If there’s one thing that I have to explain to people it’s what I do as the full-time managing editor of a student newspaper. Partly, because people have assumptions and partly because it’s a job that’s constantly evolving.
When I started working at The Dialog in the spring of 2012, besides myself as the sole full-time managing editor there were four part-time student staff reporters. That was the entire staff of a student newspaper at a major college in Ontario with 24,000 students.
The reporters would file their stories, and I would do everything else. From copy-editing, to layout, to writing editorials, to managing advertising and other business work, to the dirty job distributing the paper over five campuses in downtown Toronto.
It was way too much work for one person and while I think we did an okay job with the resources we had, the quality of the newspaper wasn’t as good as it could be. Shoot, we didn’t even have a website.
Today, after a couple of years of working with the management and board of the Student Association to re-invest in the newspaper, The Dialog has expanded to have 10 part-time student staff, including reporters, an assistant editor, an art director, a photo/video editor and an advertising sales representative.
We now produce more content and have seen our readership triple in print and our website and social media generates thousands more pageviews each month.
We have won national awards for excellence in student journalism and Peter Kuitenbrouwer, a senior writer for the National Post, recently said we publish “a really nice newspaper.”
As the student staff of the paper has increased, I have been able to work with the students to empower them to run the editorial side of their student newspaper.
While it is useful to have some experienced permanent staff, especially in a college environment where most students graduate in two years time, a student newspaper should be written by students for students.
Now I split my time between mentoring student journalists and doing the administrative and technical work needed to run a biweekly newspaper.
In addition to my work at The Dialog, full disclosure, part of my job is also doing some communications work for the Student Association.
What this means, I don’t dictate what our student journalists write, that’s their job. I help talk them through the process, outlining what some options are and giving my advice, but what they write is ultimately up to them.
The students come up with the story ideas and pitch them at our weekly story meetings, which our student assistant editor runs. What I do is work with them to make sure that what they’re writing about is well-researched, gives a voice to the many sides of an issue, and meets journalistic standards.
The students also set the official editorial positions of the newspaper. Every issue we discuss the upcoming paper’s editorial together coming to an agreement on a subject that one of the students then writes the unsigned editorial.
Probably the biggest part of my job is working to help build a team of student journalists that will take control of their student newspaper and write about the issues that their fellow students want to know about.
I think that we’ve done a pretty great job of doing just that over the past couple of years and that the student staff have has totally reinvented The Dialog, taking it from something that very few people picked up to a popular student newspaper that is widely read by students at George Brown College.
I can’t wait to see what they do next.
