Editing, leadership & team building
Good culture is vital to our success as a student-led publication and requires active effort to establish and maintain. At the Southerner, I have worked to create a culture of trust and collaboration.
UGA GRADY ON INSTAGRAM
At the Georgia Scholastic Press Association fall conference, I worked with co-editors Fairlie Mercer and Zelda Lerner to decide which issue to submit for our critiques.
Collaboration
Collaboration is vital to every step of the journalism process. At the highest level, we work together as a staff to pitch different stories that cover a wide variety of subjects. I also often work directly with others to co-write stories. Especially when I'm covering a very important or controversial issue, it's helpful to have multiple writers to expand the sources and perspectives for the story.
I work as one of six editors-in-chief, and we've worked hard to maintain open communication and trust. I've been adamant about consistent phone call meetings and regular texts, and this has prevented a lot of the animosity that's built between editors in years past.
My co-editors have become some of my best friends, and I'm constantly learning from them and asking them for advice.
Election coverage
By the time the 2024 election came around, I had already published a story each on the Trump and Harris campaigns and attended several election events, so I was comfortable reporting on politics and able to use that experience to help lead the Election Day coverage.
To effectively cover the election, we needed a large team of reporters to spread out around the city and cover different polling places and events. We planned out the stories and assigned reporters for each location, then had a zoom call the night before to finalize details and explain everything to the team. We had folders in our shared Drive for photos and interview transcripts and worked together throughout the day to produce three stories.
ELECTION PLANNING
We created this spreadsheet to plan our team's election coverage, focusing on polling locations in our school's zone. We paired new staff members with more experienced editors to create balanced teams and promote collaboration across grades.
ELECTION REPORTING
This photo shows Lifestyle Associate Managing Editor Mariam Darb and I reporting at a polling location on Election Day. We have worked together on several stories, including the story about the Syrian regime, the feature on Jimmy Carter and more.
We paired more senior editors with writers and section editors, which provided newer writers the opportunity to get out in the field and report for major political stories that they otherwise wouldn't get the chance to cover.
This year, we experienced a disconnect between first-year staffers and upperclassmen, so we used the election as an opportunity to promote collaboration across grades and give the first-years more hands-on reporting experience.
We took the three interested sophomores to different polling locations to work on the Election Day update story, and that experience helped all three of them be promoted to section editor and become some of the most skilled reporters and productive members of our staff.
Design
Page design is the other main place we collaborate as a staff. Editors-in-chief choose which stories to run, then everyone gets to work building pages. Each person in our staff has a section they primarily work on and we collaborate to sketch out the pages, design them in Adobe, edit them for grammatical and visual errors and get them approved by our adviser.
During my sophomore year, I was assigned to work on page seven with Fairlie and Abby Hyken, one of our editors-in-chief. Abby helped us get comfortable with InDesign and the Southerner style guide, and after a few months, we were able to design the pages ourselves from start to finish, leaving her open to focus on the doubletruck, front page and other comment pages.
Halfway through junior year, I shifted my focus to designing color pages. Each month, I work with design teams to come up with an idea, then we collaborate with photographers and artists to make our vision come to life. I oversee the creation of all black and white pages in my class, effectively delegating so I can focus on making standout color pages.
Co-writing
I love to collaborate directly on stories. When I'm writing breaking news, in-depth news or stories on controversial issues, I find it very helpful to work with another writer. Our shared perspectives help eliminate bias and expand the scope of the story. I've also co-written stories with sophomores, giving them more opportunities and helping them learn.
SHARED BYLINES
This is only a fraction of the stories I've collaborated on during my time in high school. Co-authoring stories is a fun way to collaborate with my peers and empower younger writers with reporting skills and confidence.
Mentoring
In addition to organizing one on one editing sessions with sophomore writers and upperclassmen, I've written stories with several younger writers, giving them a taste for my in-depth style and helping them win awards young. Last year, I took a sophomore writer to the "Hands Off" protest in New York City, and she was able to interview protestors and climb up on scaffolding to take photos, a level of on-the-ground reporting she'd never done before.
Lara captured this poignant image of protestors walking toward the march in the rain, an incredible achievement for a first-year staffer. My goal as a mentor is always to give younger writers the hands-on opportunities that I didn't start having until months into my junior year.
Paying attention to school stuff (weekly schedules, announcements, posters, conversations and complaints, Ms. Boyd Yondr H2H
Importance of attending events in person to get the vibe and talk to as many people as possible (election and serious stuff)
Deep internet research for stories (students should stay home when sick, )
Sierra Pape
Former Editor-in-Chief
"Audrey was incredibly dedicated to the success of the Southerner’s election coverage and put an immense amount of energy into covering events and community opinion."
Mariam Darb
News Managing Editor, Social Media Managing Editor
"Audrey puts 110% in every single task and story she does. Whether it’s something as simple as doing a first edit on a page or being out in the field reporting, you will always see her dedicated to making sure the Southerner is to its best standard."
Stella St. Clair
Former Multimedia Managing Editor
“Audrey thrives when working on collaborative projects because of her incredible communication skills and her willingness to help her peers.”
GSPA
I've presented at the Georgia Scholastic Press Association twice, once in Fall 2024 and once Spring 2025. My first presentation taught students about comment writing, while my second shared my unique strategies for collaborative in depth news, as well as tips for safely attending and successfully covering political rallies and protests.
I love presenting at GSPA because it allows me to expand my leadership beyond my own newsroom, empowering journalists from around the state with the skills to cover their hometowns.
GSPA PRESENTATION
During the spring GSPA conference, I taught students from around the state of Georgia about political reporting, sharing my guide for safe, effective on-the-ground reporting and
Editing
Our stories go through a cycle of three edits, with printed or sensitive stories getting a fourth edit from our adviser. As editor-in-chief, I often complete the final edit on around 12 stories per cycle.
I always start my edits by scanning to make sure the story is opinionated and effectively uses evidence. Opinion writing is very unique and sometimes requires more guidance to make sure the story is in the correct style, especially for writers who primarily focus on reported stories.
INTEGRATING OPINION
Rather than writing an opinion about the benefits of online shopping or the cultural losses from the end of mall culture, this writer extensively researched the transition from mall shopping to online retail and wrote an informative essay. She had a strong base of information and relevant local examples to build an opinion onto, but at that time, the story was unusable. I worked with her to edit each paragraph until she had a solid comment story about why the shift from in-person shopping to digital retail is beneficial to our community. This not only brought that one story back to being usable, it also taught her how to write an effective comment piece that puts the opinon first.
Once I have worked with the writer to make sure the story is written correctly as a comment, I edit it for grammar and style. It's easy for writers to make AP Style mistakes, so I make sure to check everything against my knowledge of AP Style and research anything I'm unsure about. I also rewrite anything I can to improve clarity and streamline the message.
EDITS FOR CLARITY AND AP STYLE
I edit stories to fix AP Style errors and make them easier to understand. The most common issues I find with AP Style are misformatted dates and street addresses. I also sometimes suggest additional sources or points for a story if it's a topic I'm familiar with. In the above screenshot, I suggested that the writer add a link from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations explaining the influence of food wast on climate change.