Photography Presentations
I have given photography presentations to our staff intermittently during the first semester in order to show them the basic features of our DSLR. For many students, this is the first DSLR they have ever seen or held, so I spend a lot of time working one-on-one on them in addition to giving these presentations.
Photography Manual
I wrote this manual up this year to help staff members know exactly what settings to use in specific situations, and how to change those settings. The goal is that staff members should be able to take photos without the aid of a manual or guide by the end of the year, but this manual acts as a crutch or emergency save as they are learning the ropes or encounter sudden problems.
InDesign Tutorials
I made these videos in my junior year to help our staff get accustomed to layout, as first-year staff members generally work on our spring print issue as their first print issue. This helped streamline the layout process because there were no standardization or format questions, and helped ease the steep learning curve of InDesign because students had a resource customized to the Ghostwriter that could be repeated or paused at any time.
Feature Print Issue
When our editorial board attended a conference by New York Times correspondent Monica Davey about finding compelling stories in our community by looking from the outside in, we collectively decided to focus our winter print edition on the single issue of student stress at Westford Academy. As Editor-in-Chief, it was my job to make sure our original vision of exploring this story from fresh angles and shedding a new light on what many students and faculty thought was an over-discussed issue.
Since we had many freshmen working on the issue, I faced difficulties maintaining this complexity while also giving assignments that first-year staff writers could complete. In the end, we ended up making a lot of editor-freshman pairs, when previously the only double bylines we published were investigative and long-form. I had to coordinate advertising, layout, and editing, which were all par for the course, but this edition in particular required a flexible mindset and the ability to zoom into the details of each article as well as zoom out and make sure our original vision was being retained. In regards to the details, I had to coordinate the photography of various "stock photos" that represented an issue (e.g. "poor sleep schedules") with the student's face and identity diminished so that the image was more universal. I had to make cuts to remove redundant articles, chart the flow of the paper, and in general deal with the many obstacles that come with a feature issue, our very first in the Ghostwriter's history. All in all, our staff pulled together to pull off something incredible, and I think that the stress issue had a much greater impact on our community than our traditional print edition would have.
Since we had many freshmen working on the issue, I faced difficulties maintaining this complexity while also giving assignments that first-year staff writers could complete. In the end, we ended up making a lot of editor-freshman pairs, when previously the only double bylines we published were investigative and long-form. I had to coordinate advertising, layout, and editing, which were all par for the course, but this edition in particular required a flexible mindset and the ability to zoom into the details of each article as well as zoom out and make sure our original vision was being retained. In regards to the details, I had to coordinate the photography of various "stock photos" that represented an issue (e.g. "poor sleep schedules") with the student's face and identity diminished so that the image was more universal. I had to make cuts to remove redundant articles, chart the flow of the paper, and in general deal with the many obstacles that come with a feature issue, our very first in the Ghostwriter's history. All in all, our staff pulled together to pull off something incredible, and I think that the stress issue had a much greater impact on our community than our traditional print edition would have.