A Lander University student spent her summer getting experience in a career she has aspired for since she was a little girl.
Holly Tuggle, an incoming junior from Simpsonville, spent her summer at the WYFF 4 news station as a creative services intern.
Tuggle’s dad worked for a news station when she was little and she remembers when he would take her to visit news stations.
“I can’t even remember when, I just fell in love with the environment and told myself this is what I want to do,” Tuggle said.
When she found out there was an internship available, she immediately began perfecting her resume and cover letter, applied and interviewed and got the spot.
Creative services handles promotion for the news station itself, so Tuggle has been able to go on shoots with reporters and anchors to make commercials encouraging people to watch the news.
She traveled all over the station’s coverage area with anchors: to Greenwood, Anderson, Spartanburg, Greenville, Asheville and Hendersonville.
The project Tuggle got full responsibility over was creating new commercials for kids programming on Saturday mornings. She wrote the scripts, got them approved, then worked with anchors and reporters to read the scripts, scheduled the recording sessions and pulled all the clips and graphics together into a final product.
“Even though I knew I've always wanted to do broadcast television, I didn't really know everything that went into it,” she said.
“So that was really cool to just see, ‘Wow, there's so much more.’ But I think the biggest thing would just be what goes on behind production, because no one really thinks about what's going on behind the newsroom other than reporters just reading off, you know, a screen and telling us our news, but there's so much more behind it.”
Tuggle also learned a lot on the job, such as how to switch writing styles across different formats like TV writing to LinkedIn and social media posts to caption writing.
“I think that just them being able to give me such hands-on experience in reporting, editing and production, it's just been so, so incredible,” she said.
“And I mean, from day one, they just immersed me in that fast-paced type of broadcast journalism. And they were always ready to just mentor me and support me however they can. And that was really, really special.”