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tuftsdaily.com FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 2022

Former Editor-in-Chief Alex Viveros reflects on hardship, joy, community at the Daily

by Abby Stern

Staff Writer

Though many know the saying “jack-of-all-trades, master of none,” when it comes to the Tufts Daily, a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ can be exactly what is needed. When the right kind of hardworking person finds their passion at the right time, mastery comes naturally.

Former Editor-in-Chief Alex Viveros has taken on eight different roles over the course of his four years at the Daily. Now a senior, Viveros looks back on the way he devoted his college life to the paper.

As a pre-med biology and community health student with little writing experience, Viveros signed up for the Daily on a whim his first-year fall. When asked what section he wanted to join, he blurted out “Sports,” since it was the one section of the newspaper he really knew.

Viveros almost quit after his first article when he messed up the due date, leaving him to scramble to write the piece at midnight while also studying for a Bio 13 exam he had the next morning. He remembers thinking at the time, “Oh, my God, I’m never doing this again.”

The next day, however, Viveros went to complete his interviews for the article, and found that the experience of getting to interact with the players and the coach was actually fun. He decided to give the Daily one more shot.

One more shot became two more shots, then three, then four, until Viveros was writing a piece every two weeks. Writing for Sports trained him to write fast and meet tight deadlines. Over the course of his time at the Daily, he would always be thankful for the sports section and the skills it instilled in him.

“I think a lot of people that aren’t in the sports section don’t realize how timely it is,” Viveros said. “I had situations where I had a game one night … and we want to [get it] in the paper for the next morning. So I’d have like an hour to write the entire thing and get all my interviews, which is actually incredible training.”

By spring of his first year, Viveros was promoted to assistant sports editor and was responsible for covering football, women’s basketball and men’s lacrosse. Then, in his sophomore fall, Viveros took on the role of executive sports editor, becoming the only sophomore on the fall 2019 executive board. He credits this as one of his most stressful positions over the course of his four years.

“I had to recruit a lot more people because we came in with … like 10 or less writers,” Viveros said. “For sports, when you’re producing like a bunch of articles a day, that’s not enough. So I was kind of scrambling for a while.”

He eventually made it work, and he soon moved up to the position of managing editor during his sophomore spring. Though stressful at first, Viveros eventually hit his stride, loving the work he was doing and truly finding a home in the Daily office.

“When I was managing editor, I was vibing for a while in the office,” Viveros said. “I actually found that I really liked being in the office and I liked the managing editor’s job. I liked jumping from Arts to Features to Opinion to Sports, and editing, all of that was really rewarding.”

All was well until March 10., when Tufts announced it was closing for the remainder of the semester due to the COVID19 pandemic. Viveros remembers sitting with the Daily staff, watching the news unfold.

“I just remember we were all in the office in shock,” Viveros said. “But it was like all the gears went into motion … we were like, ‘Okay, we need to write about this.’”

With his biology and community health background, writing about COVID-19 fit right into Viveros’ interests. He had been following the news of COVID-19 since January, and Tufts’ closing was like a call to action, encouraging him to inform the public.

He remembers thinking, “This is what I need to do right now in order to process what’s happening. I need to be here in this office writing about infectious disease and stuff. A lot of the things that the CDC was talking about … it made sense to me, so I was like, ‘Okay, I’m built for this. I’m gonna go, go, go.’”

The pandemic showed Viveros that writing was his calling. He could use his words to help people make sense of the world falling apart.

“I just remember sitting at [my] desk … And I was like, ‘This is what I’m meant to do. This is what I need to do right now,’” Viveros said. “It felt like I was doing something when the world was kind of ending.”

When COVID-19 turned the world upside down, it turned the Daily upside down as well. In the hubbub, the position of editorin-chief was left unfilled for the incoming fall semester. Prior to the pandemic, Viveros had had no intention of becoming editor-in-chief. By the end of the spring semester, however, when members of the Daily suggested he fill the role, he decided to take it on.

Throughout summer 2020, Viveros and the other members of the Daily’s managing board worked tirelessly to ensure the newspaper’s survival. Viveros noted that Robert Kaplan, the Daily’s fall 2020 business director, went the extra mile to restructure the Daily’s business side in order to keep the paper afloat.

