I’ve been getting all kinds of feedback this year about how great our paper is. Administrators and faculty alike have been telling us and our advisor how great we’re doing, and on one side it makes me proud and warm inside.
On the other side though I don’t think we’ve been doing so great this semester. We’ve bungled several things, and others we haven’t covered. Since I am one of those people who plans this paper I obviously have a much more connected view of this so I can see it from every level of production. After the paper comes out I don’t need to read it because I’ve touched every article in some sense. I guess it’s just harder for me than most to look at the work I’ve created because I see all of the tiniest flaws in it.
So here’s a list of things our paper needs to do better in the future:
Consolidate control: My idea of spreading out control amongst the page editors failed in a big way. This is because on several pieces in the paper we had too many people thinking they had authority in an area where they might not. At its best this spreading of control resulted in our Gears of War 2 review, which I think was the best example of project planning ever in our paper. At its worst a spread of control created the front page of our Obama issue, which I didn’t think was a very well planned or efficient use of color or space.
Move online: I actually have no critique of this, we just need to do more of it. Andrew and Jesse, our online editors, have done a truly fantastic job that isn’t really recognized by the rest of the staff on the level it should be. Our website is now chock full of stuff. For a concrete example of this, at the beginning of the year we had about three headings on the left side of our page. Now we’ve pretty much doubled that, on only that side. The rest of our online paper still looks pretty much the same, but that is actually due to College Publisher more than us.
Deadlines: I don’t like deadlines, that’s why I don’t enforce them. I’m very quick with writing, so naturally I assume others are, but writing doesn’t work that way. They need to be enforced because with them the whole paper just moves faster and we don’t have to stay as late. I just haven’t found the will or the way to properly enforce them else I would have…. Seriously.
Story ideas: Ever since I stopped forcing a connection with the ASSC our ability to gather news I feel has been severely hampered. The pulses of this campus on an official level come from the Presidents office and the ASSC. That should be the bare minimum that we should have to cover for news to be relevant. Furthermore also due to my spreading out of power the section editors are way too used to having others make up story ideas for them. This has to stop.
Aside from those things actually there’s not much else that I can think that our paper should need to improve. I mean it’s taken me a while but I’ve realized in our paper the only thing that should need to matter is covering our campus. I don’t really care about winning at JACC anymore because I don’t think we’ll be raking in the awards there until JACC allows for more categories in online content, which should be about the same time hell freezes over.
These things aren’t things I’ll have to deal with though. I’ll be leaving these to my successor as I move onto San Francisco State. That person will need to be pretty good, and to flex my ego for a second, it may actually be hard to find someone who was as dedicated as I was. So I guess this is Nick Donofrio Editor In Chief of the Skyline View signing off.