Risha Sinha
Co-Editor-in-Chief, The Lion's Roar
Embedded Files
From laughing through late-night send-ups to racing around Newton to cover a breaking story to meeting some of my closest friends, these past four years working for The Lion's Roar has meant everything to me.
I'm excited to share what I've done and what I've learned along the way.
My Reflection on my time with The Lion's Roar
Print journalism is dying. You know it. I know it. It’s dying a slow, painful death one tweet (sorry, X?) at time. It’s obvious at a local level: my newspaper, The Lion’s Roar, is the only print news source in our 90 thousand person city.
So what am I doing to pump life back into the frail shell of the hallowed fourth estate, that promethean entity responsible for holding together communities with one arm and holding those in power accountable with the other? Making crosswords, of course.
Here’s my logic: a headline about the City Council’s newest ordinance about tobacco isn’t the most exciting to a teenager, even though that ordinance most directly affects them. However, let’s say clue 19 of the beloved crossword redirects to a detail buried within that tobacco ordinance article…then someone may actually read it! — you’ve just got to get creative.
As someone whose artistic ability is limited to color-coding spreadsheets, I would have never expected it, but every aspect of running The Roar is inherently creative.
There’s creativity in team management, wrangling 28 editors and over 50 reporters each issue to produce a paper we’re all proud of. As Editor-in-Chief, I find myself searching for new ways to deal with interpersonal conflict, because Mark Cuban’s guide to running a business doesn’t account for the work stoppage that ensues when a news editor flirts with a graphics manager’s prom date during wellness class. (Turn’s out, the solution is clever scheduling so that the two are separated as much as possible.)
There’s creativity in teaching, editing a rookie reporter’s article harshly enough to uphold our standards and encourage growth, but not so harshly that it hurts their feelings.
There’s creativity in marketing and sales, finding new and unique ways to convince local businesses to buy advertisements so we can pay our printing costs. (Hands-and-knees begging is not the move, but mentioning that we are the only print news source in the city and entirely student-run does help.)
Of course, there’s creativity in the classical sense, writing and formatting pages in engaging and appealing ways. But I’m most creative when I’m covering sensitive topics.
In the months after October 7th, I began an article on how students felt the impact of the war in Gaza. In interviews, some shared the fear they felt for family members in danger in Israel; others shared the fear they felt as victims of Islamophobic incidents. I started to bring tissues, because a lot of times my interviewees would cry, and I couldn’t stop from crying as well. Even when certain stories remained off the record for safety reasons, people still shared their entire experience. I found that students needed an outlet to share their pain, with someone willing to just listen. We focus so heavily on how providing information makes an impact, but that article taught me how gathering information, making people feel heard in their pain, creates an equally important impact.
So, while my article did not take a side, it couldn’t remain objective. I wrote an article driven by the raw emotion I felt during the interviews. In grief, there is no singular truth to report. What I tried to capture was the common, pervasive pain that weighed indiscriminately heavy on everyone, in an effort to bridge the gap between two sides of a polarized issue.
I am immensely proud of that entire article, process and product. I’m also proud of how I handled the aftermath: the reception was mostly positive, but not entirely. Some parents and students were upset with me for broaching such a sensitive topic at all; in the days after the article’s publication my principal was flooded with emails from just a few parents demanding that I issue an apology or that I be suspended. A few students sent me threatening messages on social media. One told me that they hoped I’d be raped so I could experience what hostages experience; another sent me a picture of a box cutter and Swiss Army knife captioned “watch ur back”.
While I heard all the criticism, I stood confident in my work. By that article, I’d edited more than 100 articles and written plenty more. I knew what I had written was not editorial or untrue and that I’d done my due diligence in representing a range of viewpoints, not just the loudest voice on either side. Although I spoke with school admin to make sure I was safe, I never ended up filing a report against those who lashed out.
My goal, naive as it may have been, was to highlight how all sides, everyone touched by the conflict was hurting, and I hoped that exposure to the alternate viewpoint would spark empathy among groups. I’m not sure that goal was entirely achieved. But what I am sure of is that I tried my best. And while some of the criticisms, insults and threats hurt, it confirmed what I learned by interviewing: that everyone was hurting, and everyone deserved the grace to process their pain.
More than anything, that article reinforced what The Roar means to me: a way to serve my community. With The Roar, most of my creativity goes toward problem-solving — but there’s also creativity in being flexible, keeping in mind the end-goal of service and adapting the means of getting there.
