Student Editing: ‘It’s never personal, it’s all about our product’
By Maris McDonald, East Mecklenburg High School
At Fred T. Foard High School, Yearbook Editor Julia Ferris focuses on the guidance that an editor should provide.
“I think editing and being an editor is all about serving your staff and helping them out,” Ferris said. “You’re not in a power role, you’re in a service role.”
The big goal that all editors have is one thing: they want everyone to be proud of their work. However, getting to that point takes effort from both the writer and editor.
It’s difficult to navigate the relationship between an editor and staff writer, especially because they are not only close in age, but peers as well. Though it can be hard to be tough on your friends, West Brunswick High School newspaper writer Paige Levine keeps a positive attitude about their editing process.
“It’s never personal, it’s all about our product,.” she said.
Their staff finishes their stories in the course of one week, sharing their work in front of the class on Friday — finished story or not.
Even on a tight schedule, editors at West Brunswick’s The West Wind take lengthy precautions to maintain the writer’s voice.
“I never want to restructure someone’s article,” Levine said. “I will sit with someone for an entire period and go through every single sentence before I delete a whole sentence,”
Interestingly enough, Ferris also reports of a particular exercise they do at Fred T. Foard.
“We take a personality test at the beginning of the year to learn each other’s love language,” she said.
Love languages, a concept coined by marriage counselor Dr. Gary Chapman, are different ways a person may express and prefer to experience love. This practice is easily used in platonic settings.
“I know our business manager just loves compliments,” Ferris said., “So I try to keep his morale up with compliments.”
Inter-editor communication is very important to remain cohesive. Nico Jordan, editor of Riverside High School‘s newspaper, values the collaborative effort between writers, editors, photographers and their advisor. They write their editorial as a team, and all writers are welcome to add their ideas to the story. Their editing process includes six rounds of edits.
“First, it usually goes to the section editor, then head editor, and then after that, the teacher. And then we do that twice,” Jordan said.
For Ferris, her preference is to first look at grammar — in her words, the most common mistakes live in grammar, and they’re the easiest to miss.
“There’s always some minor spell check or something that gets overlooked, ” Jordan said.“If you can — if you have time to — check every story.”
Eli Bishop has an inside view of two types of student media outlets as a member of the yearbook and editor-in-chief of Watauga High School’s sports media outlet.
“The yearbook is definitely more structured,” Bishop said. “Just because there’s a structure of the book and it’s supposed to look a certain way. And then in journalism, there’s more of an individualistic aspect to publication. Each person (is) able to have their own style in what they’re putting out.”
Although print and video media differ in the content that is being produced, Bishop keeps similar values when editing.
“Pay attention to the small details, even if your audience isn’t really looking at that. People will, eventually, and then maybe they’ll complain or start talking to other people, which can be degrading to your publication.”
Whether viewed with the idea of being appealing to a crowd or focusing on the writer’s authentic voices, the editing process is where the team should come together to help strengthen a story. There’s no perfect system to copy, but editors should instead try to perfect their own system as a cohesive group.
“Just have a set structure of what you’re looking for (when editing) and make sure that those things are being held up to standard,” Bishop said.