Training & Communication.
A huge part of leadership and team building is grooming younger journalists and training Editorial Board members for the many challenges high school journalism can pose, all while building an open system of communication.
Staff Training
Here are a few of the training endeavors I’ve organized:
Summer workshops — the entire staff met twice during the summer. With workshop instructor David Knight (pictured right), we learned professional interviewing skills and practiced writing personal columns. With journalist and author Bobby Hawthorne, we looked at page designs that worked really well and refined our news and feature writing skills.
Q+A with Northwestern Medill professor — As editor-in-chief, I had been receiving many questions about journalism in college and beyond — questions I didn’t have all the answers for. To reconcile this, I reached out to Medill’s Professor Everette Dennis to speak to our staff (ZOOM recording available left).
JEA/NSPA National High School Journalism Convention — senior leaders attended this convention Nov. 10-13 in St. Louis (pictured right), hearing from renowned journalists, attending informative sessions and meeting like-minded high school journalists.
Efficient communication is key to being a good leader and a good editor-in-chief. Our primary medium of communication is Microsoft Teams, but I’ll also send out messages to a staff GroupMe or to a section-editor specific group text for more pressing matters. Here’s a compilation of messages — with various purposes — I’ve sent to my team:
