Editing, Leadership & Team Building
As Editor-in-Chief for Eagle Nation Online, my first priority is the staff. Making sure they feel welcome and comfortable in the newsroom is so important to me and for the newspaper to thrive. From the beginning of the year, I've made sure to get to know everyone on staff and interact with them on a daily basis to make sure they know they can come to me if they ever need anything for either the newspaper or even outside of our program. I've noticed that showcasing an open personality to the staff and really being myself has allowed others to trust me and lead alongside me in the newsroom. I've found this to be effective, and I've seen a lot of growth in our staff since the start of the school year. I make it a priority that my teammates know they can rely on me to guide them.
My Leadership Approach
As the Editor-in-chief of Eagle Nation Online, I want to make sure that the staff sees me as a friend but also someone who can guide them through our newspaper program. From the beginning, I knew I wanted my staff to know that I will be their biggest supporter on the newspaper. As a leader in the newspaper, it can get busy, and deadlines are a priority, but being genuine and building connections with my staff is important. Taking time out of each class to talk to all the tables has shown a difference in our publishing. Staff members are not only more willing to jump on a new assignment, but they learn to see how important the newspaper means to the editorial board, and that passion for the newspaper expands.
At the beginning of each week, I make sure to post our weekly pitch meeting form as a way to start the week and brainstorm for the following weeks. I also talk to the class every day and go over the daily schedule to make sure everyone is on the same page and we get everything sorted out. I know this can get repetitive and boring for our staff, so I make sure to add fun questions and quick team bonding moments like doing a quick poll or asking them what their favorite song is – these pitch meeting questions always create an uplifting and fun environment in the newsroom.
Besides finding ways to get the staff laughing, I also prioritize leading the newspaper to its success. At the beginning of the year I share a variety of lessons I created through presentations. I make sure to show them all at the beginning of the year, but I also go over them 1 on 1 with members of our staff. This year, the majority of our staff was new to journalism, so teaching them all the ins and outs of every single writing style was a challenge. Going over AP style slideshows, and articles online got repetitive so I decided to make all of this learning fun through our AP style tip of the day in our group chat.
Through hands-on learning and working 1 on 1 with each staff member, I've noticed effective results in our paper. During the first semester we had at least 5 freshman get their first Best of SNO for their first article, and I was so proud of their hard work because all of the learning has paid off for them. As Editor-in-Chief, I want to continue creating an environment where the staff feels welcome and the passion for our paper builds in order to create a positive and impactful platform for our community.
The Whiteboard
The whiteboard is our main source of scheduling and communicating new ideas. I update the board on a daily basis to make sure we fulfill our goal of publishing every day. I also have the next two weeks on there, so everyone on staff can schedule their pieces further out. I've found the whiteboard to be the most efficient when it comes to getting people to commit to the schedule and having it visually in front of us every day helps minimize the chaos.
Google chat!
On our newspaper, we use Google Chat to communicate all types of things from daily announcements, editing tips, to upcoming team bonding activities and celebrating our staff.
Editing & Sharing information!
*Note* Click on each gallery for full view
Celebrating teammates!
Editing
Editing every single article that goes up in the newspaper is one of my first priorities and a big part of my job. The first thing I do every day is edit the pieces that are publishing and make sure they are ready to go for the date they are scheduled to publish.
Pitch Meeting
In order to keep track of everything that the staff is working on, I post the pitch meeting at the start of each week. The form allows the staff to tell me what they're working on, pitch ideas, and let me know if they have any questions or concerns. After I give everyone a chance to fill out the form, the editors and I hold a meeting for the first few minutes of class to go over what's publishing that week, pitch ideas to staff members, and solve any ongoing conflicts. Not only has this form turned out to be beneficial for scheduling, and pitching ideas but its also been good for team building when we talk about the 'fun' questions during class.
Presentations
I created this presentation at the beginning of the year to introduce the newspaper to our new staff members and give a little refresher to our returning staff. I also included a caption mini-lesson to kick off the start of our summer boot camp. I think this presentation was a success after I recieved positive feedback from staff members. I noticed it helped kick off the year smoothly.
My sophomore year I had the opportunity to serve as the feature editor for ENO. With this, I knew I needed to find a way to teach the staff how to write features efficiently. I created this presentation to use while helping out teammates, showing it to the class, and even to this day I use it whenever I teach a new staff member or I send it out to google chat to review feature writing.
At the beginning of the year, I noticed that our team was getting confused about what publication was the first priority, and all kinds of concerns came about, so I decided to address this issue through this presentation because both of our publications are equally important to the newspaper program.
I noticed that this year we struggled a lot with remembering headline rules, so I wanted to help our our staff so we can all master these rules and grow as copy editors and headline writers. I also created this presentation because its a good resource to send out from time to time, and give out to new staff members that join throughout the year.
Team Building
Team building is an important aspect of our newspaper - not only does it help us come together but it strengthens our paper's quality. While leading the class, I make sure to incorporate fun and engaging activities to make sure it's not just a cycle of working and publishing.
For example, I like to add a 'fun section' in the pitch meeting form in order to kick of the week in a positive note. I love hearing my teammates laugh and discuss their responses and it definitely brings a fun vibe to our news room. Another way is we have holiday party's and boot camp at the end of summer.
We also like to use google chat to wish everyone a happy birthday, celebrate contest results, and just recognize all of our teammates.
1) Celebrating teammates through google chat
2) Holiday Party's & Team outings
Packing food with ENO Staff (Grace Bridge).
ILPC spring convention 2023. During our break, the staff and I went to Pizza Press near the UT Austin campus.
Annual Christmas party with ENO (2024).
Exploring Austin with ENO staff before the 2024 ILPC spring convention.
Morning spent volunteering with ENO.
SNO Badges
Achieving all of our SNO badges as soon as possible was my #1 goal at the start of the school year. I started planning at the beginning of the summer where I would meet with my adviser, and editorial board members every Saturday at the school. I created a calendar to make sure we had a schedule set in place and we set up a chart with how we're going to achieve all of them. I wanted our newspaper to be the first in the nation, and although we ended up getting second I am proud of our hard work because it took every single staff member to give it their all in order to achieve the distinguished site award. Looking back at it, i'm proud of all of us and i'm glad that we still ended up being one of the top newspapers to get the badges. This is definitely a very hard process and it takes a lot of work and effort from all staff members, and I know I did everything I could to make our newspaper as successful as possible alongside my team.
I'm so proud of our staffs work not only with the badges, but with the way everyone's writing has grown so much the past few months. Most importantly watching the underclassmen quickly gain recognition through their best of SNO's, and watching the sophomores and juniors finding their way as leaders in the classroom makes me proud of our newspaper and our dynamics.
Below, Eagle Nation Online can be seen as the second newspaper to recieve "Distinguished Site" on Oct. 15, 2024
