My Experience as a Page Editor

Img credit: Dall-e 2 “Students writing articles, digital art, bright”

My school runs outreach programs for underprivileged children- Atulasha for boys, and Amitasha for girls.

I recently worked on a page written exclusively by these children for my school newspaper. Page 10 is the “Prompt Box” page where writers respond to a prompt. On the occasion of India’s Independence day, the prompt was- “Name an important Indian figure whom you consider your role model and why“- all the students responded to this in the form of 150-word articles. Read the articles here.

I was able to pitch the idea for this page in one of our weekly meetings. After submitting a detailed proposal and a week of getting permissions, the idea was approved by the editor of the newspaper!

I met up with the students, talked about the newspaper and how the writing-editing-publishing system works. This session in itself was amazing. I got the names and numbers of all the interested students, and we began.

A lot of the students who ended up contributing to the newspaper had some trouble communicating in English and sent hand-written documents. But I was able to get help from my fellow editorial board members to set up an edit-review system which translated, edited and finalised the articles.

We were given a very tight deadline of three days, and I’m very thankful to my fellow editors who helped meet that deadline.

What I found most interesting about the articles was how politically perceptive the writers were. For instance, in an article about Narendra Modi, a 7th grader talked about how her family has benefitted from some of his schemes. She went on to talk about his party’s religious inclinations as well. I certainly did not have such a level of perception or sagacity as her back when I was 10. I still don’t.

Being an editor was also quite interesting. The experience gave me a deep insight into the journalistic process. My opinion of the content did not matter. I just had to remove the clerical errors and move on. But I suppose I was wrong. I asked my team to not edit the language or the content, just correct the errors. In my mind, this was supposed to be a way to get students interested and familiar with the editorial process, not to get flawless articles. However, the articles ended up being heavily edited by the editors at the head office. Oh well.

It was quite fun talking to the students who wrote the articles. “Didi kis colour ke page par likhun” 🙂 I’ve truly never met a group of children who were more enthusiastic about writing. I’m still in touch with most of the girls who wrote, and they sometimes send articles for me to have a look at. The head teacher of this program asked me to get print-outs of the online edition so that all of the students could read them. When I went to her office a couple days back to discuss a separate workshop, I noticed that she had pinned up that page with drawings of flowers around each writer’s name.

I really look forward to doing something like this again in the future.