Flakey staff members common, but easy to combat

It’s 9 p.m. on production night and the issue is still a few hours away from being sent to the printers after hours of layout design, proofreading and writing articles at the last minute to fill space. Exhausted and frustrated, you continue to stare at a backlit computer screen, hunched over the keyboard, wondering what you did so wrong that you ended up in this predicament.

Every college editor's nightmare on production day
by: Laurenjmapp

Though many things can go wrong throughout the course of a single production cycle, there are measures that an editor can take to reduce staff procrastination and the number of late nights stuck in the newsroom.

1. Check in with staff members frequently.

It may seem like you are babysitting at times, but unfortunately as an editor for a college paper you will be doing plenty of this. Oftentimes a staff member will let their other coursework or a big party cloud their memory and they’ll forget to work on an article. By checking in frequently with the entire staff it will help to give everyone a gentle reminder throughout the production cycle.

2. Offer help as needed.

Sometimes – especially for new staff members – an article can seem overwhelming at first, so offering to help to alleviate a writer’s anxiety about a piece. Pointing someone in the right direction of who they should talk to about the construction project on campus can do wonders for the timeliness of an article. Helping to edit while giving reasons for your changes can also improve the quality and turnaround of articles in the future.

3. Withhold big stories from unreliable writers.

If your newspaper is structured as a class then you won’t be able to “fire” lazy staff members who don’t make deadline. While you might not be able to “fire” someone, you can refrain from giving them important stories. After two or three issues of writing about the paving of the faculty parking lot or the new sign placed on the door to the dean’s office, the writer in question should be able to prove that they can submit a story on time.

This can apply to photographers as well. As editor-in-chief at The Mesa Press I often had photographers who would come back with only a handful of unusable shots, or even worse, hadn’t gone to the event that they were supposed to cover. While photographers are hard to find (and many newspaper staffs are lacking in this department) it may be necessary to send those that are unreliable off to boring shoots and pick up the slack yourself if need be.

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