Editing, Leadership and Team Building

Leadership

As the Editor-in-Chief of our newspaper, I am the leader of our publication. I am at the top of the pyramid of staffers, designers, section editors and managing editors, and have to manage all of the 25-odd people below me in some way. I'm sure that description makes it seem like I hold a somewhat tyrannical position - after all, I am the highest authority - but really, that's not at all how I like to lead. My leadership style can be boiled down to two things: Guidance and collaboration.

I strive to guide my staff, rather than to rule them. What exactly this means is complex, but the easiest way to think of it is that I help people figure out their tasks, rather than ordering them around.

This looks a little different for everyone - some people need more writing help, some need to know who to interview, and some just need to be left alone - but generally, you can find me having conversations with writers and editors about the best way to go about whatever it is that they are doing. This is a collaborative process, where we work together to figure out what needs to be done, rather than one in which I tell them exactly what they need to be doing. 

This guidance-oriented mindset has truly helped our publication excel, because when you equip people with the tools they need (be it knowledge of who to interview, how to write a story or anything else), what they produce can truly blow you away. Even if the work isn't 100% ready to go when it's ready for editing, guiding people though the editing process and showing them how they can get better rather than just fixing their mistakes for them allows them to become better writers and better reporters overall.

The principle of guidance extends to my management of our web editors as well: I work with them to come up with tentative dates for things to be published and have a set day of the week for each of them to publish, but I never directly tell them what story to put up on what day. Instead, I work with them to figure out what should go on the web when.

Everything we do as a staff is collaborative in some way- I make sure of it. From editorial discussions, to determining whether or not to take down stories or even what story should go on what print page, all of it evolves from working together. It always takes some wrangling to keep those discussions on track, but I've been able to focus and direct our staff in a productive way, getting the most out of our collaboration.

There is one more thing I've done as a leader that I believe has made our products better: setting our staffers free. This really just means letting writers explore out of our structure and do things on their own, exploring whatever passion they have. One example of this come to mind quickly: one of our writers, after writing a piece on belonging, wanted to find alienated students in our building and to tell their story. Usually, for profiles, we assign specific people to writer about, but in this case, I let her go explore and find a subject on her own. She did, and the result was one of my favorite stories of this year: "Trans student ‘getting the hell out’ of Central."  Allowing our writers the time to explore their passions and take on more ambitious assignments brings us all sorts of interesting and engaging content, from an in-depth piece on chronic absenteeism to a 25-day-long review of every Ryan Gosling movie. I'm proud to encourage these projects, and for them to have been produced under my leadership.

Editing

There are two kinds of editing, in my eyes: simple copy editing, in which AP Style, grammatical and spelling errors are fixed, and the more in-depth type of editing that ensures a story is focused, lean, truthful and fair. The first type of editing is something that pretty much anyone with AP style knowledge can do, but the latter takes much more skill.

Over the past couple of years, I've developed a talent for that second type of editing. Most of what I do in this department is rather simple- rephrasing sentences, cutting paragraphs, reorganizing a story to fit inverted pyramid style. Sometimes, though, a story needs truly major changes, like a new source or a completely different angle. These types of edits are most often done face to face, and involve a deeper discussion of the needs for a story.

There is no good way to show those conversations, but I can give some examples of my other editing work: click on the version history of any of the following links, and looking at the version history (file -> version history) and comment history (text bubble next to the share button) of the doc:

Story 1

Story 2 (This one is a little more complicated to read - I edited while it was being written due to the length, but just look for the changes made in my name)

Dedication to diversity

My dedication to diversity shows primarily in my encouragement of staffers to tell the stories of marginalized people or minorities in our community. Under my leadership, our staff has heard from the less heard about groups in our school and community, be it transgender students, students impacted by ADHD medication shortages or the practices of Naperville minority groups.

We also have a religiously, racially and sexually diverse staff, who bring diverse perspectives to all of our discussions, be they on an editorial, in brainstorming or otherwise.

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