A Day in the Life of a Student Journalist
For this week’s blog post, I was inspired by our in-class discussion on Thursday, August 30 about “day in the life” style pieces. I realized that I too have a unique perspective to offer about a certain type of student — one who is perpetually exhausted, constantly typing on her MacBook Air and knows more about campus news (not to mention USC scandals) than any average student would ever want. Yes, I’m talking about a student journalist; more specifically, a student editor at the Daily Trojan.
Every morning, the Daily Trojan miraculously appears on newsstands across campus. I would venture to say that most people don’t stop to consider where it came from (did it materialize out of thin air?) or who created it (a team of mythical elves, perhaps?) In reality, it is created daily by a team of 20 student editors who labor away for upward of 40 hours a week in a hallowed newsroom on the fourth floor of the Student Union building.
As the associate managing editor, and as mentioned in last week’s blog post, I am endlessly proud to be surrounded by a team of fiercely passionate and hardworking colleagues who hardly rest, seldom complain and never cease to bring journalism of the highest quality to our campus.
Every Sunday through Thursday, I log onto Trello (an online task-tracking platform) and edit stories for the night’s production set to run in the next day’s paper. The section editors for editorial, lifestyle, sports, and news must hit deadlines for uploading stories for further edits by senior editors. The other managing editors and I edit every story on Google docs for AP style, grammar, accuracy, clarity, and overall writing quality.
At 5 p.m., after hours of editing throughout the day, production officially starts in STU 421. Section editors address our edits and send the articles off to the copy editors who are in charge of fact-checking every sentence and making further stylistic adjustments. During this time, we hold a budget meeting for all the sections to share what stories they have running for the next two days to make sure everyone has enough content to fill all the pages in their section every night. For the rest of the night, editors work on laying out pages on InDesign and plugging in edited text, adding photos or illustrations, and writing headlines, captions, and decks. The laid out proofs they produce are printed on 11x17 inch paper (which emulates the tabloid size in print) and go through two rounds of written page edits by the managing editors, again checking for quality, style, and layout cleanliness. After page edits are done, section editors are then tasked with preparing all the text to be uploaded online and composing captions for when the stories are shared on social media the next day. We managing editors then place all the pages onto a master PDF which is sent to our partner printer, New Publishers Press, who distribute the day’s issue across campus early the next morning.
On a good night, we’re out of the newsroom by midnight. When there are deadline stories, supplements, or breaking news, however, we are no strangers to staying in the newsroom until well after 2 a.m. Our record was 4 a.m. when producing the Fall 2017 “Power and Privilege” special issue.
I sometimes question why I took this job. It comes with a punishing sleep schedule and involves sitting hunched over my laptop or over layout proofs for hours every night. I don’t have time to see many of my friends except on weekends and it’s often difficult to complete homework while in an environment as raucous and distractingly busy as the DT newsroom. I am dependent on coffee yet eternally under-caffeinated.
But I’m no sadist. I do it because I truly love the paper and believe in the service we provide. I do it because I get to work with some of my best friends and the most talented people I know every single night — it doesn’t even feel like work most of the time. I do it because I am passionate about writing and journalism and value every chance I have to practice and perfect my craft. I do it because there is no way I would rather spend my time and I love seeing the product we labored over the next morning shining on newsstands. I do it because I love that I have a say in all the information that gets disseminated daily across campus and I love being more informed than the average student.
In fact, as I finish writing this post, it is just after 1 a.m. and I am sitting in the newsroom with the editor-in-chief and other managing editors, putting the final touches on our special issue for USC’s football season opener against UNLV. Trust me when I say: No campus organization works harder than student journalists. I am so proud to be one.
