So I’m not the best blogger in the world. Actually, I’ve never really blogged before this exact moment, so sitting down to write this is a little daunting.
First off, I’d like to say, “Hi” to everybody (and anybody) reading this. Thank you for being the kind of reader who spends time on our website, and thank you for choosing this exact blog to read. Hopefully, it won’t be too boring for you.
Second, I’d like to introduce myself: My name’s Kaytlyn Leslie, and I’m the Editor-in-Chief of the Mustang Daily this year. I still get a little bit of a thrill every time I get to say or write that. The Editor-in-Chief.
For somebody who applied to work on the paper last year willing to do anything from fetching coffee to managing a section, it seems like a pretty big deal. I went from having a marginal amount of input as the news editor, to being the final say in pretty much all things editorial. For those of you who don’t know, those of us on the side of the newsroom that generate and write the content you see in the paper call ourselves “editorial,” while the other side of the newsroom is taken up by our advertising staff, cleverly nicknamed, “ads.” I know, we’re geniuses with words.
So in her blog, our managing editor Karlee Prazak explained a little bit about what her job is, and consequently, also described mine as well (if you missed that blog, check it out here). We work together closely to manage the editorial side, helping them to come up with story ideas, checking articles for content, copy editing every night, living in the newsroom from 5 p.m. till we’re done and all around ensuring that the news you receive is of the best quality known to man, or at least to college students.
And sometimes, we make mistakes.
In Tuesday’s paper, we misnamed a person — his name was Petersen, we put Patterson — and that’s a big no-no in journalism. Mistakes do happen, because everyone who works on the paper is only human, despite our best attempts at only hiring super-human employees. But we still strive to NOT have that sort of error, ever
Every article runs through an insanely long process before it ends up on the page. Stories are written and looked over by reporters, submitted to us (or in the case of our Mustang Daily class, submitted to the professor, AND THEN to us), read by a section editor, two copy editors, Karlee and myself. Then the stories are put on the page for laying-out, after which we print the pages and copy edit once again. Once each page has been looked over by four people, it goes back to the section editor, who puts in edits, and is then turned over to Karlee. She reads them one last time to ensure that all edits have been put in properly and passes them on to me. I do a final read-through, checking for design and any obvious errors, before finally submitting them to Cal Poly’s own University Graphic Systems (UGS) for printing.
All in all, each article is read approximately 13 times. And still, small errors will make it through. It is a constant battle to produce a paper that has absolutely no mistakes in it, but we keep on trying. So I hope that all of you who pick up a paper each day, appreciate the amount of work that goes into each and every article that you are reading. Even the sudoku and crosswords (which I know is the real reason many pick up the Daily) are checked before print. Every paper you look at has been painstakingly worked on by multiple people for countless hours, because we all have one goal: To give you the best college newspaper we can. So let us know if something’s not up to par — this is YOUR paper too, and we want to know what we can do to make it better.
I’ve blathered on long enough. If you enjoyed this, make sure to check back each day for a new blog from members of our editorial staff, and learn all about their insights into making the countries only entirely-student run college newspaper. See y’all next week!
🙂