As a journalism publication, The Post is constantly publishing articles, photos, videos and more, but the majority of the time, the process to getting those published goes unknown by our audience. Furthermore, with “fake news” as rampant as ever, journalism can be confusing to those who aren’t familiar with it.
With the appointment of next year’s editor-in-chief and a transfer of leadership on the horizon, it seems like a great time to break down the hierarchy of The Post and how we run as a publication.
Like our masthead explains, The Post runs with a few executive editors as well as a slew of section editors who run all of our many sections. From there, some of these staffs have staff writers as well as everyone else who writes/shoots/designs/contributes in whatever way to The Post. With over 150 members, The Post really would not be what it is without its staff members.
Throughout the process of one article, though, multiple Post staff members work with it.
To begin, once a writer picks up a story, they scour for sources, conduct interviews and write their piece. Once the story is written, that student will edit it with their respective section editor. Throughout that editing process, facts and quotes are checked, structure is changed if need be and most importantly for the writer, it’s a chance for the editor to help their writer grow as a journalist.
While that writer is going through their writing process, our creative teams also get looped in. No matter if the article will be accompanied by a photo, graphic or illustration, it’s assigned to either a photographer or illustrator who then creates the art for the article.
After both the art is solidified and the article is edited, the piece then goes to a copy editor who will peruse it for any missed grammar or AP Style mistakes. From there, the article will go to another copy editor — what we call slot editors — for another round of style editing. To round this out, if a story is a featured top story on our website, the piece also gets edited by our managing editor. Then, the late-night editor for the evening will do one final read-through before publishing.
After all of this, our social media team whips up our attention-grabbing social posts to drive pageviews and engagement throughout our website. All in all, one article published at The Post goes through many people — and this doesn’t even delve into if multimedia, coding, data visualization or more is included with it.
The point of this column isn’t to brag about how extensive what we do is but more so to introduce transparency into journalism and offer up a slice of what our evenings look like.
This process can sometimes be tiresome and grueling (many late, late nights are involved), and human error still happens despite the number of eyes that see one article. We aren’t perfect, after all.
Nevertheless, The Post continues the work we do because we owe it to our readers, Southeast Ohio and the standards of journalism we always strive for.
Journalism is a practice like no other. There isn’t anything really like it, but hopefully, this gives you — our beloved readers — a bit of insight into how a story goes from an idea to being published.
Molly Schramm is a senior studying journalism at Ohio University and the editor-in-chief of The Post. Have questions? Email Molly at ms660416@ohio.edu or tweet her @_molly_731.
