Leadership/Team Building
As editor-in-chief, I lead meetings, check in with my fellow staffers on a daily basis and help out my peers whenever they need it. I also work very closely with our adviser. I have loved holding this position.
I have always promoted the idea of asking questions because I never want anyone to be scared to talk to me. I am happy to help.
While we were working on our first issue, there was some drama. When we finished the magazine and sent it to print, I wanted to address the frustrations I had, but I wanted to do it the right way. With the help of the book "How to Win Friends and Influence People" I decided that I would have a meeting that would allow us as a group to reflect on the past issue. I wanted everyone to get a chance to speak and share what we did well and did not do well. We talked about what we wanted to do in the next issue.
After we had a successful conversation, I felt able to share what I needed in a respectful way. It really helped us to improve as a team and feel like we all had a say. I have inserted photos of the pages of my Quill journal. This was where I wrote down what I wanted to say and wrote down our reflections.
We did a reflection just like that one after our second issue. But this time, I did not have a lot of frustrations. We learned from our first issue.
This year, we decided to break up the Quill into categories to better organize it and create a more well-rounded publication. Our categories are Around Glendale, In the Community, Sports and Lifestyle. We try to keep a fairly even number of articles in each category. At meetings, I assign writers, photographers and designers to each story. The assigning is based off of interest and keeping the workload fairly even among members. Below is the table of contents from our winter 2018 issue. This helps us to ensure that our coverage reflects the school and community. Additionally, it allows each staff member to be involved in many aspects of the publication and diversify the work they do.