Wrapping up this four year journey is a little scary. Nothing has been so all-consuming or taught me as much as The Roar has — I don’t know what I’ll do with myself without it. As I pass the baton to the next staff, I’m confident that The Roar will be for them what it has been for me: a place for growth and a source of purpose.
So what am I doing to pump life back into the frail shell of the hallowed fourth estate, that promethean entity responsible for holding together communities with one arm and holding those in power accountable with the other? Making crosswords, of course.
Here’s my logic: a headline about the City Council’s newest ordinance about tobacco isn’t the most exciting to a teenager, even though that ordinance most directly affects them. However, let’s say clue 19 of the beloved crossword redirects to a detail buried within that tobacco ordinance article…then someone may actually read it! — you’ve just got to get creative.
As someone whose artistic ability is limited to color-coding spreadsheets, I would have never expected it, but every aspect of running The Roar is inherently creative.
There’s creativity in team management, wrangling 28 editors and over 50 reporters each issue to produce a paper we’re all proud of. As Editor-in-Chief, I find myself searching for new ways to deal with interpersonal conflict, because Mark Cuban’s guide to running a business doesn’t account for the work stoppage that ensues when a news editor flirts with a graphics manager’s prom date during wellness class. (Turn’s out, the solution is clever scheduling so that the two are separated as much as possible.)
There’s creativity in teaching, editing a rookie reporter’s article harshly enough to uphold our standards and encourage growth, but not so harshly that it hurts their feelings.
There’s creativity in marketing and sales, finding new and unique ways to convince local businesses to buy advertisements so we can pay our printing costs. (Hands-and-knees begging is not the move, but mentioning that we are the only print news source in the city and entirely student-run does help.)
Of course, there’s creativity in the classical sense, writing and formatting pages in engaging and appealing ways. But I’m most creative when I’m covering sensitive topics.
In the months after October 7th, I began an article on how students felt the impact of the war in Gaza. In interviews, some shared the fear they felt for family members in danger in Israel; others shared the fear they felt as victims of Islamophobic incidents. I started to bring tissues, because a lot of times my interviewees would cry, and I couldn’t stop from crying as well. Even when certain stories remained off the record for safety reasons, people still shared their entire experience. I found that students needed an outlet to share their pain, with someone willing to just listen. We focus so heavily on how providing information makes an impact, but that article taught me how gathering information, making people feel heard in their pain, creates an equally important impact.
So, while my article did not take a side, it couldn’t remain objective. I wrote an article driven by the raw emotion I felt during the interviews. In grief, there is no singular truth to report. What I tried to capture was the common, pervasive pain that weighed indiscriminately heavy on everyone, in an effort to bridge the gap between two sides of a polarized issue.
I am immensely proud of that entire article, process and product. I’m also proud of how I handled the aftermath: the reception was mostly positive, but not entirely. Some parents and students were upset with me for broaching such a sensitive topic at all; in the days after the article’s publication my principal was flooded with emails from just a few parents demanding that I issue an apology or that I be suspended. A few students sent me threatening messages on social media. One told me that they hoped I’d be raped so I could experience what hostages experience; another sent me a picture of a box cutter and Swiss Army knife captioned “watch ur back”.
While I heard all the criticism, I stood confident in my work. By that article, I’d edited more than 100 articles and written plenty more. I knew what I had written was not editorial or untrue and that I’d done my due diligence in representing a range of viewpoints, not just the loudest voice on either side. Although I spoke with school admin to make sure I was safe, I never ended up filing a report against those who lashed out.
My goal, naive as it may have been, was to highlight how all sides, everyone touched by the conflict was hurting, and I hoped that exposure to the alternate viewpoint would spark empathy among groups. I’m not sure that goal was entirely achieved. But what I am sure of is that I tried my best. And while some of the criticisms, insults and threats hurt, it confirmed what I learned by interviewing: that everyone was hurting, and everyone deserved the grace to process their pain.
More than anything, that article reinforced what The Roar means to me: a way to serve my community. With The Roar, most of my creativity goes toward problem-solving — but there’s also creativity in being flexible, keeping in mind the end-goal of service and adapting the means of getting there.
Wrapping up this four year journey is a little scary. Nothing has been so all-consuming or taught me as much as The Roar has — I don’t know what I’ll do with myself without it. As I pass the baton to the next staff, I’m confident that The Roar will be for them what it has been for me: a place for growth and a source of purpose.
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