Editing, Leadership, and Team Building
The most valuable part of my involvement in student media is learning to fill leadership roles. It’s a lot of responsibility to edit a yearbook. But the most important thing I strive to get better at every day is leading my classmates with humanity. I try to build not only their skill but their strength, confidence, and excitement in their work.
Staff Culture
Building a staff culture is probably the hardest aspect of leadership and requires patience and experimentation. Each of the three years I’ve served as editor, I’ve felt a noticeable improvement in the staff’s engagement and investment in the program. I think the little things I’ve implemented have, over time, added up. A year or two ago, yearbook felt difficult and sometimes impossible. Today, while I still feel stress and face challenges, I walk out of the class at the end of the period feeling so full of joy, simply because my staff members care about this project as much as I do. And as cheesy as it sounds, that really makes all the difference.
Training
At the start of my junior year, I spent the first month of school teaching three different periods of yearbook important concepts:
Copy Editing
I think many members of our staff find writing to be the most challenging aspect of producing a yearbook. When I receive copy for editing, I strive to provide easily actionable feedback that affirms that students are on the right track.
I provide feedback through Google Docs comments. Some examples are in the PDF files below. After I edit the story, I’ll sit down with the journalist to ask them any questions I might have about their piece, before explaining what I meant by each comment. This dialogue is, of course, the most important part of collaborative editing.
Next: Design