From the Daily Northwestern, I'm Erica Schmidt. This is The Weekly, a podcast that breaks down our top headlines each week. Welcome to the third recap of the quarter. Today I'm here with sports editor Sky Swan and print managing editor Anjali Mittol.
They will be talking with me about the sports desk and some recent headlines at The Daily. First of all, Sky, what are some of the previous areas at The Daily that you've been a part of? I've served as assistant sports editor for two quarters prior, and I've also been assistant game day editor. On the editing role, I've done development and recruitment editor and newsletter editor.
So all those different jobs have kind of helped me go into this quarter with the mindset of being able to plan and being able to just really be organized because that's what it takes to be an editor. But the adjustment also is just making sure for the late nights in sports, there can be stuff that is groundbreaking or things that are out of your control. So being able to just go with the flow and be able to produce anything on the fly. What does the sports editor do?
I budget out all the sports content that is published from the Daily Northwestern and I assign my reporters to different beats and they go to the games and they cover and rewrite fun features, recaps, little sidebar pieces and columns about the different sports. Skye says that this quarter, the biggest project she worked on was the Spring Sports Preview, a special edition of the Daily that was published on February 16th. The issue focuses on what's to come for the spring sports season. She says she started creating a list of planned out stories, also known as a budget, early on in the quarter.
This quarter sports editor, it's kind of like my bank or break moment. I started creating my budget week three of the quarter, just knowing that we want to cover lacrosse, softball and baseball and trying to get kind of a pre-seed or what to watch for. just some key takeaways to look out for this season some feature pieces on some of the key players from all different three teams and also making sure that we could get maybe a couple audio visual aspects but that is always harder just contacting with the athletic communications team Once the budget was released, we had reporters take stories. Then we tried to have most of the content coming in the week before so we could talk with design and have stuff placed with the web developer design team looking for photos and put outs.
So that way, when it goes through the print night on Wednesday, we are basically smooth sailing. What has been the biggest challenge for you as an editor? And SID is an athletic communications person. So in order to talk to an athlete, you have to go through one of the Northwestern Athletic Communications workers and then they will set up interviews.
The challenge has been getting the SIDs to respond no matter the amount of bumps, emails I send, they send. It's been like a no-show on their end, so that has been a challenge. But all my reporters have done a great job of being flexible and working past that obstacle. What's some advice you would give to other women pursuing a career in sports journalism?
Sometimes a woman might feel discouraged being a woman in sports as a male-dominated and very patriarchal, very misogynistic field of journalism. I have learned that whatever you put your mind to, you can accomplish. It just takes determination and just all your top skills to get it done. Anything you want, don't be afraid to do because it is achievable.
Anjali, you are one of the three print managing editors this quarter. How has this experience been for you so far? I've primarily worked with digital, even though my first role at The Daily as an editor was Assistant City. It's kind of going back to freshman year, it's given me those vibes.
Being a print managing editor, this is quite different. Editing print stories is a totally different kind of atmosphere but I think it really fun especially because I do like to write for The Daily a lot it kind of cool to come back to that and read what other people are writing about because I feel like I don get as much time to devote to that to read other people stories And so now that I editing them I get to hear about the cool education topics that are going on in Evanston or politics or the weird things going around on campus. As a previous digital managing editor, Anjali says she has enjoyed seeing a larger incorporation of multimedia content with print. It's been kind of cool to see how much we've incorporated multimedia in print content in general, especially with the establishment of the data visualization desk.
There are so many print stories that are going with graphs. There are also a lot of cool maps that I've been seeing in print stories, which has been very interesting. And also there were a ton of city stories that ran with videos that I thought that is a very interesting take on that. And so it is very, very cool to see.
That's a really big change, but I'm glad you're liking it. Can you tell me about some recent print stories that you like? One that particularly hits is the Starbucks story that was written recently for campus. It was about the seemingly free items that students thought they were getting when they were purchasing things at the Starbucks in Norris, but then ended up getting retroactively charged free items.
Being one of those people who lost a ton of dining dollars over that, seeing that story and hearing about other experiences like that, that really hit. And I think the story was really well put together. Anjali says a favorite story of hers is from the City Desk's Education Beat. A story I was looking at for an audio piece that I thought was really good.
It was about how black students were disproportionately being given disciplinary action compared to white students at ETHS. And the two reporters who covered it did it really well. And I think the quotes were so powerful. So I was really excited to read that.
I'm really proud of the content that's been going around this quarter. And I'm particularly pretty happy to be a part of that. And now for a top history headline The Daily covered this past week the Northwestern men basketball team won against number one Purdue on February 12th Northwestern was projected to just not even come out with a win basically because Purdue, their opponent, was ranked number one by AP, which is Associated Press for Division I college basketball. So the stakes were high, and Northwestern entered the game at the underdogs.
But to have them come out with that nail-biting just close finish and win was pretty epic. I mean, I didn't get to go through the game, but I was watching on the TV here in the newsroom and seeing the people just stormed the West Ryan Arena. It was pretty dope. That was the first game I was gonna go to, not for the daily.
I usually photograph some of the men's basketball games, but I went, right? I was in the stands. And then once halftime started, I was like, okay, there is no way we're gonna win. So I left.
I made a mistake. I should have stayed. I didn't actually think we were gonna win. Like, apparently we, like, got so many points near the end of the game, like, we were going to lose, but, like, somehow we just, like, scoring.
That's crazy. Senior guard, Bulu, he, like, finished with 26 points. And then redshirt senior guard, Chase Audish, his shooting in the first half was just really bad. Like, he could not make a bucket.
But yeah, we got a 15-point surge in the last eight minutes of the game. That helped just lift the cats up to win. That's definitely an insane win. Thank you both for taking me through the sports desk and some top headlines from Week 7.
From the Daily Northwestern, I'm Erica Schmidt. Thanks for listening to the third weekly episode of The Quarter. This episode was reported and produced by me. The audio editor of the Daily Northwestern is me.
The digital managing editors are Joanne Hayner and Ola Tunji Osha Williams. And the editor-in-chief is Alex Perry. Make sure to subscribe to the Daily Northwestern's podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or SoundCloud to hear more episodes like this.