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Editing, Leadership, & Team Building
EDITING: FEATURES
As the features managing editor this year, my responsibilities include editing all of the "larger" features for each student. I published over 70 features for 100 writers (as people work with partners), approving each pitch and editing the thefeature articles. I ensure every article meets the standards of our publication: bias-free, concise, and purposeful.
Pitch approval:
Every writer on our staff from both our media arts class for sophomores and our journalism class for juniors and seniors are to write a feature article or collaborate with a partner on a feature. The media arts students work on them on the end of their first semester and journalism students work on their features during September to October. I was responsibility for reviewing all their pitches which they sent through a google forms. These pitches included their desired sources, story angles, and their purpose for writing this article. I reviewed each pitch and gave comments about how to improve their pitch, things to look out for, and recommendations about what to focus on if their angle was too broad or not relevant to our audiences. I firmly believe a strong article starts with a good angle and strong sources, and I made sure all writers started off their story on the right foot.
Feature editor drafts
How our feature process works is writers have multiple deadlines: an editor check in, and editor graded draft, and then a final draft. I assigned each writer an editor for the editor check in and drafts so writers would have someone who would closely edit their article before the final drafts.
It's an expectation that all editors provide thorough feedback at each stage. I provided feedback to my writers during the"Editor draft" stage, the stage before the final draft in our features process.
Editing final drafts
Once all the writers have gotten through the editor draft, they put their final drafts into SNO, the final story along with the multimedia and their elements. I am in charge of editing the final drafts and edit every one of these features in SNO before publishing it onto our site. I check for all possible mechanics errors grammar, style, AP style, and arrange the formatting. I also pay attention to concise wording as I firmly believe conciseness is key to features as they're generally 600-1000 words, but many are longer (as long as 5,000). There are 79 features this year and I edited each one before publication.
I scheduled each feature for publication and allocated the date the feature will be live on Scot Scoop. Before publication, I will edit the features and comb through the article.
EDITING BEAT ARTICLES
For the 2022-2023 school year, I was an editor for Scot Scoop. I check for grammar, ap style, flow, and more to ensure the articles are up to par for our site publication. We communicated through Microsoft teams and text message and once I edited the pieces, I published them onto Scot Scoop. I always aimed to edit all articled within an hour that the writers submitted them to me.
I provide grades to the writers and give them feedback through our Scot Scoop beat rubrics will throughly outline what writers need to improve on as well and work closely with them to improve our staff. I aim to help all my writers grow rather than just changing their work.
Over the 2022-2023 year, I edited and provided feedback for every article. Editing is such an integral apart of journalism to me because I get to help my writers grow through feedback and meetings. I want to help the publication grow as a whole, so although creating individual pieces is exciting, editing is just as important. When I began editing, a huge challenge I faced was over editing, and I realized I had a tendency to even accidentally change the writer's voice. My role was to encourage creativity and unique writing voices, I realized, and not to dull them down. I learned throughout the year how to keep my own writing voice out of my writer's articles, realizing what parts of the articles I should edit, and what I should keep while still making sure it flows in a logical manner with proper AP style, grammar, sourcing, and more.
LEADERSHIP
I am passionate about multimedia integration in feature stories as I feel that it adds another dimension to it. Multimedia, such as audio clips, interactive infographics, and video embeds transform the story into a living, breathing piece. Long article with no breaks between the writing can be dreadful to read, but cutting it up with multimedia enhances the article. This year as the features managing editor, I wanted to encourage people to choose multimedia for their features and I assisted writers with finding the right one for their piece. I presented this presentation to the class so they could figure out which multimedia pieces to utilize for their feature articles.
I also created guidelines which informed writers on how to embed different forms of multimedia. Audio clips aren't utilized as often as I personally believe they should have been on our site so I wanted to create a tutorial so writers can embed them in the future. I also compiled a simple list of effect sites to build infographics on and created simple tutorials on how to use certain sites. In addition, SNO came out with. anew Long Form template and I created a tutorial on how to use it to create a dynamic feature article. I wanted to take an initiative to simplify the process of writers and give instruction so they would be able to proceed through the feature compilation process smoothly.
INNOVATION
The current editor-in-chief and I wanted to redo our Trello pitching process. Before, writers would just pitch on Trello and never return to the pitch, letting the card sit there for ages. The page was soon incredibly cluttered, people still forget their deadlines because viewing the card was never emphasized, and it was often forgotten about because there was a separate column for those who were waiting for approval from their editors. Instead, we revamped the process and decided it would be more efficient if writers pitched directly to their editor's column and the editor utilized the label features. We were inspired by other pitching tools but decided we could still use Trello and instead maximize the efficiency of the site. In addition, we were able to figure out ways to connect our main forms of communication, Teams, to the Trello site so writers would never miss deadlines because they were actually alerted.
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