the Swindon Link website and then eventually the Ocelot website, which cover cultural topics, so I was publishing articles about music events. The website used to publish on the Ocelot was completely different, and at times more difficult, mainly with uploading images. I’ve never used Photoshop before, so I was nervous when they said I had to use it to edit the image for the website. Luckily, to my relief, it was only for changing the size of the image and maybe cropping it which was easy to do. I was busy publishing for the Swindon Link and the Ocelot up until Thursday which I enjoyed so much. 

Friday was my last day, and the team wanted to see how I write. So, for the entire day, they let me get on with my own article. Apart from the first 30 minutes of the day, I was shown how the physical magazine is made and laid out. Who writes what article, what advertisements go where, front cover image and back cover advert. 

I originally thought of my idea between the time of being told I was writing an article on Thursday and actually writing one on Friday. My article was about why it’s bad for autistic people to hide their autism. So, from around 10.30am to 4pm, I had to focus on getting an article completed ready for it to be checked and ready to be published. My article was completed with about 15 minutes left so then it was read over and the only mistake was to change a word because I used the wrong tense in a particular sentence. There were issues with getting the image on there in time, so it was published on the Swindon Link website Saturday afternoon. All through the weekend, I got a lot of positive feedback and even one of the reporters I worked with emailed me saying how much she loved it.