Ever wonder what goes into Wofford’s student-run publication?
Behind the scenes of The Old Gold & Black is a fairly routine, yet exciting process, and I am here to walk you through it. Whether you are interested in joining our team or are just curious about the ins and outs of the process, this is the article for you.
It all starts on a Tuesday afternoon in the Dupre Residence hall’s publications room, affectionately known as “the pub room.” We have our weekly meeting and discuss all of the different ideas that our writers would be interested in covering. This workshop is a process that we like to call “pitching.”
After everyone has their ideas refined, they start researching, writing, and creating their finished product. Every article is required to have quotes/research and adhere to AP style guidelines. We train our staff on how to do this at the beginning of each academic year with a weeklong training.
We also generally require all articles to have a photo, which means that every writer has to submit a photo request to our photographer(s) and/or illustrator(s). We also have a formatting technique for captions, but I won’t give all of our secrets away.
For the next week and a half, this process continues. Nine days later, on a Thursday, the articles are due at midnight. The meeting on the Tuesday of that week would be reserved for distributing the papers for the previous issue (more on that later), and making sure that everyone is on track with their articles.
Once the articles are all turned in, our copy editor and our managing editor each take half of the articles to edit and check for AP style adherence. Once it goes through their approval, the editor-in-chief looks over all of them one more time to catch any last-minute mistakes and/or make further edits.
From there, the articles are shared with our layout and design editor, who puts all of the articles into the format needed for the paper. She will spend her time in the pub room, using Adobe, and perfecting any visual errors that may occur.
The finished paper is then sent to our advisor who pays close attention to all of the ins and outs, including the writing, format, layout, photos, etc. If he finds any mistakes, he sends it back to the editors for final changes.
The paper is then, once again, approved by all of the editors and sent to the printer, which is in Charlotte. Once printed, the papers are delivered to the pub room and on that Tuesday our staff members distribute the papers all over campus.
That same day, our web designer also uploaded all the articles to the website.
With all these parts working consistently and cooperatively, the paper is able to be produced on a biweekly basis for everyone in the Wofford community to enjoy.
If you or someone you know may find themselves interested in being a part of this process, please reach out to any of the editors to sign up today! Some positions even have the potential of being paid, and we are always looking for more unique voices and opinions!
