Yes, I do sit up late at night with my red pen reviewing articles and coming up with new story ideas. I constantly drink caffeine to stay awake after the long hours of layouts and prep. I walk around campus being nosy, trying to find the last story, but I’m not just that.
Being a newspaper editor is not just a multitude of grammar checks and revisions and deadlines. It’s so much more than the stereotype in which is portrayed most of the time. I believe my job is much more than that, I am teaching the next line of journalists what journalism is all about.
The imaginary light bulbs that flash above your head when you discover a new story or have that moment of clarity after writer’s block, that is what my job is – helping my writers feel that. To feel the accomplishment of going after a story with everything you have and getting that incredibly revealing line from an expected interviewee, there is nothing like it.
On any given day, the first thing I do is to check my emails. I always have staff emailing me the latest edit or my bosses approving a story idea – my day cannot start until I have an idea of where it is going to go and every day is different. After reading articles, proofreading and designing layouts, I then usually work on my own stories. Just as I encourage my staff to be a journalist, I have to live what I preach.
Being a newspaper editor is not always whipping out my red pen but sometimes it is. I spend hour’s every day looking through articles, blurbs, making sure names aren’t spelled wrong and that my writer isn’t being biased while talking about certain topics. It’s hard, I am not going to lie and it’s a lot of work, but it is worth it.
Like I said, I often sit up late at night going over articles pointing out all the errors, but more likely I’m kicking myself for not teaching them better. My job is to teach; to teach ethics and compassion; to teach the way of seeing a story like only journalists do – with such intensity that it feels like you are physically pulled into the thick of the story.
My job is to not be my writer’s cheerleader, but to encourage them to believe in their words as much as I do. I want to bring confidence to new and aspiring journalists that might not have been there before and to watch them write the stories of the future – that is my job.
