Editing, Leadership,and Team Building
As part of their efforts to encourage school spirit, The Spectrum editorial staff all participated in the theme of pajama day.
Copyediting
As Editor-in-Chief, I focused a lot on improving our quality of writing. One way I focused on this was copyediting, focusing on both the page's design and the article's content. This was especially important because we didn't have a dedicated copy editor. Here is an example of a page I copyedited as Editor Emeritus. I used my notation style for most of it, which made most of the pages look like my books in English class. I use a lot of margin notations to make note of what doesn't make sense or to go beyond the basic copy editing notation.
Leadership: MNHSPA Fall Convention Presentation
My presentation, "Creating a Remarkable Research Routine," from the Fall 2024 MNHSPA Fall Convention.
After coming back from the Free Spirit Conference, Kathryn Campbell reached out to me and asked me to present on something I learned at the Minnesota High School Press Association Fall Convention. I was struggling to think of just one topic when I thought of a piece of advice that Chuck Todd told us about research: “Go three inches deep to go one inch deep for the audience.” I realized that I could talk about research, especially because I had just gone through two radically different research processes for the two articles I wrote the previous cycle. The presentation wound up being a great test of my flexibility because the A/V didn’t work and they had to wheel in a TV halfway through the presentation. This meant that I had to do the first part without my slideshow. I made friends with some of the kids from my presentation and I still talk to them to this day.
Editorial Leadership: Pivoting From Fake Interviews
This was the most challenging experience I had as editor-in-chief. We had gone through a long cycle that extended over Thanksgiving break, and several pages were being worked on up until the export day, including that month’s food page. As one of the managing editors and I looked at the finished page for the first time, we noticed that some quotes seemed a little unrealistic. I was friends with one of the students he quoted, so I texted him about it and he said that he never said it. I instantly realized that we had to change the page radically. However, I had to go through this specific issue without my co-editor-in-chief, who had just left for an off-campus choir rehearsal. I sent two editors down to get some new interviews for the article while I talked to the writer. I then realized that this was one of the scenarios when I had to get my adviser involved because I needed to focus on exporting the paper since we still had other issues to resolve.
Editorial Leadership: Israel-Hamas War
Page 8 of The Spectrum's Dec. 6, 2024 issue was part of the double truck feature on the Israel-Hamas War and featured Zacks' timeline.
At the end of October 2023, I felt like the community wasn’t talking about the Israel-Hamas War, which created an environment where students were afraid of repercussions for what they would say in class. Working with the other news editors, we decided that the best way to cover the war was to ask community members how they thought we should discuss the conflict. Because we’re a newspaper, I felt a responsibility to adhere to our mission and inform our readers and provide a forum for opinions. I continued to push for this coverage the next month, leading to a full in-depth spread on the war and how students were talking about it. I spent hours working on the spread with my adviser and the leadership team. When I became a leader for the next issue, I continued to push for our coverage of the war, this time through the lens of the Claudine Gay resignation.
Leadership Testimonials from Editors
Leadership: Weekend Meeting and Middle Lunch
Our staff meetings always take place over lunch, and since we have a split lunch, this means that all the editors eat lunch together in a block we call middle lunch. It’s a time for us to bond as an editorial staff outside of the newsroom, and it gives everyone a chance to learn a little more about the other editors. Our other bonding time outside of the newsroom is our weekend meetings. Instead of having a more traditional export day where we spend hours after school editing pages, we go to a location off-site (usually a coffee shop or grocery store) and do our edits there. It’s another chance to learn more about the rest of the editorial staff outside the newsroom.
The editorial staff from Spring 2023 enjoys the last middle lunch of the year.