IU student produces special as CourtTV intern

Juliet Reichman has craved a career in advertising for as long as she can remember.\n"When I was seven years old I used to play ad agency with my friends," she said. "We didn't even know what advertising was, so I'm not exactly sure how the game went, but I remember having a lot of fun with it."\nReichman, a junior majoring in Telecommunications with a focus in industry and management, was given a chance to make her game of improvisation a reality this past summer. After a series of interviews over the phone and in-person, Reichman was offered a position as a paid intern at CourtTV in the Ad Sales Marketing department, where she eventually was able to produce a 30-minute television special that will be broadcasted on national television and on the CourtTV Web site.\nThe interns were given the task of producing a project to showcase their abilities in advertising. As a group they were allowed to choose any topic they wanted to represent themselves and eventually perform it at the close of their summer.\nWhen the interns began to work on their project, their first mission was choosing a theme.\nAs a group, they decided to do a spoof on the "Weekend Update" segment of "Saturday Night Live," which they called "CourtTV, After Hours."\nThe interns handled every aspect of the show, including writing, directing, editing, marketing, graphics, research and on-the-air talent. Reichman said working with all of these aspects gave her an incomparable experience that will help her in her career path.\nThe interns were split up into groups and given one of five segments to work on. \n"I worked on 'Top Stories', which made fun of the CourtTV cases that are sometimes extremely out of the ordinary," Reichman said.\nThe project was professionally polished and taped in the actual CourtTV studio and is available for viewing on the CourtTV Web site at www.courttv.com.\nAlthough it may be the most glamorous part of her internship, Reichman had other responsibilities during her internship which was from June through early August.\nReichman started out doing tedious task work. She spent a large amount of time in the "dub center," where she pulled specific tapes of CourtTV for clients, made copies of them and eventually sent them to the prospective business. \nAfter a few solid weeks of hard work, once she began to feel comfortable with her responsibilities, Reichman took on many of her boss's duties in the office.\n"The other CourtTV offices began to e-mail me for new premiums instead of my supervisor and I actually felt like I was working independently at a real job," she said. \nCourtTV boasts an extremely structured internship program. Each week, a head of a department spoke to all 35 interns at a meeting held specifically for them. To apply for a CourtTV internship, log on to www.courttv.com/about/careers/internships.html.\nReichman said she has learned so much about herself through the internship and she has confirmed her desire to pursue a career in advertising.\n"I felt the ad sales department received a lot of respect from the rest of the company," she said. "Since ad sales gains most of the revenue to support CourtTV, I really got to experience some of the most important aspects of the company."\n-- Contact staff writer Lindsay Kaplan at lkaplan@indiana.edu.