True to its tradition, The Press welcomed four interns from the magazine The Itinerary for a period of one week. The day they left, they told us about their experience.
Posted at 5:27 p.m.
“I found it wonderful. There’s not a minute of the week that I didn’t like,” exclaims Gabriel Lavoie, stars in his eyes. “I have a background in electromechanics and I’m a painter, but I liked the internship so much that it made me choose journalism as a profession,” he says.
A total of four journalist-hawkers completed a one-week internship at The Press supervised by journalists Valérie Simard, Pierre-Marc Durivage, Marie-Eve Morasse and Éric-Pierre Champagne, as well as editorial writer Alexandre Sirois.
During the week, Mr. Lavoie, journalist-hawker from The Itinerary since 2015, attended a press conference, made several interviews and wrote some texts. “I loved the experience,” he says. For the past year, Mr. Lavoie has been regularly writing columns in the magazine. In the coming weeks, he will also write scientific articles.
The Itinerary is a bimonthly street magazine published since 1994 in Montreal, whose mission is social reintegration. It is printed at approximately 10,000 copies per month. Intended for the general public, it addresses a range of societal issues.
“Normally, in the morning, I have difficulty getting up. This week, my alarm clock went off and I stood at attention. I didn’t want to be late. It was extraordinary,” says Mr. Lavoie.
” I learned a lot ”
Agathe Melançon was also delighted with her experience. “It went really well. I was able to go see a play rehearsal, write an article based on a press release and do two telephone interviews,” says the woman who sells The Itinerary since September 2019 at the Lionel-Groulx metro station.
” TO The PressI learned a lot, because people looked at the texts with us, helped us to correct them and made us think,” adds Ms.me Melancon.
Mathieu Thériault was on his second internship, after coming for the first time in 2019. “It was very different because of the pandemic. The room is almost empty, it’s special,” says the street vendor who works on rue Bernard, in the Outremont district.
For his part, Simon Bolduc, journalist and peddler guide, is delighted to have seen the trainees evolve during the week. “The peddlers have developed their writing a lot, to be in control and to have journalistic reflexes. It gives them a lot of tools to express themselves both in writing and orally,” he says. During the week, Mr. Bolduc covered education and immigration with journalist Marie-Eve Morasse.