 My name is Rebecca Duffey. I'm a senior at UMass Amherst, double majoring in journalism and communication. I'm from Chikabee, Massachusetts, and I'm a news intern here at Amherst Media. My name is Chris McLaughlin. I'm a senior journalism major at UMass Amherst. I'm also pursuing a minor in French and the Five College International Relations Certificate. I am from Belorica, Massachusetts, and I am a reporting intern for the Amherst Weekly Report. My name is Claire Healy. I study political science at UMass Amherst, and Arabic and Spanish as my minors. I'm from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and I am the news anchor for the Amherst Weekly Report. And I use she or her pronouns. So I'm a news intern at Amherst Media, and I work on the Amherst Weekly Report as a field correspondent and also just as a general reporter. Usually every week I go out into the field and I shoot a field report or a news package on an event going on in the community, or I speak with folks out in the community about current events and issues, politics, anything in between, and put that together in a news package. And it rolls out every week with our Amherst Weekly Report Show on Friday. So I'll take on a few stories, and sometimes it's just a matter of writing up a brief that we'll put into the report, or sometimes we'll actually go in depth and reach out to sources and try and get full-length interviews with folks so that we have a better concept of what's going on with a certain issue or a certain event, or even we do profiles sometimes. So if it's a local business or a certain person who's of interest to the community or a local government representative, we'll talk to them and we'll get a better picture of what's going on and how it affects everyone in town. And then on Fridays or Thursdays we film the script, and that's me talking on the show. Anchoring has been such an interesting experience. I studied political science, so I didn't expect to be working in TV journalism my senior year, but it's been an incredible blessing, and I feel like it's really helped me discover more of what I might want to do in the future, more of what I might be good at, and it's been a learning process. I have a lot more appreciation for anyone that speaks on TV, goes on live air. It's definitely not exactly what I expected and took a lot of practice to get to where I am now. So I've definitely connected better to Amherst as a community, although I am a UMass student and I have been in Amherst for quite some time now, it's different being a student on campus versus actually going out into the Amherst community and speaking with the people who live here and the politicians who work here. It really feels like I'm in the middle of everything versus just on campus and I'm going to different restaurants or different stores downtown. I'm actually having one-on-one conversations with its citizens to talk about stories that really matter around here. I think through also reporting, you also kind of get to dive into areas that you normally wouldn't be a part of. So like communities and events and groups who maybe you normally wouldn't necessarily come in contact with through reporting, you can actually see the world through different lenses and it's kind of cool in that respect. I feel connected to the Amherst community because I'm now actively following the news around here and I feel like through this I've started to meet people and build those relationships where someone will share that news with me before I go and search for it. So I feel like I'm starting to become part of the news cycle and know what's happening in a way that I didn't before in the community, in different parts of the community and like I said before that's really just the relationships I've made that have been the highlight and the most fun part of doing this project. Thank you for watching the Amherst Weekly Report at Amherst Media. I'm Claire Healy and we'll see you at the same time next week. How is it? Great job. All set? Yeah. Awesome.