Week 4: How lack of leadership pushed me to do more

This week has been relatively slow in the newsroom. I definitely had a lot to do on Tuesday, as I was finishing the last touches on two pieces I’d been working on last week, but other than that, it’s been a lot of sitting at my computer doing absolutely nothing. I think that has been one of the leadership problems lately — a lot of editors have been retiring, or are on vacation, so there is very little organization when it comes to planning the next day’s issue. For example, I worked on the 4th of July, and from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. none of the interns were assigned anything until another editor came in for her shift and started giving us heavy assignments, and she was clearly annoyed that we had not been told to do the assignment before. I think that if there was a more centralized leadership structure, this would not have happened, and if the paper’s leadership could communicate better, then work could have been assigned in a more timely manner.

In a way, because of this lack of leadership on behalf of the editors, this week I really had to work on my personal contributions. Since I wasn’t being assigned anything, I spent all day Thursday looking for potential ideas to pitch. It was nervewracking because I don’t feel familiar with the area enough to be able to pitch my own stories, but I came up with two pitches that were finally accepted, and they were both related to Latin America. Finally, I thought, something that I’m really quite passionate about. Don’t get me wrong — town halls are fun and all, but writing about issues that are pertinent to the Latino community makes me feel as if I am doing something to generate awareness and to add my grain of sand to the immigration debate. Seeing how excited I feel about being able to write about Latin American affairs, I think I’m starting to find the niche that I want to focus on in my journalistic career from here on.

In other news, on Thursday we had a moment of silence to honor the victims of the Capital Gazette shooting. It provided me with some interesting insight into the way top leadership managed a crisis, and it also proved my thoughts last week that leadership is generally weak. The entire staff filed into the auditorium at 2:15, the time we had been told to arrive at so that we could all be in place at 2:33, the time when the shooting began. In those 15 minutes, people trickled into the auditorium, some laughing, some talking, but most being solemn and quiet. We had been told there would be remarks before the moment of silence, so we kept looking up, waiting for someone to speak. The editor-in-chief stood up, and we all thought it was going to start, but then she just stared at us for about seven minutes and nervously shuffled notes around. Noone knew what to do, or what was happening, and the entire air was filled with this nervous, awkward tension. Finally she spoke, but her speech was short and hard to hear, as she barely raised her voice and did not use a microphone. When her speech was over, there were still about 6 minutes to go before the moment of silence, but nobody knew whether to start it early, or talk, or be silent. I kept looking at other reporters and they just shrugged at me, showing they were as confused as I was. I think the entire situation made a lot of people uncomfortable, and I heard people criticize the editor for the lack of planning and for not showing the strong leadership style that we needed to hear about. It would have gone so much better if she had spoken assertively and inspirationally, and had not seemed as clueless as the rest of us were. Then again, it is possible that she was subject to the double-bind theory, something we studied when we analyzed gender roles in leadership. Maybe her soft approach, while a good one, wasn’t appreciated as much because it fit in more with the feminine stereotype than the masculine one that has been shown to be preferred by people in times of conflict.