“How come applicants ask whether they can work from home two days a week during their first interview? You want to be a journalist, don’t you? Then you have to be at the university, where it all happens,” a fellow editor in chief remarked during a meeting of ‘the Higher Education Media Circle’. We were talking about working from home. Someone wanted to know what the standard is (most editorial teams allow one day of working from home, at most, including Observant). The unanimous view was that it is healthy and beneficial, after all, to be around each other, and the people you are writing for.
Last Monday, editor of the week Deborah Blekkenhorst was just as anxious as I was about whether we would have enough to fill the paper – enough news articles, columns (one of our columnists had recently said goodbye to UM but had promised one last piece, what if he forgot...), and particularly, a centre spread? There is usually some ‘larger’ scientific article or background story for page 6-7, but now I felt we had a gap.
Riki Janssen, fellow editor and former editor in chief (who faced this same issue for years), had worked on an interview with a final-year student and wondered why we couldn’t just use her article for the centre spread. “Sometimes you have to lower the bar a little, or you’ll never make it,” was her advice. But still, it’s a story about one student, moreover, one of the three we will be following throughout the year, I argued.
By the end of the afternoon, after a few more conversations and some time for the idea to marinate, I was convinced. The article gives an insight into the life of a third-year Global Studies student, which many students will recognise. Problem solved. But what about the front page? We didn’t really have a good picture or any ideas for an illustration. After some collaborative brainstorming, we decide to go for a typographical creation.
Paul Onkenhout, a journalist retiring from De Volkskrant, recently wrote about the good old days of newspaper offices and what all that “waffling” is good for. In his piece, he quoted a number of people. One quote struck a chord, and I couldn’t agree more: no other profession “relies so heavily on cross-pollination, on simply being around other people” as journalism.
The editor-in-chief gives a look behind the scenes at the editorial office