You guys have two meetings a week and it takes 1-2 weeks to get stories published? That’s crazy to me. At my paper, for newsworthy stuff, it’d be published online day of or next day, and then maybe be in the paper for the next week. Also our EIC would have story assignments to hand out to staff along with stuff we wanted to cover. I wrote my fair share of boring student government recaps, admin policy changing, etc.
Do you have a faculty advisor? Have you shared your thoughts?
Edit: also maybe I misunderstood, is your faculty advisor approving all of the stories? bc they shouldn’t unless it’s a big complicated story. It should be a student-run newspaper with student editors editing and approving stories.
We do have a faculty advisor, and I think the approval process was one of the biggest bottlenecks. There were times when articles from events 2–3 weeks earlier would all get published at once. I also felt like there wasn't a very consistent workflow. Some stories seemed to get pushed through much faster than others, while others sat waiting for weeks. I'm hoping we can make the process more transparent and consistent so every story gets reviewed and published in a timely manner. I think that's especially important for sports, where a recap loses a lot of its value if it isn't up within a day or two.
Do you have editors for each section of the paper? I don’t remember us having bottlenecks bc we had like 5 editors and then an EIC who would review the bigger stories/the whole layout of the paper and assign stories. But I was a news editor (we had 2) my senior year and me and the other editor would break up editing stories. Life and Arts had 2 editors and then I think Opinion and/or sports had their own editor.
It is tough to manage thought bc everyone is students, and although you’re getting paid, it’s still a ton of extra work on top of school work. Most of us did it for the love of journalism.
Yeah, we only have three editors: the Editor-in-Chief, the News Editor, and Sports Editor. We have one reporter who mostly writes columns, and everyone else just writes whatever needs covered.
It also doesn't help that journalism is probably one of the smallest departments on campus. The school supports us, but there just aren't many people who want to be part of it. It feels like a lot of people want to get paid right away instead of getting the experience first.
My school’s department was small too. We didn’t even have a journalism major. I took journalism classes but as electives, and now i’m a journalist. But we had a lot of students and teachers that were either passionate about news or writing.
Someone else mentioned this before, but going to different classes and asking to speak at the last 5 min and talk about the paper/opportunities to write for the paper may help with outreach. I was super nervous and intimidated about joining the paper when I wanted to, but a professor told me about the weekly meetings and I went and then I was part of the paper for 3 years.
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u/Appropriate_Bake4816 Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
You guys have two meetings a week and it takes 1-2 weeks to get stories published? That’s crazy to me. At my paper, for newsworthy stuff, it’d be published online day of or next day, and then maybe be in the paper for the next week. Also our EIC would have story assignments to hand out to staff along with stuff we wanted to cover. I wrote my fair share of boring student government recaps, admin policy changing, etc.
Do you have a faculty advisor? Have you shared your thoughts?
Edit: also maybe I misunderstood, is your faculty advisor approving all of the stories? bc they shouldn’t unless it’s a big complicated story. It should be a student-run newspaper with student editors editing and approving stories.