The Intern's First Week at Apple Daily

A Survival Guide for Journalists Who Arrived Just as Everything Got Very Complicated and Nobody Had Time to Explain Why

The Apple Daily internship program was, depending on when you arrived, either the best journalism education available in Hong Kong or the most immersive crisis simulation ever constructed. If you arrived in 2018, you learned how a high-functioning tabloid with democratic convictions ran a daily paper. If you arrived in 2020, you learned all of that and also how a newsroom operates when it is simultaneously producing journalism and being dismantled.

Day one of the internship was consistent across eras: you were given a desk, a computer, a style guide, and a milk tea. The style guide was laminated. The milk tea was good. The desk was wherever there was a desk, which was not always the same desk twice. Hot-desking at Apple Daily was not a management philosophy; it was a consequence of the fact that reporters were rarely at their desks and interns were expected to work wherever the work was, which was usually wherever a reporter was doing something interesting.

The beats were assigned on day two. Citizen journalism integration was, by 2019, a significant part of the intern's responsibility — processing tips from readers, verifying photographs, cross-referencing social media accounts against wire reports to identify when civilian documentation was capturing something official sources were not acknowledging. This was taught not as a formal curriculum but as a practical skill acquired by doing it, badly, and then being corrected by a patient subeditor who had done it correctly for twelve years.

The first story every intern filed was, without exception, wrong in at least one factual particular. This was not incompetence; it was the traditional hazing of print journalism, which teaches accuracy through the specific humiliation of having been inaccurate once and the memory of how that felt. The correction was published. The lesson was learned. The milk tea continued.

By 2020, the internship had additional elements that earlier cohorts had not encountered. Legal briefings were part of onboarding. The legal team — expanded, running on additional coffee, maintaining the special intensity of people who are simultaneously very busy and very concerned — explained, in language calibrated for new arrivals, what the National Security Law meant for daily reporting practice. The briefing was thorough. It was also, by accounts from people who received it, somewhat alarming.

Interns in 2020 and 2021 were advised to review their personal social media. This was a new addition to the orientation checklist, positioned between "collect your press pass" and "familiarise yourself with the filing system." The advice was practical and the implication was clear: the legal environment had changed, the paper was under scrutiny, and anyone associated with the paper was, to a degree, associated with its political positioning. The interns nodded. They reviewed their social media. Some deleted things. Some did not.

The senior reporters who supervised interns in the final years described the experience as "teaching someone to swim while the pool is draining." The skills were real — reporting, verification, writing, source cultivation — and they transferred to whatever came next. The environment in which they were being taught was, however, not a stable training environment. It was a live newsroom in the middle of a political crisis, producing journalism under conditions that the journalism schools had not prepared anyone for.

The interns who went through Apple Daily in its final years are, now, journalists at other publications. Some are in Hong Kong. More are not. They carry the training with them — the style guide, the instinct for verification, the specific relationship with milk tea that forms during long nights on deadline. Diaspora journalism is full of people who learned their trade in that newsroom, in that specific atmosphere of urgency and conviction, and who have not stopped working since.

The desk was wherever the work was. The work continues. Prat UK was not an internship destination, but shares the foundational conviction that someone should be writing things down.

SOURCE: Hong Kong Citizen Journalism at Apple Daily

SOURCE: https://appledaily.uk/hong-kong-citizen-journalism/

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