Hi. My name is Rachel Jones, and I’m running for editor-in-chief.
I’m going to spend as little time on my qualifications as possible: I’ve spent three years at the DTH in a variety of roles, starting as an Arts and Entertainment staffer and taking on roles as a Swerve assistant editor and social media manager my sophomore year. I served as summer editor before my junior year, and currently act as online managing editor. I’ve won state and national awards for my reporting and as a part of our online team.
Since my first year, I’ve become a generalist and evangelist for The Daily Tar Heel, and I believe my wide range of experience, close relationships with staff and editors and drive to preserve this paper for future generations will help me excel as editor and surround myself with a team that can make the following goals simple and actionable.
The tent-poles of my platform are simple, and they support each other:
I want to consolidate desks where it makes financial and practical sense. We need to give online initiatives a permanent home on Copy, to solidify the role of fact-checking and reader advocacy in our newsroom. We need to have more city staffers, and fewer national news stories with tangential ties to campus: by combining our State & National and City desks, our newsroom values will better reflect our role as the leading paper in the county.
I want to increase the diversity and inclusivity of our newsroom. This is a public platform, so I’ll take this opportunity to increase awareness of an issue that’s just as pressing as our financial crisis: the leadership of our current newsroom is less diverse than UNC’s student body by almost 20 percent, and in 125 years, we have only had four people of color as editor-in-chief.
The good news is that we are more diverse at a staff-wide level. I believe our issues are recruitment and retention. We rely on word-of-mouth for the former, and for the latter we struggle to acknowledge our mostly white perspective. We can begin to fix this by reaching out to diverse journalism organizations on campus to develop ongoing relationships and publicize staff opportunities, holding honest conversations about race at our editors retreat and encouraging people of color to apply for assistant editor positions — these are the people that go on to lead desks, join management and shape the newsroom’s future.
I want to expand roles for senior staffers so that there is a clearer path to editorship, and an expanded role in the newsroom for those that want it, whether they’re on a writing or production desk. We can emphasize beat reporting for our senior writers, social media ownership for our veteran copy and online staffers and broadened visual storytelling for our photographers and designers. We can also institute breaking news shifts that provide our reporters with massive responsibility and opportunity, while better positioning us as a paper that not only covers the news, but gets to it first.
I want to establish clear lines of communication between all of the DTH’s departments. Sharing equipment and talent between the newsroom and brand studio should feel natural, and while it does in some regards, there are a lot of opportunities on this front that we’re squandering. I propose two solutions, one direct and one indirect: a joint task force to confront the issues facing our organization, and moving most of our listserv communication to Facebook groups to encourage interaction across desks and departments and responsive dialogues between leadership and staff.
