This is the second issue of the semester and we here at The Skyline View are finally settling in to what appears will be our permanent staff for the rest of the semester.

Firstly, I’m proud and happy to say that this is the largest staff The Skyline View has had since it’s creation more then a decade ago, before the turn of the millennium.

If you recall from the last View from Here, I mentioned the changes the state has made to repeatability, preventing students from repeating the same classes. This resulted in our Adviser, Nancy Kaplan-Biegel, having to break Journalism 300 into separate classes to be in line with the new rules.

I mentioned the benefit of the new separation and lightening the load of responsibilities on each student regardless if they are a writer, editor, photographer, illustrator, and so on.

Well, as a result, The Skyline View has more than 15 writers, five section editors, and myself as the Editor in Chief. That may sound like a lot of people, but it’s not enough to cover the whole campus and cover all the events occurring daily on it. We can only do our best this semester as we have done in pass semesters with the limited manpower we have.

Despite this. I still feel proud to have such a large staff this semester. As a long time member of the newspaper,
to be a writer and editor at the same time is not something that a student will find easy, especially if you work and need time for homework and the time needed for an active social life.

Though It may sound easy, trust me when I say that an editing job isn’t easy. It requires you to: assign stories to writers, sometimes writing them yourself when you don’t have enough written for that week, layout your section for print or help manage writers when they encounter problems, and look for stories to assign to writers on a weekly base.
Before you start thinking that being a writer for staff is far easier, don’t.

Writing itself for the different sections requires skill and understanding of the differences between each section. Case in point, news articles are designed to be written and to present the known facts to the reader without any bias but that isn’t true. Sometimes news providers present a bias while they talk about the fact, especially in the case of mainstream media network. But features articles are pretty much colorful and descriptive of the event or people that it’s covering, and thus conveys the mood and environment around the story in a less factual way. This of course is tied to the issue of the morality and ethics, but sadly this small article isn’t enough space to adequately cover the subject.

Writing and understanding the different sections, however, isn’t the only skill that you need as a writer You also need to be able to do appropriate research to gather information and talk to experts and sources for your stories so that the final product presents information on the core idea, theme, or purpose of the story with additional information that the reader will find interesting but also supports the article overall.

So if you’re still interested in learning more you may search the internet for answers or take Journalism 110 on campus next semester to learn more about the Journalism department.

This is a changing moment in time and as the Editor in Chief of the largest staff in The Skyline View’s history, I can only hope eagerly that the program will continue to grow in the future and allow future journalists, editors, illustrators, photographers, business hopefuls or those interested in using the field as a backup position
in their careers to learn and gain experience which will be useful to them in the future.