Viveros calls being editor-inchief “the most stressful thing I ever did in my life and the best thing … I ever did.” In some of the darkest times of the pandemic, running the Daily alongside a devoted managing board and executive board anchored Viveros in something good.

After securing the Daily’s future during the fall, Viveros took a step back to the bare bones of the Daily: writing.

The second semester of his junior year, he worked as a news editor. Viveros was given free reign to write what he wanted, and he credits this time as the most fun he has had at the Daily.

“Honestly, [I] had so much fun just writing about whatever I wanted, breaking stories,” Viveros said. “I was the one that broke that Carm was gonna be gluten-free. I remember the meme pages went crazy and it was so funny.”

Going into senior year, however, it was time to get serious about his own future and the future he wanted for the Daily. After realizing that he wanted a career in writing, he decided to no longer be pre-med and took an internship at Science Magazine in the summer of 2021. There, he saw new ways of running a publication, and as he returned to the Daily as a senior last fall, he brought along new ideas.

Viveros started the science section of the Daily, with the goal of trying out a new way of running a section.

“I started the science section with a different … way of handing in articles, doing pitches, doing edits, stuff like that,”Viveros said. “So, the way we do it at Science is a little bit different than the way the other sections do it. It’s kind of like my little … experiment.”

Viveros also currently wears another hat at the Daily, that of investigative editor, however the details he could share on that front are limited.

“We’re working on stuff that’s more long-form,” Viveros said. “And that is the maximum amount of details I can give about that.”

On top of all of this, Viveros’ crowning achievement at the Daily is the COVID-19 Dashboard, which he calls his “baby.” Started in January 2021, the dashboard keeps track of the total number of cases on campus, informing the public even when the school does not.

“Tufts doesn’t report how many cases happen per day,” Viveros said. “They never have … The only people [who] know this is basically us because we’ve been keeping track of it every single day for like a year.”

It is important to Viveros to mention that, though he loves writing, there is much about the field of journalism that he’d want to change. Viveros has seen through his own background and family the problems that occur without access to information, whether this be through paywalls, educational barriers or language barriers.

“My biggest thing is there’s been this barrier in terms of … who has access to the right information,” Viveros said. “Whether that’s the way scientific journals are written, whether that’s literally access to scientific journals, you have to pay a lot of money to get all those. We ask people to do their own research, but they can’t, because it’s behind a million paywalls.”

Viveros’ time, leadership and passion have helped shape the Daily over the past four years. Though he has set the Daily on a steady path of progress, he remains modest regarding his immense contributions to the paper. He is constantly thankful for the friends he made along the way and the peers that helped him over the course of his college journalism career.

“I’m a link in the chain that will be the Daily … I feel like I held my job as ‘link’ and now it’ll be onto the next person that’ll be an even stronger link,” Viveros said. “I feel like I helped in its natural progression, but … I really want to highlight that it was the people that worked around me.”

COURTESY ALEX VIVEROS

Alex Viveros is pictured.

Features first-year Kaitlyn Wells talks all things Tufts Daily with former Executive Features Editor Amelia Becker

by Kaitlyn Wells

Assistant Features Editor

Senior Amelia Becker is a sociology and economics double major from Norwalk, Conn. The Tufts Daily has been lucky to have her as a veteran contributor, with nearly eight semesters under her belt.

Amelia Becker (AB): I started my freshman fall writing for Features, so I’ve written and edited for Feats all four years, also serving as Feats [executive editor] for one semester. And then I also have done copy [editing] briefly and I worked on The Rewind podcast for one semester doing some audio recording.

Kaitlyn Wells (KW): Features? No way, me too! Well, hopefully the irony is coming through because this is not the first time that we’ve met … as a first-year rookie myself who joined the team last semester, I’m excited to learn more about you and your journey through the Daily. So, were you involved in any type of publication or media outlet before Tufts?

AB: No, this was my first foray into doing any sort of journalism.

KW: Given that there’s a variety of student publications on campus … why did you choose to get started with the Daily?

AB: Freshmen fall, I kind of browsed around and the Daily really stuck out just for the number of options of … how I could get involved. And I think there’s just been some really important pieces of work that have been published through the Daily so I was excited to get more formal journalism experience.

KW: Were there any … aspects that you found challenging when you were new to the Daily, and if so, did those challenges change over time?

AB: Yeah, I am, by nature, a more shy person, so the idea of having to reach out and interview someone is kind of scary, but I also knew that it’d be a good thing for me … even now like four years later, [I have] a bit of nerves every time I’m interviewing someone.

