Editing, Leadership, & Teambuilding as a co-editor-in-chief
After adopting the position of editor-in-chief of The Muse, the publication became my lifestyle. My days have been consumed by journalism, and I LOVE it. As the editor-in-chief, I lead a 62 person staff. My main goal as I went into this role was to balance amazing journalism with prioritizing the mental health of the staff. Click the tab above to see my leadership as a coverage editor.
My vision and plans as EIC
Before taking on the role of EIC, I created this presentation to plan out how I would act in this role. My main plan from this vision was making sure I keep a positive attitude and facilitate organization through managing the editors that will then manage their staffers.
One of the changes I made on staff was to change the role of Content Team Editors to be more hands-on in their approach to checking on their team. I wanted to require that they were there for their staffers and had everything organized. This support system is essential for when deadlines are piling up. This is an example of a team using the document I require CTEs to complete every class.
The All-Staff
Our publication is split across three different periods, so the all staff meeting, our weekly staff meeting in the media center, is essential for communication. At these meetings, we present an agenda with lessons and reminders. Frequently, we also give time for communication, especially from writers and photographers to the design section, but we noticed that this unstructured time wasn't always being used correctly.
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Therefore, before deadlines in our print issues, we began to use a document to ensure communication took place. Then, to keep that level of productivity at the center of these meetings, we created a required Google form for staffers to fill out.
I created the all staff collaboration document in the hope it would encourage communication with designers about deadlines and vision.
This form often yields results that either encourage us to change our plans for the all staff or assist a staffer who says they are struggling.
These were my plans for all staff agendas from over the summer! By scheduling different necessary meeting types, we efficiently planned our year of collaboration.
Organization as EIC
This is my personal to do list! I keep myself organized for general muse work and things I should be doing in each period based on who and what I've noticed struggling.
After our weekly MICE (managing editors and editors in chief) meeting, I send out a text to-do list to our groupchat so we can have common goals for the upcoming week and meet those goals.
Honestly, the hardest part about being EIC is rallying everybody. These are texts I sent to the editor groupchat when we had a major upcoming FSPA deadline during our hurricane days off and needed to proof.
Class Time
Every week, me or my co-EIC makes an agenda for class time. We read this agenda at the beginning of all class periods to give people reminders and set the stage for both the fun and productive aspects of the publication.
Here is an example of an agenda I made. Each week, I try to incorporate three things: 1. Encouraging exercises that help people learn about both web and print, 2. Time for staffers to do their work in class, and 3. Fun games and bonding so that staffers feel like they have a bond and that they are happy to come to class.
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This week, we discussed signing up to give the survey to English classes, a reminder to take data collection for our print stories seriously. We also discussed our web contest, our motivator for people to post articles with social media promotion (whichever team gets the most story views gets Crumbl cookies). Then, I added a winning photo gallery exemplar to show my staff how descriptive just photos and captions could be. I also used the pre draft presentation I made for the design section so that they were on the right path in their print designs. At the end of the week, we have our "Fun Fridays".
More about Fun Fridays and staff motivation
As you can see on the agenda above, each week, our staff participates in Fun Fridays! This includes staff shoutouts, where the staff can write thank you notes to others and they get read aloud at the end of the week. This serves as a great source of validation and motivation for staffers who want to be recognized for a positive attitude or a great work ethic. We also do a live current events quiz with the class (incentivized by candy, of course) which helps encourage news literacy. Then, we play some kind of team-building game!
Our Halloween pumpkin painting contest!
This was our most recent fun Friday game, a marshmallow tower building competition! I love to add these contests to the agenda because they make teams and sections collaborate, helping them bond and building camaraderie.
