Describe any academic, professional, and/or extracurricular experiences that qualify you to lead the University Press.
It’s been less than five months since I arrived at the University Press. In that time, I’ve gone from staff writer to film critic to assistant entertainment editor, while at the same time writing several cover, news, and entertainment stories. The UP has given me my first experience with published articles, but being editor wouldn’t be my first time serving as a leader.
The summer before my senior year in high school, I was elected band captain by the band director and his assistants. Two weeks before school started, the director told me he was leaving our school for another job. I had to blindly lead the band into a marching season with a new director no one liked, and I had to teach the director everything about our band. Serving as the go-between for the students and the instructors was a challenging experience and one that helped me learn how to resolve conflicts. I see a similar situation right now at the UP. The paper has lost its leader, and whoever becomes editor now will have to worry about making a lot of people happy at once and take care of several financial and staff-related problems. It’s not an ideal situation, but I’m not afraid of it.
Before I joined the UP staff, I thought I could just graduate from college with no tangible work experience and immediately land a job as a Sun-Sentinel film critic. Oh, how little I knew. After coming to the UP, not only did I find out getting a decent job is impossible without good clips, but I also eventually learned that I don’t really want to be a film critic. I now prefer writing news stories, which I’d always thought were terribly boring before.
The UP has taught me, in just a few months, what I really want out of my future career, and, of course, that decision will probably change again before I graduate, but that’s what I love about the paper: it’s a safe place to play with your skills and find your path before you’re thrown into the dreaded “real world.”
Describe a major strength and a major weakness of the University Press.
The UP‘s greatest strength is its core of extremely dedicated, hard-working staffers who will go to any length to get things done. These people stay up all night and all but move into the UP office on weekends in order to get each issue finished. The newspaper office is a career-launching operation- clueless students wander aimlessly through its door and, sometimes within a matter of minutes, realize what they want to do with the rest of their lives. They get to spend a couple years honing their writing, designing, and editing skills and those staffers who stick around and really care about the UP are the future of journalism. Because of their time spent here, they will eventually go on to well-paying, rewarding careers.
Unfortunately, there are just as many people whose hearts aren’t truly in it, and they are the paper’s biggest weakness. They may work here to pass time, goof off and find drinking buddies, or just have something to put on their resume. Their lack of commitment to better writing and designing brings down the paper, as we’re only as strong as our weakest link. Along these same lines, the UP has become a place where those with friends in high places can get away with whatever they want. Many people in the office are friends with upper management staffers, and thus, their deadlines aren’t as strictly enforced. These staff members who aren’t using their time wisely wait until their deadline is an hour away, ask the editor for more time, and then end up staying up all night writing rushed, poor-quality stories and forcing the designers to create layouts with no pictures because they didn’t have enough time. When the stories come in late, the copyediting is late, the art is late, and so on. One person not doing his/her job initiates a domino effect that diminishes the quality of our paper and undermines the whole point of working at the UP, which is to produce impressive clips and land good jobs.
Describe the most important goal you want to accomplish as editor.
My primary goal as editor is to make the UP‘s writing great. I believe people have been focusing too much on how the paper looks. Yes, the attractiveness of the issue is what gets a student to pick it up and look through it, but what gets them reading and keeps them reading week after week is the quality of the articles. I want to focus on improving our writing by doing workshops, by inviting professors from our English and Communication departments to speak at staff meetings, and by thoroughly discussing each story in detail, as well as how it could be improved, at every meeting. I would also like to look into having writing contests, which would be judged by a panel of FAU journalism authorities and hopefully some professional journalists. Meanwhile, the paper’s design needs to keep on improving as well, but I predict that by upholding interim editor Dan Cregan’s tradition of strict, early deadlines, the design team will have the time it needs to make every issue visually stunning.
As editor, what measures will you take to ensure that deadlines, both internal and to the printer, are met?
Missing deadlines is one of the UP‘s biggest problems. Little by little, writers and editors have been slacking to the point where many people don’t even know what their deadline is anymore. I think the answer is establishing earlier deadlines than we currently have, and accepting no excuses for tardiness. If a story or section is late, it gets cut. Eventually, people will start to respect the importance of meeting deadlines and the paper can function more smoothly.
As editor, I would ask that all section editors email me the Thursday before each issue comes out and inform me of what articles will be appearing in that issue. Then I would make a list of all the stories and send them out to each editor so everyone can know what other sections are doing. If a story is going to be late, the editor can tell me in that email so I can decide if his/her excuse if valid enough to grant an extension. Obviously, if there were late-breaking, significant news, I would try to print a story about it as quickly as possible, and if someone had a death in the family or other tragedy, I would certainly allow that person some extra time.
I would also like to have each week’s cover story done a few days ahead of time so we’re not scrambling at the last minute to get everything done, and I would ask the sports and entertainment editors to provide me with an evergreen cover story that we could have on hold for emergencies.
Preferably, everything (including layout and art) would be done by the Friday before the issue goes to print. I don’t want designers and copyeditors living in the UP office on weekends rushing to finish the issue.
Finally, I would resurrect deadline charts and make sure they are put all over the office. This will help new people understand our system and serve as a constant reminder to everyone. I would really like to integrate sections more so people can help each other improve. If everyone works together, every issue can be well-done and complete with plenty of time to get to the Boca News for printing. As editor, how will you recruit and retain a qualified staff of editors, writers, designers, and photographers?
My first order of business would be to visit other campus governors to establish a relationship and recruit new staffers. I would try to have one open house each month on a different campus to introduce new students to our paper, as well as hosting a Breezeway Day on the Boca campus at least twice a month.
When new people come into the office, I want staff members to welcome them and make them feel comfortable. After discussing with them what section(s) they are interested in, I (or that section’s editor) would give them a small assignment to do right away so they’ll feel their skills are needed and want to come back. For example, Dave Ellis and I take turns writing a “Top 5 Flicks” mini-article each week. These pieces aren’t difficult to write, but they fill up space in our section, and they would be a fun thing for an incoming writer to play with.
Money is, unfortunately, an essential motivating tool for retaining staffers. I would rather people work here out of love for journalism and the opportunity to find a good job after they graduate, but nonetheless, their UP paychecks keep them happy. I know there has been some discontentment with staff salaries, but it would be difficult to raise them at the moment because of the UP‘s budget difficulties. I would continue to pay staffers as fairly as possible and hope that they get satisfaction from their work, not just their paychecks.
Since the change from newspaper format to tabloid format a few years ago, the cover art has been a showcase for the center spread, and only by looking at the table of contents would you see what else is inside. I like the current format, but I think we should highlight a few other big stories on the cover, like magazines do. It wouldn’t have to be anything big and fancy – just a couple of headlines and their corresponding page numbers placed in a corner of the cover page. I feel that seeing one’s story mentioned on the front page would make him feel like he is really contributing to the paper and will encourage him to continue to write.
I’m also a firm believer in the value of praise. It seems like the only thing staffers hear about sometimes are the things they’re doing wrong. Personally, I feel much more motivated when I am told that I’m doing well, so as editor, I would create a weekly mass email in which Koretzky, section editors, and/or I would make everyone aware of two or three staff members who accomplished something in the last issue, such as beating one’s deadline, writing a really good lead, designing a great cover, etc. It’s a small thing, but it could mean a lot to those people who don’t think their efforts are being acknowledged or appreciated.
