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 News Associate Managing Editor Zelda Lerner and Comment Section Editor Fairlie Mercer 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.
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 make a run list, which is a document listing which stories are going on each page, 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.
This year, I have collaborated with new staffers Ayan Amin, Oliver Grosse, Kai Chen, Daniel Hyken, Colin Kovac and Henry Eckersly on comment design, helping them become independent and confident in their design skills. Now, I find myself leaning on them to help me finish comment while I work on the doubletruck and front page.
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.
SHARED BYLINES
This is only a fraction of the stories I've collaborated on in the past year. Co-authoring stories is a fun way to collaborate with my peers and a good way to improve story quality.
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
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 Associate 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
Multimedia Managing Editor
“Audrey thrives when working on collaborative projects because of her incredible communication skills and her willingness to help her peers.”
GSPA
In October, Fairlie and I presented at the Georgia Scholastic Press Association to teach student journalists around the state about comment writing.
Comment writing is very different from reported stories, and we saw Southerner writers who mainly focus on other sections struggling to correctly use evidence and support their points in opinion stories.
In our presentation, we explained our process for generating pitch ideas, researching strong evidence, using compelling reasoning and pushing stories to the finish line.
GSPA PITCHES
We ran a mock pitch meeting in our presentation and were impressed to see some really creative opinions surrounding local issues and the upcoming election. Afterwards, we gave the students glazed donuts for their participation.
Throughout the presentation, students took notes and asked clarifying questions. Afterwards, several attendees stayed to ask individual questions and get assistance starting their comment journeys.
GSPA PRESENTATION
During our 40 minute-long session, students learned about the entire process for producing comment stories, from drafting ideas to writing captions. They were very engaged and asked questions specific to their experience.
Editing
Our stories go through a cycle of three edits, with printed or sensitive stories getting a fourth edit from our adviser. As comment associate managing editor, I split the second edits for comment stories with comment managing editor Henry Moye.
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.