Dear, Diary… A Daily Trojan Day
8:45 a.m. I wake up the sound of my alarm, more abrasive than ever given that I hadn’t gotten home until about 2:15 the night prior.
10:00 a.m. In my first class of the day, I open up Slack, Trello, and Google Drive tabs on my laptop along with my class notes. These tabs stay open from Sunday through Thursday—only after we’ve submitted our last paper of the week so I relievedly command-W them for the weekend. During class, I try to edit as covertly as possible and keep up with the Slack channels that we use to communicate everyday.
11:34 a.m. My class ends about 20 minutes early so I have some extra time to catch up on Daily Trojan duties. I use this time to email the Los Angeles Coffee Festival, requesting media passes for myself and the chief copy editor, Breanna, with whom I share a passion for/dependency on caffeine.
12:31 p.m. The news team channel starts blowing up. We have been reporting on the breaking story regarding the suspension of a number of fraternities over alleged hazing. Phi Sigma Kappa, one of the suspended frats, has just sent us a statement. The next steps are to contact Eddie North-Hager, the media and communications contact for the University, and Interfraternity Council, the parent organization for all the fraternities.
2:00 p.m. In the middle of doing research for my Writing 340 paper on the film “The Post,” I pause to check Trello for stories that are ready to be edited. The lifestyle section, which I directly oversee, must have stories through their first round of edits and ready for edits by managing editors by 2 p.m. every day.
2:16 p.m. I finish editing the stories that are ready on Google docs and send them back to the section editors with suggested edits and comments for them to address. Where are the rest of the stories, though? I Slack message the editors, reminding them that stories must be uploaded by the 2 p.m. deadline and they tell me that there have been some delays with staff writers and their class schedules.
3:04 p.m. The lifestyle editors are struggling to fill three pages of content for the 12-page paper we’re producing today. I tell them that we can make an exception and run a story that should have been uploaded online earlier for timeliness in print instead. Luckily, I’m able to get creative and bend the rules a little bit by pegging the review to the news that the show had just been renewed for another season earlier today.
3:25 p.m. As I sit in my “Censorship and the Law” classroom, waiting for the class to begin, I hop back on Trello and speed-edit a story. No matter how busy I am, I must make time to edit—otherwise stories won’t be ready in a timely manner and nightly production will be greatly delayed.
5:00 p.m. This is when Daily Trojan production officially begins. I march into the newsroom, hazelnut latte in hand and laptop fully charged. I am met with a familiar chorus of voices, gabbing about their days, wondering what they should buy for dinner, and complaining about unreliable writers. The start of production is my favorite part of every night because the newsroom is most packed and highly energetic.
5:30 p.m. Following an announcement from our editor-in-chief Allen, all the editors file into the office adjacent to the newsroom for our daily budget meeting. At these meetings, the managing editors make announcements and give general feedback to their sections while the section editors share the pitches they have budgeted for the next two nights’ papers.
7:41 p.m. After going through rigorous copyediting and being laid out on the page using InDesign, the opinion section is the first of the night to print its proofs. I take a break from conversing with friends and doing homework intermittently to focus on reading and making edits directly on the page.
8:16, 9:22, 9:57 p.m. The remaining sections—lifestyle, sports, and news, respectively—print their proofs for the first time. The page-proofing process, which consists of two rounds of edits and prints, takes each section about an hour after initial prints to complete. From this point on, I begin to feel hopeful that we will leave the newsroom at a reasonable hour, meaning before midnight.
11:43 p.m. Since it’s my night production day, I am in charge of taking all the finished pages from each section, compiling them into a master doc, exporting it as a high quality pdf, and sending the final copy to the printer. I call Gregg, the night production manager at the news publishers company, to tell him that our pages are in and he promises to call me back once he checks them over as he does every night.
11:54 p.m. We’re done for the day! I’m relieved that it’s been a relatively easy day, considering we finished before midnight and didn’t face any problems with the printer. It’s time to sleep and do it all over again tomorrow. And the next day. Five days a week, through the last day of November— but I’m not demoralized, stressed, or worried about it because I’m doing what I love with some pretty amazing co-editors.
