American hotelier, Conrad Hilton said, “Success seems to be connected with action. Successful people keep moving. They make mistakes, but they don’t quit.”
Here, at The Clarion, we strive to be the best we can be. Each designer, reporter, photographer and editor is in the office working hard to produce a weekly paper for Sinclair. We are students first, obtaining a variety of degrees, from visual communications to biology to creative writing to business, but we’re striving for success.
Perfection isn’t the name of our game, but experience is what we focus on. Building opportunities and being part of a community is what keeps us pushing ourselves to be better each day.
At The Clarion, success is important for everyone—as students and as employees. We thought because we don’t give up and we continue to push ourselves in everything we do, we should give our readers some tips on how to succeed in this fast-paced lifestyle.
First lesson on how to succeed: Learn how to spell the word “success.” Trying to get on the fast track to success is hard when you can’t spell or edit the word success.
Where is the ending? When laying out the paper make sure you copy and paste the whole story from the document to the InDesign layout so the story doesn’t just end randomly.
Know what picture goes with which story. Part of a newspaper is having photos to engage with readers so it’s not just a block of text. Part of our responsibility is to know what photo goes with which story, especially if it is a Tartan Spotlight. Knowing the face of the person and double-checking would’ve prevented us from reprinting 3,000 papers on the publishing date.
Learn how to spell the word “Racism.” Especially with the amount of news that is happening in the world that includes race, it’s really important that you know how to spell “racism.”
What does the Ohio Statehouse look like? This is something that you should know because you’re an Ohioan. Have some pride for your state and politics—know what the statehouse looks like. Actually, we checked it and we thought it was wrong, but we were right! But it’s still important to know.
Don’t introduce a new column and never follow through. It just makes sense, right? If you have been reading our paper, we introduced “Book Nook,” but nothing was ever published after we introduced the column.
Know the difference between the Puerto Rico flag and the Ohio flag. During our first new layout change for The Clarion, we tried different design elements to accompany our feature story. This specific edition was about the legalization of marijuana, our plan of having the Ohio flag make an appearance turned into the Puerto Rico flag instead.
Check the date. Our publishing date every week is Tuesday. However, sometimes our date says it’s Monday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday—or any other day for that matter.
Keep count. If you have a teaser on the front page that has a particular story on page 8, make sure it’s on page 8 and not on another random page for the reader’s sake.
On top of all those, we would like to honor our favorite Clarion employee, “Employee Name.” They have taken lots of photographs for a variety of stories, and we feel as though we should give them a shoutout. If you see them around on campus make sure you give them a pat on the back.
Everybody makes mistakes, by means we are not at all perfect, but the goal of working at The Clarion is gaining experience to further our degree.
Our mistakes give us the opportunity to self reflect. How we handle our mistakes and ‘bumps in the road’ give us the opportunity to learn how to handle adversity. Embracing our failures gives us the chance to leap to our potential by learning from the past to create a better future.
Laughing at our mistakes help us create awareness by making it a little more bearable for us to analyze the situation and grow. How else would we evolve ourselves if we didn’t learn from our mistakes? In all seriousness, we hope everyone can learn from their own mistakes and apply the lessons to their future.
Essentially, The Clarion is a learning lab, so the experience we are gaining while working at the student newspaper is providing us with the opportunity to launch our careers once we graduate.
We hope you found some inspiration from reading this success story and if you didn’t well then write to Dear Gabby and tell her about your problems. Please use these success tips in your day-to-day activities—you’ll be on that fast track to “succsess” in no time. Happy April Fool’s day!
Gabrielle Sharp
Executive Editor