News Editor

Brief Outline

As the editor and section head of the news division of Activate, you are responsible for managing, providing and editing content that will fill the first 3 pages of the newspaper; that is including the front page. You are also responsible for ensuring that the relevant articles have relevant images – a task which must be managed in cooperation with the pictures editor(s).

Meetings

Every Monday night there will be an executive meeting in which issues around managing the paper will be discussed. Secondly, content ideas will be discussed and noted by the content editor on the main content whiteboard. Any contentious or possible problems will be discussed with the team as a whole in this forum.

You are responsible for organising a weekly meeting with your news team. Currently that weekly meeting is scheduled on Tuesday evenings at 6pm, in the Activate office. This seems to work well as it maximises the time that writers have to produce their articles.

Every second Thursday, the Thursday preceding paste-up weekend, the team meets with the editor’s briefly to produce ‘dummies’. Theses are essentially rough ideas of where you would like each story to be placed, which is then discussed and loosely decided upon. Exact times of this meeting change and will be detailed after your appointment by the office manager and/or editor.

Paste-up weekend occurs fortnightly during term time. The cycle below will help clarify how this all fits into place, however at this point realise that paste-up weekend requires more time than you think it does, especially for the first few times as the new team gels together. Essentially however you are called in when you are needed however it is wise and beneficial to your pages that you be there as much as you can be.