Ria Lowenschuss
Writer, Reporter, Editor-in-Chief
EDITING AND LEADERSHIP
My Journalistic Experience
I've been calling myself a journalist since middle school, when I watched "Gilmore Girls" and fell in love with Rory Gilmore. However, I didn't become one until I joined Tracy Anderson's journalism class. My first year on staff of "The Communicator" was rough. We were completely online and struggling to find a way to cover a school year that was happening in people's bedrooms. However, we persevered and along the way, I realized that I loved it. I spent my first year of journalism focused on writing many different kinds of stories, talking to a wide range of people and honing my editing skills and my personal writing voice. I learned so much about AP style and journalistic writing from my peer editors and their help made me confident in my own abilities.
Editor-in-Chief
I became an editor-in-chief of "The Communicator" magazine my second year of journalism, when I was a junior. I spent my first year of leadership learning from the senior editors-in-chief and helping new journalists write stories they were proud of. My main responsibility was creating and overlooking content, assisting journalists in their writing process and editing. I was able to learn even more while being a leader and I truly believe that this year had major impact on my journalistic career. I focused more on pieces that centered around my passions of feminism and queer rights and spent time reviewing our style guide to inform my editing process. For our hard work, we won first place in NSPA Best of Show for our newsmagazine this year.
From left to right: Ria Lowenschuss, Mia Goldstein, Grace Wang, Ella Rosewarne. My fellow editors and I pose with our trophy after winning Best in Show.
"The Communicator" staff and our advisor Tracy Anderson at the NSPA 2022 Conference in Los Angeles, after winning a Pacemaker award for our website.
Near the end of my first year as editor-in-chief, I began planning for our upcoming year. We were losing many talented seniors and the junior editors-in-chief were all worried about being prepared to lead. As we were anticipating our team for next year, we wanted to make sure we all felt good about working together. I created a slideshow for our editing team across publications to foster connection.
As a senior editor-in-chief, I branched out, dedicating my time to understanding our design process and organizing our workflow. I have been intimately involved with putting each edition together, from deciding on a theme and creating story ideas to copy editing and aligning each object on a page. We have released two editions as of January 2023 for this year and we are hard at work on our third edition. For our first edition, we won fourth in NSPA's Best of Show.
"The Communicator" celebrates its Best of Show win at NSPA's 2022 St. Louis Conference.
From left to right: Tracy Anderson, Ria Lowenschuss, Serena O'Brien, Isabella Jacob, Elliot Bramson, Ella Rosewarne. The five print editors-in-chief and our advisor pose with our first edition of 2022-23.
Editing and Organization
This year, we have transferred our organization system over to FLOW, a tool dedicated to helping scholastic publications manage their workflow. We use this tool for all three of our publications and, although it has taken some getting used to, it has helped us keep track of what stories are going to publication, what we need covered and what needs to be edited.
We use the layout tool to design our print magazine page by page. It helps us see what content is going where and what holes we need to fill. It also allows us to check up on journalists' writing progress and offer them help as needed. We have created layouts for each of our editions this year. This also assists our section editors, as they can see what stories are being written in each section.
FLOW is a great way to make sure each story gets edited multiple times. When journalists sign up for a story, they mark it as "In Progress." Then, when they have a solid draft, they can submit their story to their section editor based on what kind of article it is. After the section editors review and edit the story, they send it back to the journalist to accept edits. Finally, the journalist submits their story to the editors-in-chief depending on what publication the story is for. This way of managing our workflow makes sure no story gets forgotten and allows us to clearly see who is signed up for what and where they are in their writing process.
