By Elizabeth Scalzo
Editor-in-Chief
Week three of The Equinox summer brought the staff new opportunities to truly hone in on their skills and do reporting that matters, which is a journalist’s true goal. Starting the week we had our pre-planning meeting followed by the general meeting and started planning for a special edition of our roundtable series concerning Black Lives Matter.
As a news organization, our job is to start such an important conversation and our roundtable platform is just the way to do it. Since the death of George Floyd, I wanted to do something to get people talking involve the FDU community.
The roundtable we posted Friday worked just like our previous one that introduced the series covering COVID-19 and FDU’s re-opening. Managing Editor Amaya Morales and I met with News Editor Jhoana Merino-Martinez and Staff Writer Camille Herbert to discuss the logistics and our overall goals for this roundtable.
We were lucky to have Maame Mensah and Hannah Farrow — representing the Student Government Association and the Black Student Union — join us to speak about Black Lives Matter as a whole and in relation to the FDU community.
While all of the hard work was going on for the roundtable, there were two workshops going on last week, too. On Wednesday, Amaya and I hosted a social media planning workshop and on Thursday we welcomed guest speaker Nancy Ayala.
Ayala has over 20 years of experience as a journalist and as an editor. She is a graduate of the USC Annenberg School of Journalism and she worked on the Daily Trojan student paper. She has worked at ABC News, Google, CNBC, USAToday and Adweek, making her the perfect person to teach the staff about AP style standards.
Then Friday morning hit and disaster struck. The recording for the roundtable disappeared with only 35 seconds of recording remaining. Amaya and I went into full panic mode. Assuming we needed to re-record, I was ready to reach out to our guests and the team to do it all over.
Thankfully, the file was in Amaya’s Apple Music app. How it ended up there we have no idea, but the video was posted with only a slight delay.
Accompanying the roundtable, Student Lifestyle editor Kenny Lo wrote a meaningful and well done article about why black lives matter to him and his experience protesting.
Finishing off our story posting for the week, Saturday afternoon Jhoana wrote a story about the tuition freeze at FDU, in response to COVID-19. Students shared in the excitement of this announcement.
Starting week four seems like a dream. I never thought I would have an internship this summer, let alone run one with such a fantastic team. Week four will bring another roundtable regarding reopening, more stories and another workshop.
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Graphic By Elizabeth Scalzo
During this difficult time The Equinox pivots focus from COVID-19 to Black Lives Matter.
