Editing, Leadership, & Team Building
Editorial Cartoon by Cheska Orias depicts Shane's editor-in-chief qualities.
Defining Editing,
Leadership & Team Building
Throughout my time working with the newspaper staff, I have learned to give feedback to my peers on their articles through our peer-editing sessions. I developed an eye to see what the reporter is trying to convey in their articles and guide them with journalism strategies. I've learned to provide support when my peers are struggling and to frequently check up on them to let them know that even though I hold a high position as an editor-in-chief, and with four years of experience, I still see and treat my peers as equals and learn from them. I hope they learn from me as well.
Demonstrating Editing
Constant editing and countless revision is always required to produce our quarterly school newspaper. Each student submits their articles and layout their images and align columns, titles, and spacing. Just with one Indesign program, I made the corrections online. We repeat the process until there are no mistakes. I check the file once more and sent to the printers for review.
Much to my adviser and my surprise, the second edition we submitted to the printers during my senior year was accepted on our first submission.
Laying out the second quarter edition in the Indesign program.
Demonstrating Leadership
Accountabilty
Every day for the last three quarters, I have been making sure that each Instagram and Facebook post for The Pinion is posted. Every time each reporter finishes the post, I check the post to make sure that it looks good and will go though my adviser to make any more corrections to the post before finally posting it.
In this photo, I am discussing with the editorial board to decide which articles should be printed for publication in our school’s newspaper that we hand out to students. We want the articles in our newspaper to be something worth reading, yet some students wrote things that we felt was not of quality to publish. Instead of letting the decision rest upon myself, I had a few members of the editorial board to contribute to our decision-making. This way, I can share responsibility with my team and let them have a bigger role and an avenue to lend their voices in the decision making process.
Accepting Responsibility
During my four years in journalism, my staff and I faced many problems from story shortages and incomplete articles and design programs failing at the last minute. In my junior year, the day we sent the final file to print, we found out that all fonts, images and photos were pixelated.
The free layout design program “Lucidpress” that we used for the last two and half years had failed us. We tried every possible method to have the application corrected. There was no option but to recreate the entire paper on the “InDesign” program. I had to take the initiative to take the computer with the InDesign program home and start from scratch. From the time I got home that late afternoon until six in the morning I worked on The Pinion. New to the Indesign program, I set up two computers side by side and googled tutorials to implement the design elements I needed as I created the layout. I finished at 5:00 am and sent the file to my adviser. I was relieved to find that there were just a few edits to be corrected.
During my senior year, I also experienced working all hours of the night to edit the final draft file on the Indesign program that I purchased.
I had to deal with my staff being the typical high school reporters who procrastinate. I was empathic with their performance as I too was one of the procrastinators who finished my article at the last minute. The staff was still editing on hard copy the day before the deadline. Twelve hours prior to the deadline, with a hardcopy with the edits at hand, I carefully corrected mistakes on Indesign. The file was sent to the printers and on the very first try, there were no corrections reported. My adviser and I couldn't believe it. Having the first submission to the printers without errors had never happened before in my advisers’ time teaching in this school.
Demonstrating Team Building
The beginning of the year is always tense for many students: they join a new class, particularly Newswriting, and meet new classmates. Each year, staffers come and go, but I remained all four years. Because I had more experience and I held the position as the editor-in-chief of the school newspaper, it was important that I step up and serve as a role model for the students who are new to the field of student journalism. This photo shows me teaching the class about the different types of stories and introducing them to the format of writing news articles (lede, quote, transition, quote). By taking the initiative to lead the class from Day 1, not only did I gain the trust of my peers and serve as a role model, I also honed the ability to effectively teach and slowly “level up” my classmates so they have more confidence to do well in the class and be successful beyond the classroom, as newswriting is one of the best ways to improve your writing skills. So it’s a win-win-win: I get to teach others, promote a friendly learning environment, and learn what it means to be a leader.
An important part of being a team is making sure that everyone has some sort of knowledge about who each member in the team is, both as a person and as a team member. The picture shown here is me hanging out with staff members during a work party. From spending time with my team, I learned their character. This demonstrates quality in team building because I get to know them both inside of class and outside. This also helps to gain their trust as both the editor-in-chief and as a student like them.
On a group project such as designing the school newspaper, it is important to delegate tasks so that each member of the team lends a hand in the group project and that the project does not rely on one person. Moreover, it is imperative that the person delegating tasks knows what is happening at each step of the process, which requires frequent checkins to make sure each member is doing their part. In the photo, I am listening to one of my reporters share what they want to do during the quarter and I always listen first to see what they are thinking. This demonstrates quality in team building because this will help the reporters gain trust in me as both the editor-in-chief and as a student who wants to help them. With the undivided attention, this helps me to guide them on their weaknesses and help them when they are stuck on a problem.