Leadership and Team Building
When I first joined The Journal, I knew that I didn’t want to be a writer all three years. I had seen the amazing work my sister and her friends did, and I wanted to emulate that. But I was honestly terrified when I realized how much my reserved personality would be a challenge in leading. Once I became an editor, though, I quickly realized that I was somewhat of a natural leader. Though I am shy, I don’t like to shy away from helping others succeed.
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Leading
At the start of this school year, I didn’t know how I was going to take on being responsible for a staff of 20+ members all the while trying to figure out hybrid learning and how to do so much as contact staffers. The one thing I knew I needed to pass on to every staff member at the beginning of the year was my adviser’s prized mantra: Be great. Implementing this in one of the first lessons has proven itself to be highly effective. With this mantra and the idea of inclusion, The Journal has produced four great print issues given current circumstances.
Family bonding
When I was features editor, my staff consisted of three girls who weren’t extremely close. From the beginning, I knew I had to make us feel like a small family. And the first week of leading them, I planned a hangout at a local coffee shop, swapped numbers, various social medias, and welcomed them with open arms.
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Doing that with the staff now isn’t entirely possible as no more than six people can be seated in one public place, but that has not shied us away from building our small Journal family up. This year, we’ve had small, COVID-safe bonfires and other get togethers. I even created a shared Snapchat story for staffers to get to know one another and learn more about everyone’s everyday lives. I’ve learned that it’s the small things that go a long way- like simply asking everyone about their day.
Bootcamp
When I found out I was going to be EIC, I knew that increasing staff morale was one of my biggest, if not my biggest, goals for the year. With a lot of planning and re-planning, my managing editors and I found three days before the start of the school year to bring parts of the staff together to learn and to bond. Though it did not come without challenges, we were able to bring staffers together who had never even seen each other’s faces before and create connections in various ways. Masked-up and social distanced, we persevered in order to teach the true foundation of journalism.