KW: How would you describe the culture of the Daily?

AB: I feel like there’s a lot of really thoughtful people that want to cover what’s happening on campus in an intentional way, but also, people have fun with it. Especially Features, we [joke around a lot] … like the whole thing recently about Pini’s Pizza. We’re like, ‘Oh, my God, someone needs to talk about this’ … it’s a really cool community to be part of.

KW: Definitely. I also really like how the Daily seems to be founded on [a] sense of mutual trust. Everyone trusts each other to take their responsibilities seriously, and because of that trust, we have the leeway to mess around a bit and get playful with things. Personally, I was expecting to face a lot of vetting to join a college newspaper. But that didn’t happen. There’s training, but I really love and appreciate how the Daily is very … embracing of any sort of interest or enthusiasm … and they see involvement as a learning process rather than … you having to prove yourself.

AB: Yeah, for my first article, they were just like, “Go for it,” which is scary at first; I was like, “I don’t know what I’m doing” … but also a lot of fun to learn as you’re going, and with each article, you learn something new.

KW: Speaking of articles, can you recall one or two of your favorite pieces that you’ve worked on?

AB: Well, [the] first article that I wrote was about the proposed [Native American and] Indigenous Studies minor. So I wrote that my freshman fall and it’s been pretty cool to see how the minor itself has evolved over my time here.

KW: That’s awesome … Okay, this is a big one: How has journalism impacted your life?

AB: I think personally, it’s opened my eyes to like a different career path than like I initially expected … I’m not going into journalism after graduation… [but] I’ve thought more so about … writing as something that I want to do and [will] put in whatever career that I go into.

KW: And you were part of The Rewind podcast for a while. How was that experience different from Features and copy editing?

AB: I hadn’t done audio in any capacity, … so getting to see behind the scenes of how that works was a lot of fun. And I think it’s similar to Feats in a lot of ways, like the interview process, but … I feel like your voice comes through a bit more, [both literally and] in style, it can kind of flow a bit more than the structure of a Feats piece.

KW: Let’s imagine the Daily in 10 years time: What do you picture?

AB: I picture, similar [to now] in a lot of ways, a group of students being really excited about what they’re doing, being curious … And I think in the future, it will be cool to still have a physical paper but also, as we’ve started to do, expand into other things like video and audio and whatever the next thing [is] that journalism is diving into.

KW: So you were the Feats exec during the pandemic, do you want to talk more about what that was like?

AB: I think generally [being an executive editor is] a big time commitment but a fun experience. You have to schedule all the content and edit everything and work with a group of people but … [I was] figuring out how to support a group of people through [uncertain times].

KW: And when you were starting out in your Features executive editor role … how were you prepped for that? I’m curious about how the voice of the Daily is passed down to new leadership.

AB: I was a bit apprehensive because I was a sophomore going into the role … so that was a little intimidating. It was also great because I had a lot of people … who had been writing for years before who could kind of help me through the ropes … My [executive editor] before me, Fina, was really great at helping me through.

KW: Do you ever feel the impact of the Daily being financially independent? Does that play into what we do?

AB: Yeah, it’s not something I think about, which is kind of a good thing in that we have the freedom to write whatever we want to write. And so as I’m thinking of things that are interesting on campus, I’m not like, ‘Oh, can we say this?’ We’re able to make those editorial decisions because of that.

KW: Is there anything else you’d like to chat about?

AB: I mean, I love Feats. I am really happy to be part of the section and like, I feel kind of old now. But it’s been fun to see all the various iterations of it and the different people that have come and gone. … It’s also a lot of fun to learn what’s happening on campus. In a way … I feel like it’s easy to kind of be in your own bubble, and so forcing myself out of that a bit to see what’s happening and talk to people is a lot of fun.

KW: I agree. Certainly, being a part of the Daily makes me feel very in the know, not only because we help each other out and discuss ideas for articles, but you kind of walk through the world with your ears open.

AB: Yeah … it’s cool to see how conversations reach a broader audience, and even if it is [a topic] that maybe you’re not as interested [in] or don’t know as much about [it] can then become more accessible to more people.

Kaitlyn Wells and Amelia Becker are pictured.

COURTESY NEAL CHAN

Editor’s note: This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.