For Mother’s Day, I received an AI-generated postcard. What I saw was our kitchen, but my goodness, it looked like a bomb had exploded. Dirty laundry everywhere, an abandoned school bag, sauce on the floor, sauce on the ceiling, sauce on the drawers, piles of plates, knocked over mugs. Not exactly a familiar sight, let me tell you! The message on the back of the card, obviously tongue-in-cheek (because the boys at home do know I am capable of more than just cooking and cleaning): ‘What would we do without you?’.
I was talking about it with a colleague at the office recently. Not about mess, but about being indispensable. Actually, the conclusion was quite painful: if I were to suddenly be ‘out of action’ for a while, things would carry on as normal. Colleagues know what needs doing and that tough decisions sometimes need to be made (do we post this opinion piece or not, do we mention the name of the professor who was found guilty of inappropriate behaviour?) And it doesn’t matter whether it’s the physical paper or the digital channels.
Now we are dropping the paper version after the summer, we are preparing to switch to the format of a weekly newsletter. We debated whether we should work with a ‘quota’, agreements about the number and types of articles, as in the paper: three news(ish) items a week, one human interest story (like our ‘sing pray’ series), two columns, one academic or student article (such as this week, the interview with the chairs of Tragos and Circumflex), or a substantial piece of investigative journalism.
Not everyone in the office was overjoyed with the idea of a weekly ‘production schedule’. With the end of the final editorial process of the physical paper, there will be more time to chase the news, to delve deeper into something – those stories will come, they said optimistically.
For now, I prefer to stick to a ‘fixed standard’. We call that checking or coordination in the office – not indispensable, but very useful. At home, it’s simply a case of knowing where everything is. “Your housekeys are on the cupboard in the hall”, “Your favourite shirt is drying on the rack”, “No, we’re not out of coffee beans, just look next to the bread basket.”
The editor-in-chief gives a look behind the scenes at the editorial office