Leadership & Team Building
Copy Editing 101
This was a poster I created with the help of my other senior editors. While being an excellent writer is great, poor grammar and mechanics can heavily lower the quality of your work. Starting out, we knew how hard it can be to remember all the ins and outs of journalistic writing, so we created this poster to give little tips and examples to help our staff be better editors.
Learning to Photoshop
On a regular basis my school uses programs like Adobe InDesign and Illustrator, but one of the tricker programs we use is Photoshop. There are times when we will need a photo to be cut out or a background blurred, but not everyone is proficient with the program. To help staffer be able to learn how to cut out photos, I created this step by step document outlining the tools I use to cut out photos in the easiest way possible.
Goal Setting
Each semester we do individual goal setting as well as somethings that we feel we could work on as a group. This most recent semester, the other editors and I decided that it would be fun to have a group goal corner listing the goals we have as a staff. This is the goal corner I created on one of our main whiteboards so that we can reference the goals we have set for ourselves throughout the semester.
Edit edit edit
I remember distinctly when I first joined staff that the senior editors would stay after school during production week, but no one else would. That year I stayed after as much as I could during production to copy edit every page of our newest issue so that it would be grammatically accurate. It didn't seem significant at the time, but, now that I am a senior editor, I can see how valuable it was to have someone be able to go through the pages while you worked on design.
Exploration into Design
Now more than ever the other senior editors and I have done work to try and improve our staff. Since the pandemic, we found that it was rather difficult to teach and also learn all the tools we need to be great reporters and editors. As a part trying to get out staff more involved with design, we broke up into groups and spent a day teaching our staff how to use InDesign. For those who were already familiar, I had the opportunity to teach them tips and tricks on how to make the design process easier and effective.
Inksmas, Inksgiving and more!
As a part of creating staff comradery, we have parties where everyone brings in food and we all hang out together to celebrate the holidays. For a lot of them we do secret Santa-style gift exchanges, but we will also do thigs like write sticky notes about what we are thankful for for Thanksgiving and bring in an entire potluck for us to eat. I personally bring in baked goods because I love making bread. I think that this is one of the activities that really helps to bring us together as a staff.
The above photo features the 2019-2020 Inklings staff sitting around a table with food and drinks as part of their annual Inksgiving feast.
The IJCL Editor's Handbook
When I first became IJCL Editor, the job wasn't really explained to me and I found that I really struggled at first to find a rhythm that worked for me. At one of our board meetings, I noticed how the other officers had documents and little binders with information to help them in their office. I never received one, so I decided to make one. The link below is to the pdf file I created for future editors to help them learn the ropes.
