By Marco Santana, CQS ‘09

It was yet another lesson learned.

My editor at The Associated Press during my internship had given me an assignment.

Unfortunately, the assignment he gave me was not the assignment I heard.

Being in the business of communication, you would think I would know better than to assume I understood the assignment. I should have asked as many questions as it took to make sure I knew what was expected of me.

However, not wanting to appear unworthy of the position, I went to work.

I heard him tell me to get quotes and call certain businesses and organizations to find out how the extremely cold weather had affected them.

In Des Moines, Iowa, temperatures combined with wind chill had reached 30-below zero and lower. It was miserable. Some winter parks and an outdoor ice rink were closed for a couple of days.

The information I put together would be laced into a national story about the extreme cold.

What I didn’t know was that the editor also wanted a story about Iowa’s weather. In hindsight, why wouldn’t he want that? It was only my second week and I had other responsibilities that day but looking back, that’s a normal occurrence with The Associated Press.

All day I did what I was asked to do.

I called the groups and businesses and found out what the editor asked me to find out.

When asked, I walked out in the bitter cold and looked for construction sites.

When asked, I called area homeless shelters to see what their capacity was.

Each time, I put together a few paragraphs and thought I was doing a good job. Each of the submissions was about 100 words.

I was excited. For the first time, my name was going to be on a national story, even if only as a contributor.

That’s when the editor showed me the story. He sent me a message asking me to read the final story and see how it looked.

There, for the most part, were my words, but he had edited them into a complete story. My byline was atop a story that looked familiar, but that I hadn’t put together.

Since I had thought I was only adding to a national story, the information I sent my editor had no structure.

I can only imagine what he thought when this new intern was doing nothing more than sending portions of a story and expecting him to put it together.

Excerpts were taken for the national story and my name was included as a contributor on Web sites based throughout the country and the world.

But the excitement of my first national experience was tempered because all I could think of was how disappointed my editor must have been when this intern couldn’t put a basic weather story together without a lot of help.

It took a day of embarrassment to learn that there is no such thing as too many questions asked if it results in better communication.

It was yet another lesson learned.

Marco Santana is an education reporter for The Register-Mail in Galesburg, Ill. He was a Spring 2009 Chips Quinn Scholar for The Associated Press in Des Moines, Iowa. A journalism graduate of Eastern Illinois University, Santana began as a staff reporter and copy editor, then was sports editor, associate sports editor, editor in chief, campus editor, and arts and entertainment editor for The Daily Eastern News, EIU’s newspaper. He was president of the school’s chapter of the American Copy Editors Society. He has been an intern for the Northwest Herald in Crystal Lake, Ill., and twice at the Daily Herald in the Chicago area.