RYA P o r t f o l i o
N
2020
E s s a y 1
I feel like I didn’t really learn much of anything this semester. My knowledge in InDesign only grew by having to learn how to do everything the long way instead of using all of our old plugins. Deadlines felt the most wishy-washy this semester that they ever have in here. Everything had the longest time to complete it and then it didn’t even matter by the end because no one had done anything. The only time that was different was with the print issue, but even still the editors had to rewrite half the articles in the paper. All the editors work well together. We know each other, we’ve been with each other, it’s a solid unit. Some of us have been in here for 4 years, we know how to work together to get something done. I had a few instances of copy-pasted sections of articles, but it’s an unavoidable part of this being a high school class. People have other work, projects, stuff like that, it’s easier to just take that path. A dull reminder to always reverse search something that seems a little too well written. I don’t really know if there’s a way to gauge how much of an asset I was or wasn’t this semester. We only had one print issue. To be fair, I did help with the majority of InDesign problems with Max, but that’s really it. Editors weren’t really much more than glorified staff writers for the first few months of the online paper; we just had different jobs than them. There’s one very obvious hardship that we all know about, and I won’t dwell on that, we all know that isn’t something positive for anyone. I’m in year 4 in this school’s journalism program, year 3 of being in the newspaper, and if I were ever to declare burnout, it would be now. The print issue sort of took me out of that trance of just going through the motions, but for the online stuff, I couldn’t care less about it. Probably a part of why my grade is for the first time, below 100 percent, which is sort of weird to say about any class. There are five of us editors that have been in the class since freshman year, and I would be willing to bet that they are all near this point too. We can only try to make the last few print issues of the paper as good as possible, to do as much as we can while we’re still here.
I think my most significant work was the global news article about abortions in Poland. Originally I wasn’t incredibly comfortable handling a subject like that, but I knew that I had to do it justice by making the article as unbiased as possible. The first time I wrote it actually became the last time I wrote it; I had done so much thinking about how I wanted to go about saying certain things that it was done and finished the first time through, with only minor grammatical errors to be corrected later on. No content or the organization of said content changed after that first writing. It took me probably a week or two to really get a plan in place as to what I would write about, the different facets of what I could and could not cover in the given space, and other things like that. Getting interviews was actually the hardest part, mostly because teachers and faculty on campus literally could not answer a question not only relating to abortions, but also the religious aspect of it and it being the “correct� choice. Learning to dance around those dangerous subjects is really tough and this was definitely the first time I had to do it with something so volatile. I think it was a solid article; it definitely had some flaws, but overall it was a strong article, at least to me. The writing made sense and followed a logical progression with how things were going in Poland and I thought that was an accomplishment in and of itself.
E s s a y 2
Essay 3 The first article is actually the Polish abortion ban story. I just thought it was a good article, I liked the challenge of writing something difficult, even if it was uncomfortable.
The second one is an opinion piece I wrote while we were online about political parties and our current system. I think it not only was a good article, but helped me to articulate some of the ideas I have in my head that were difficult to put into words before.
The third is another opinion I wrote while we were online about Canvas. Everything I said in there is true, I still stand by it, and I felt like it brought up all of the relevant problems we were/are having with Canvas this year, especially those that pertained to the student side of the program.
What a time to be an editor, right? If I said I liked the online paper, I would be kidding myself. Personally, I hated every second with that thing, especially with FLOW. That entire system is so buggy and will probably take a gap year just to make it more user friendly. The print paper in my opinion is just better. If we were to stay online, I would’ve wanted to just get rid of all titles besides editor in chief. The whole point of a paper is the editors laying out pages and whatnot, and the online one just sort of gets rid of that purpose. I feel like popularity merits respect to an extent; if you’re well liked, people are more likely to listen to you. I don’t really care about the majority of the people in here, but for those few, I’d rather be well liked. I like leadership positions, I don’t find them as challenging as others tend to. Seeing all of your planning come together is nice, but also, it’s still high school. People are busy with other work, or just lazy. The weakest links are sacrificed first. They’re supported by the strong ones, who pick up what they can’t, and the leader is always the one who has to deal with it all. The leader picks up all of the slack that everyone below them (or in this case, in front of them) isn’t able to. When a staff writer fails, the stronger staff pick up that slack. If they can’t, then it falls to the leaders (editors and EIC).
E s s a y 4