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Writer's pictureAda Wood
6 days ago

THE SIGNAL: Editor-in-Chief, Georgia State University's Student Newspaper

I worked at The Signal, Georgia State's student newspaper, throughout almost the entirety of my college career, from April 2018 to August 2020. I served as a News Reporter for ten months, Associate News Editor for six months, News Editor for eight months and finally Editor-in-Chief for seven months. Simultaneously during my time at The Signal, I also was a full-time student, had several internships—at The Nature Conservancy, Atlanta magazine, Georgia News Lab, Georgia Public Broadcasting, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and CNN—and worked anywhere from 20-40 hours a wek in the service industry as my primary source of income.


Below, I've highlighted more than 100 projects I worked on during my time there, including every story I wrote, photo I published, webpage design I built, print page I gave artistic direction for, and issue I edited. I wrote for every section, although news was my primary beat, including Arts and Living, Sports and Opinions. My coverage ranged from politics to crime to culture to data analytics to equity to arts to historical review. I've also highlighted some of my biggest accomplishments during my time in two editor roles.


My work at the student newspaper was an invaluable educational experience and the platform and foundation on which I have built the rest of my career.


 

Publication History


(ordered from most to least recent)


 

Print Clips



 

News Editor


From July 2019 to May 2020, I worked as the editor of the news section for The Signal, the student newspaper at Georgia State.


Below is a list of the issues I worked on by selecting the content, editing the writing and guiding the team.


Fall 2019


Spring 2020


 


Editor-in-Chief


I joined The Signal on April 5, 2018. On February 1, 2020, I officially assumed the role of editor-in-chief until August 31, 2020. Below are the issues I had oversight on and a short list of some of the accomplishments under my term.


Spring 2020

Vol. 87 Issue No. 19 The Sex Issue

Vol. 87 Issue No. 22 The SGA Issue


Spring 2020 (Post-COVID-19 Campus Closure)*

Vol. 87 Issue No. 24 The Mental Health Issue

Vol. 87 Issue No. 25 Panther of the Year

Vol. 87 Issue No. 27 The Earth Issue

*During this time we made a switch to an online-only "mini issue" since printing was no longer an option.


Fall 2020


Summer 2020 Marketing Rebrand and Print Redesign

Many of the examples of this major project are outlined in individual subsections below. This project focused on making The Signal brand more concrete and consistent throughout all of our mediums. The team behind it was me, Brooklyn Valera, Monte Lowery, Shancheze Johnson, Julian Pineda and Franky Huang.


The first and biggest change was a redesigned logo, pulling elements like the skyline from our old logo and selecting a better front and layout with our new logo, designed by Shancheze Johnson. We also established an official slogan for The Signal, based on our pre-existing mission statement: Independent, Impactful and Impartial.


The print redesign — by Monte Lowery and Shancheze Johnson — took our old product and turned it into one that is reorganized and visually enhanced. We reduced our page count from 20 to 16 and turned it from some color, some black and white to full color. We moved content to spaces in the paper that made more sense (for example Masthead moved from page two opinions to inside cover). One thing we aimed for was making the content more functional, creating multiple story page templates instead of just the two we had prior and designing a spread that could be rotated between the four sections instead of solely belonging to the Arts and Living division every week. We also designed a new section in the back two pages of the paper called The Kickback, designed to engage reader involvement.


The Signal Sound Weekly Podcast and Radio Collaboration with Album 88

While much of the credit for this podcast goes to the creator, producer and reporter behind it, Christopher Alston, I worked to help him get this project up and running, helped make decisions on the content and organization and encouraged its marketing and promotion through various Signal platforms.


After Chris' graduation, I worked with Timo Clark to continue this project past spring 2020. We also developed and began releasing two more podcasts, The Signal Sound Sports and The Signal Sound Sports Roundtable.


On August 24, 2020, we aired our first hour-long segment on the WRAS, Album 88 airwaves, composed of former Signal Sound and Signal Sound Sports segments. This was the first in several years for Album 88 content to be news-related and the first partnership in at least several years of collaboration between the two student media organizations to air a product of The Signal (to my knowledge, it's the first ever). This became a recurring monthly segment.


The Signal in a Minute Weekly Video Newscast

While this project was filmed and edited by Andre Walker, the concept and leadership that brought it to life were from my efforts. Before this, The Signal's last video project had been published on April 28, 2019. More than a year later, I brought back the medium of video to the newspaper's portfolio in a style that's quick, clean and on-brand.


The Signal Social Media Rebrand

(View posts beginning February 1 and again beginning August 10)

For the first round of improved social media, the credit for this project goes to the person who put in the most work, Julian Pineda. I worked alongside him to create a new format, image and structure for posting to Instagram and Twitter every week to engage followers with our website, print product and other mediums.


After the initial improvement of more consistency in our post schedule, we dived deeper into our Summer 2020 Rebrand and made a clearer concept of what The Signal brand looks like. We came up with a format for sharing news visually on Instagram and created in-house advertisements for everything we could market, from podcasts to newsletters. These advertisements helped promote products that weren't promoted previously and helped create a defined brand for advertising instead of every advertisement being in a completely different style. These designs were made by Julian Pineda and Franky Huang under my guidance.


Homepage Launch, Webpage Improvement and Sales/Advertising Updates

Round One

Round Two

New Advertise Archived Page (And Updated Media Kit)

Credit for this goes to Daniel Varitek and Will Holley for developing and creating this homepage. I pushed for the launch and helped implement some content and visual changes by fixing some last-minute bugs on the website before the launch. This continued into our Summer 2020 rebrand and redesign where I implemented new elements, both visually (like improved section headers) and content-related (like social media plugins and better integration of user forms like the tipline).


This included the implementation of a redesigned Advertise Page and Media Kit by Franky Huang. Our previous media kit had outdated statistics on the Georgia State community and The Signal's reach, we updated these stats, our price guidelines, our advertising options online, in print and on social media and the style of the kit to fit the new brand.


Newsletter

Integrated into the new homepage was a slot for users to sign up for a newsletter in their email inbox. This project was brought to life with our marketing team, Julian Pineda and Franky Huang. This weekly letter highlights top stories and keeps us connected in one more way to our readers.


Journalism and News Reporting

At the top of my mind, despite all of my ongoing projects, was for the paper to continue to serve its core purpose: engaging, informative and accurate reporting. During my time, we covered COVID-19's impacts on campus extensively, took on an investigation into sexual assault cases on campus, followed the Black Lives Matter movement on a local level and continued to cover our regular areas of interest from student government to mental health.


Internal Functions

I implemented several processes, procedures and resources to improve internal workflow and structure, that may not be directly visible from outside The Signal but drastically impacted our quality, quantity and capacity to create.


This includes a format for editors to share notes with writers on what they expect in a story, a formal way for stories and pitches to be submitted, an improved and consolidated budget, an organized Google Drive system to localize all work (editorial, photo, art, video, etc.) in one space instead of multiple locations and an easy to follow calendar and deadline resource.


Additionally, there has been the concern of new leadership not being given the resources and training necessary to effectively do their job. I worked with every current member of the team to create guides for how to do the job, how to do it well and what they learned in their position to pass on to future leaders. Several other inner workings needed an update, including a backlog of more than 130 applicants and planning for the upcoming semesters.


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