Clubs & Pubs

It’s no secret: 2020 was, for better or for worse, a historic year. Likewise, it has been a very impactful and productive year for The Western Front. 

In winter 2020, we started using Slack for the first time to coordinate newsroom communication. We have used it ever since and it has helped our newsroom out a lot, especially when we became entirely virtual in spring 2020. 

When the COVID-19 pandemic first hit in March 2020, the Front ran over spring break on a volunteer basis so we could report vital information about the pandemic. It marked the first time in a while that we were active between quarters. 

Despite the pandemic and the shift to a virtual newsroom, spring 2020 saw a lot of positive changes for the Front. Editors started using AirTable to track stories, which helped us ensure articles weren’t falling through the cracks due to a lack of communication. We established weekly meetings with Paul Cocke, Western’s communications director, which increased the quality of our campus coverage because it was easier for him to relay important information to us and answer reporters’ questions. 

We also shifted our campus lifestyle and city lifestyle beats into campus curiosities and city curiosities. This expanded the beats in the best way possible — instead of limitations in focusing exclusively on things like arts and culture, it allowed the people on those beats to adopt a general approach. These beats started acting like the public’s detective agency, going out of their way to track what people are curious about and how we can address those questions.  Now we’re seeing better quality coverage and increased engagement with the community. 

During the Black Lives Matter protests, the Front released a statement declaring that we stand by Black Lives Matter and acknowledging that we have work to do in terms of how we treat communities of color. 

In June 2020, the Front began hiring editors anonymously, starting with the summer 2020 editing team. Candidates submitted their applications to faculty advisor Betsy O’Donovan, who anonymized their applications and submitted them to the editor-in-chief. We did this again when hiring editors for fall 2020 and winter 2021 with the goal of reducing implicit bias.

Along with changing up the hiring process, the summer 2020 editors made some major changes to our editorial policies. They required anonymous hiring and created a policy  requiring every story to include the voice of someone directly affected by the issue discussed. For instance, a story about homelessness requires the reporter to include the voice of someone who has experienced homelessness. If the story covers a group of people, the story must include the voice of at least one person in that group. Another new policy requires reporters to ask how their sources would like to be identified and referred to if their identity is important to the story. In August 2020, they published this letter discussing these policy changes and how the newsroom would like to improve in working with underrepresented groups. 

In fall 2020, we focused on elections coverage. We used Hearken’s Citizens Agenda to inform our reporting, which emphasizes community engagement. A small team of reporters and editors covered local and state races during the chaos of the 2020 election, focusing on delivering the breaking news in real time as part of our effort to develop the Front as a reliable, professional news source for the whole community, not just the campus.

In winter 2021, we took further steps to remove bias from our hiring process. We started using this rubric to create a points system so the editor-in-chief and managing editor had objective criteria to screen candidates. We did this in the hopes of further eliminating bias when hiring editors. The rubric is a work in progress, although we are going to do our best to ensure objective criteria are used in the hiring process going forward. 

We also created a copy chief position, which allowed us to have a central newsroom expert on all things style, grammar, spelling and punctuation. The copy chief runs the copy desk, which also means we have three copy editors in winter 2021 instead of the usual two. They’re also tasked with publishing articles to our website, which was traditionally handled by the multimedia/online editor. By making copy in charge of publishing, we freed up our social media/online editor’s time to come up with creative ways to promote our stories and engage with our community.

In winter 2021, we created a new Instagram and started conducting polls on our Instagram stories to further engage with our audience. We also started doing editor takeovers and introduction videos, where the editors would appear on our Instagram stories, introduce themselves and answer any questions the community had about the Front. Our social media/online editor, Ryan Morris, provides a weekly update on our digital engagement efforts, experiments and offers tips for how the entire newsroom can help readers learn to turn to the Front.

We’re also in the process of writing protest guidelines for our newsroom, with input from Erin Ailworth at the Wall Street Journal, Barbara Allen at Poynter, our faculty adviser, Professor Betsy O’Donovan, ethics Professor Joan Connell and visual journalism Professor Joe Gosen, that will allow our reporters to cover protests safely, accurately and ethically. We look forward to making these guidelines public by the end of winter 2021. 

We have also noticed some overall trends from our newsroom in the past year. One of these is a dramatic increase in the urgency of our breaking news coverage. Between Black Lives Matter, the 2020 elections and Camp 210, we believe we’re getting much better at balancing timeliness and ethics when covering breaking news. We have been better at engaging with the community, reaching out to underrepresented groups, and increasing diversity in our newsroom — although we recognize we still have a long way to go. 

The sports beat, in particular, has dramatically changed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since there have been almost no games, the sports beat shifted away from game coverage and instead, focused on stories such as athlete profiles, sports history and how people are staying connected to the sports world during the pandemic. 

We also published several high-quality investigative pieces over the past year, which can be found here, here, here, here and here. 

To top it all off, we’ll be launching our new website in spring 2021! 

We are grateful for all of the extraordinary changes the past year has brought us, and all of the people who made these changes possible. We look forward to another year with abundant opportunity to learn, grow and serve our community. 

Sincerely,

Izzie Lund, Editor-in-Chief