http://hsji.org Hosted at the Indiana University School of Journalism Wed, 21 Jul 2010 20:36:24 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 http://hsji.org/student-work/always-an-editor/ http://hsji.org/student-work/always-an-editor/#comments Fri, 15 Jan 2010 23:47:02 +0000 Matt Bettonville, St. Louis University High School http://hsji.org/?p=796 "I hope it’s not your life, but you’ll find that you’re always an editor."

These were words of both warning and expectation that I heard from my newspaper adviser before this year as editor in chief of the my high school’s student newspaper. I found them to be true in more ways than I expected.

HSJI addressed the issue of always being an editor in the context of seeing stories in everything. We learned to see trends or milestones in each award or assembly at school. We learned to look at the kid who seems to do nothing extracurricularly and notice the three younger siblings he or she cares for each day after school or the part time jobs he or she held. We learned to take every daily conversation and see potential story angles.

One day I threw a baseball around with some friends during a free period, then walked back inside my school sweaty and disheveled and ran straight into our Dean of Students.

"I guess the Prep News is a mess today," he said of my appearance. I laughed about it with him and we struck up a conversation (it’s every editor’s job to be best friends with the Dean of Students).

But this is a just a small example of another way that an editor is always an editor. Just as much as an editor has to associate everything in his or her own life with the job, he or she also carries all the associations that accompany the paper. An editor and his or her newspaper reflect upon each other at all times. If the driving force behind a newspaper is sloppy, the paper itself is seen as sloppy. They are implicitly perceived as intertwined.

And concurrently, they absolutely must be separate. HSJI brought a stern warning not to dedicate all of one’s time to a newspaper because an editor has to get around and have a feel for school events. One of my newspaper’s section editors spent all of his free time in our newspaper office studying, working, and even eating lunch. When an editorial debate came regarding the student response to a new school program called the Jazz Diversity Series, he was clueless.

An editor cannot comment on a school without being a part of it. An editor has to stay social and active outside of the newspaper. An editor has to stay immersed in student opinion or he risks both innaccuracy from his or her own biases and a loss of credibility from an "ivory tower" perception by his classmates.

Ultimately, an editor is always an editor. As long as he or she is part of the newspaper (and probably for several months of withdrawal afterward), it will not leave him or her. But at the same time, an editor has to be more than just an editor. In whatever context, high school or the world, an editor has to be a citizen within his or her subject.

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