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About the Job:

Viacom Boston is a branch of one of the world’s largest entertainment and media companies, and a leader in the production, promotion and distribution of entertainment, news, sports and music. My position existed within the Creative Services Department, and my official title was WBZ-TV Web Intern. I worked with three primary websites, each of which represented a separate television network. The three networks were CBS 4 Boston, UPN 38, and UPN 28.

I worked directly under the WBZ-TV Webmaster, Stephanie Miller. Her job responsibilities consisted not only of developing and maintaining the websites for the three networks, but also developing marketing campaigns and building relationships with sponsors for the websites. In fact, I would say this position was more half marketing and half web management, whereas I had expected it to be much heavier on the technical side of things, such as programming and web design. I also worked with another intern twice a week, whose position was the same as mine. She was a student at Tufts University, and came in on Mondays and Fridays.

My work schedule was Monday through Friday, 9am to 5pm. My personal responsibilities during this internship were largely related to the CBS 4 Boston website, www.cbs4boston.com. Each morning when I came in I would use an online tool called Dayport to cut the newscasts from the 6am news into individual stories and push them out to the live site. This would take me anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour and a half depending on the volume of news that day. I would also have to do the same for the noon newscast around 12:30 as soon as the news was finished. Following the morning updates I would usually either have some basic updating or maintenance tasks to take care of for any of the three sites. For example, a producer may have sent me an email with an attachment of a story to post on a particular section of one of the sites. I would then log in to their online “VLN” tool (Viacom Local Network) and create and publish the story to the proper section. Sometimes I would also be required to touch up images and add them to the stories or sections as well.

My other major day to day responsibility was to help with the live webcast at 12:30pm. The live webcast is a shortened version of the noon newscast that is produced specifically for the website. Each day around 12 noon I would publish the webcast story to the live site to let the site viewers know that the webcast would be coming in a half hour. At about 12:20 I would add a link to the video player so that by 12:25 the webcast story was updated to include the link on the live site, and at 12:30 the visitors at the site would be able to watch the webcast live on their computers. Most of the time my supervisor would oversee this whole process, however there were a number of times where she was either out for the day or simply too busy to handle the webcast, and so I would be in charge of publishing it to the site. Once the webcast is over, I would take it down from the site and then update another story, called the "on-demand" version of the webcast to include the video for each individual story from the noon news as well as the entire 5 to 6 minute webcast, and then publish it to the site where it would stay until 3:30pm.

When I began this position I had a limited knowledge of html, however the skills that I developed in CS 139, 239, and particularly 430 aided me in quickly figuring out the syntax and learning to read and write useful code. Of course, html is a fairly simple language, but I was still grateful for the ease with which I was able to figure it out due to my programming experience at school.

As far as long term projects are concerned, I discussed with my supervisor the possibility of developing a simple flash animated Red Sox trivia game, and got as far as writing and revising specifications, however the project never really got off of the ground. Unfortunately the art department was too busy to give me the assistance that I needed in building the necessary graphics. The CBS 4 site was scheduled to migrate to a new system in late August / early September, however, and I was able to spend a lot of time modifying different sections of the site to prepare for the migration. This required reorganizing some of the sections of the site as well as updating and sorting individual stories within the sections. Other than some additional research tasks, this was the extent of my job responsibilities during my internship with Viacom.