Recruiting Student Journalists
How to Recruit and Keep Writers for Your Campus Paper
Recruiting writers for a college newspaper can be a frustrating and difficult task. Here are some tips on how to increase the number of contributing writers.
Creating a respectable and interesting college paper is hard enough to accomplish on its own, but one of the most important and most difficult aspects of producing the campus paper is recruiting and keeping journalists. The editorial staff depends on student journalists to create copy in order to fill the pages of the paper. In turn, those same journalists depend on the editorial staff to help them with their stories and offer them guidance when needed.
Recruiting
There are many ways of recruiting students to write for your campus paper, but none are as effective as visiting classes and asking students to write. Those who will be most inclined to write for you are Journalism, English and Writing majors. These students must build their portfolio to become successful in the future, and the campus paper is a sure-fire way of creating clippings to add to a portfolio.
However, don’t count out students majoring in other fields. Students from different majors can add diversity of voice to the paper. Their copy may need more editing than that of Journalism majors, but it is better than having nothing. Recruiting as many writers as you can, no matter what their area of study, is key.
Placing ads in the paper with contact information for each of the section editors is another way to express the need for writers, but an editorial staff should not rely on this alone.
Organize
Keep a detailed list of everyone who has written and who has expressed interest in writing for the paper. Names, campus phone numbers, cell phone numbers, e-mail addresses, sections of interest and anything else that may help to assign stories to the right journalist should be included on the list. Use a program like Excel to create the list so it can be easily updated when new recruits are added.
When handing out assignments, keep track of what stories each journalist is assigned to. Provide them with any leads that may be helpful to the story such as phone numbers of administrators, professors or students who could comment on the story or offer more information. Make all deadlines clear and make sure that the journalists understand when their stories must be finished.
Remember to try and assign journalists stories that pertain to their field of interest. Not every student will be excited about writing a story on the new food options in the cafeteria. Note each writer’s interests with their contact information.
Follow-through
Check up on the journalists as often as possible. Make sure that they are working on the story and will have it finished by the deadline. Stories won’t make it in on time unless the editorial staff keeps tabs on each one that has been assigned for the upcoming issue. There is nothing worse than having little to no copy on layout night, and white space is not an interesting read.
Keep track of which journalists are reliable and which tend to miss deadlines. This will be helpful in the future to avoid assigning important articles to writers who tend to miss them.
Keep Them Happy
If a story needs to be heavily edited or if it needs more information, let the journalist know. Don’t make major modifications to the story without telling the writer. This will help keep journalist/editor relations positive. They may even choose to write more than once.
Let writers know when they have written a good article and that their contributions are appreciated. Do not alienate any of the journalists. The more writers a campus paper has, the better it can become. Try to keep as many journalists on the contact list as possible.
