Student editors enjoy a rare and privileged role that combines leadership and journalism. You’re guiding a journalistic enterprise that serves your school community, and you’re doing it by leading a staff of schoolmates. Big responsibility, especially considering it might be your first real leadership opportunity.
Poynter teaches leadership seminars to professional journalists to help them lead their newsroom staffs. One of the instructors is Butch Ward, former managing editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, who shared the thoughts below in a recent column, reminding editors that their experience as storytellers can be helpful in their new role as newsroom leaders:
Actually, a lot. Remember the elements of great narrative storytelling?
Character. Emotion. Scene. Action. Tension. Plot. Dialogue. Meaning.
Sounds like a day in an editor’s chair to me.
- To bring a character
alive, a reporter needs to be able to discover that character’s
essence: What makes her tick? Ask a good leader what it takes to
motivate someone effectively, and you’ll hear about searching for what
makes the staffer tick.
- Then there’s dialogue. Good reporters capture conversations, not just quotes. Good leaders engage in real conversations, not just monologues.
- And what about meaning?
The best stories help me understand something. They leave me knowing
why I read them. The best leaders help me discover why my work matters
–- its meaning and what difference it makes.
Butch Ward offers this tip, drawing on your skills as a writer: Organize for “story.”
the first stories you ever heard? For many of us, they were fairy
tales. Remember how they began: “Once upon a time …” And how they ended
(most of the time): “They lived happily ever after.”
leaders do the same thing. They take us (willingly!) from a clear
starting point toward a conclusion we can envision and feel good about.
of the work you’re doing with your staff as a story in progress. Do you
and your staff share a common understanding of your story’s
“beginning?”
I‘ve taken the questions Ward suggests editors ask themselves and modified them for you. Ask yourself:
- What expectations does your adviser have? Are they clear to you?
- Have you, in turn, clearly explained to your staff your expectations of them?
- Do they know what you think of their current level of performance? Do you know what they think of yours?
these questions allows you and your staff to begin your journey in the
same place. Inaccurate assumptions are minimized; time wasted on
confusion is avoided.
Now, Ward suggests, imagine how your story will end. For example: “We will be the most credible and relied-upon source for understanding the events in our school community.” Ward concludes:
words like “credible,” “understanding” and “our community” can help
your vision come alive. These are words that can help you flesh out a
strategy and then measure your success.
Now you and your staff
know where you are and where you’re going. Your challenge is to lead
them from “Once upon a time” to “happily ever after.”
Together, we can write our “story.”
