As an avid reader, I take great joy in finding authors from a wide range of backgrounds. I have found that the author’s background changes not only the characters’ voices, but also the perspective. For example, even a traditional meet-cute rom-com is a completely different read when the main characters are both women. My experiences as a reader have helped inform my choices as a writer and editor.
My high school, Newton South High School, is not known for the diversity of its student body. Often, the newspaper staff is a reflection of that homogeneity. This single-minded viewpoint informs choices of articles, ideas expressed in the Opinions section, and recruitment of new staff and leaders. When I arrived at Newton South High School as a ninth-grader, my background, in many ways, fit right in with a predominantly white, upper-middle-class student population. However, I identify as a Hispanic Jewish female. The intersectionality of my own background often influences my opinions and has prompted me to recruit diverse voices in journalism. At the end of my sophomore year, I was asked to assume the leadership role for the Opinions section. In some sense, this was particularly challenging since there were no staff members, and I had never written an opinion piece in my life. On the other hand, it gave me the chance to experiment and build a section from the ground up. High school journalists often rely on recruiting their friends to write and edit for their publications. The downside of this is that people’s friends often look and think the way they do. I freely admit that I had to do some of that as well. Relatively new to the school and unable to write four opinion pieces myself every week, I absolutely leaned on friends and classmates to participate. However, I also made a concerted effort to recruit new people and voices. By the end of the year, the section had grown to 10-15 staff writers, many of whom were not my friends! Another challenge of writing and editing for the Opinions section was having to put my sometimes unpopular opinions beneath my byline. In particular, I wrote a piece about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which I feared could be a lightning rod for controversy. My English classes and journalistic experience prior to that had been focused on objectivity. Learning to use facts to bolster an opinion was a different kind of writing for me. Furthermore, I had to learn how to edit other people’s opinion pieces by focusing on the writing style, mechanics, and use of evidence, even if I disagreed with their conclusion. Building a diverse Opinions section and learning to edit pieces whose content I disagreed with was a small-scale example of building a journalistic community that respects integrity and quality, but tolerates a range of opinions. As co-Editor-in-Chief this year, I have tried to continue to expand that community, both on the side of writers and readers. For the first time in recent memory, we have a female webperson, an intentional choice on our part to promote women in STEM. We have continued to guide our section editors toward recruiting a diverse group of staff members. We have tried to publish news and opinion pieces that feel relevant to our student body but also represent a range within the political spectrum. On the reader’s side, we have tried to engage with a broader cross-section of the student body. By revamping our website, we have made the paper easier to read, access, and search. We have also used social media to engage students who might not otherwise read our publication. My biggest source of pride is not any individual article that I wrote or edited; rather, it is the fact that I will leave the newspaper looking different than it did when I arrived. The staff and editors now feature more women and greater variation in backgrounds. As I move into the college journalism community, I hope to bring this drive for diversity with me, as much as I hope that the seeds I planted continue to flourish at Newton South. |