“What’s your headline?” a voice asked me from a rectangular Zoom window during a 10 AM editorial meeting for a daily New York City newspaper.
I had only prepared a pitch—how the overturning of Roe v. Wade would impact college students’ abortion access—not a headline. Our meetings didn’t run that way at the Harvard Independent. I used the spare seconds it took to unmute myself and clear my throat to condense my preliminary research on the topic into a concise thesis.
“Panic… Grips College Campuses in the Post-Roe Era,” I ventured, speaking frenetically for fear of taking up too much time amongst a dozen seasoned reporters. I was the youngest person on the call and the newest addition to the team.
The editor-in-chief allowed a moment of silence, then responded slowly, deliberately.
“Now, that’s a story,” he said, with a slight smirk beneath his signature flat cap. I couldn’t help but smile.
“But please, Mary Julia, speak one word a second.”
I nodded and smiled even wider, the way any intern would to affirm their enthusiasm to their boss on day two of a junior summer internship. “Got it!” I quickly responded, then immediately corrected myself with a laugh: “Got… It…”
“Great!” chimed our associate editor, acknowledging that my pitch had earned our chief editor’s stamp of approval. “Ok, who’s next?”
This is how the real world of journalism works, I realized. To sell your story to senior leadership before you’ve even written it, you must identify its precise angle, its headline—and if you don’t have one in mind, you’ll be forced to procure it on the spot (aided by the luxury of speaking one word a second, of course).
“You really have to form your ideas fully before even approaching the editor of a newspaper,” noted Marissa Garcia ’20, the former editor-in-chief of the Independent, who is now a freelance journalist for the Washington Post’s Climate Solutions column.
At the Independent, our weekly storyboards progress more casually, with staffers rolling around in office chairs as we bite into Otto pizza and chew over bits of campus gossip that could culminate into an article not yet published by the Crimson. I expect our writers to bring fresh pitches to the newsroom, but in hopes of lowering the conversational threshold to welcome bold ideas from quieter voices, I don’t call on each one of them or demand a headline. We’re unpaid college students doing this mostly for fun, not full-time, trained reporters.
But writing for the Independent prepared Garcia to freelance for a national newspaper. “Because we celebrate independence so much, your editors aren’t telling you what to do,” she said of the Independent’s philosophy. “You are walking around with that self-initiative that we breed so much, and you are designing the story yourself.”
“Freelance is something I believe everyone at the Indy is capable of,” expressed Garcia. “It’s very much ‘find your own opportunity,’ though. You are the one responsible for pitching your own ideas, for cultivating your ideas and harnessing those ideas into the stories they could become, and selling them as such.”
While the practice may be effective, the arena is undeniably smaller. When reporting on the world beyond the gates of Harvard Yard, your ability to find a novel story in the oversaturated media marketplace is put to the test. The seeds for an investigation could lie in the third paragraph of a rant on Substack, the questions raised by a local journalist’s Twitter post, or the tenth bill of a legislative package passed by your governor last week. But if the New York Times already published a similar headline, forget it.
“Don’t react to the Times, be ahead of the Times,” one of our writers asserted in a meeting. Being first is the currency of journalism.
And when another reporter does beat you to the punch, go further than the “first-day lead,” my editor told me. Scrutinize a surface-level narrative and interrogate simple details in a “second-day lead.” Tackle a hot topic like abortion in an unconventional way. Look ahead in the United States’ government calendar and investigate a case that will soon be heard by the courts.
Almost as much as the angle of your article, the nitty-gritty details matter, too. “We need clean copy,” my editor would always say. My bible for the summer became our Twelfth Edition Reporter’s Handbook and Manual of Style. I learned to not capitalize the “t” in titles of publications except our own. To exclusively write Mr., Ms., or Mrs. after the first mention of a full name. To include no more than five sentences per paragraph in news stories. To never use the word “reveals”—a second-nature verb to any humanities major like myself—for “God reveals, man discloses,” my editor wrote in the margins of one of my submissions.
But more than the savvy to craft headlines or the tools to clean up my copy, this summer cultivated in me a curious confidence.
“What was most intimidating was that this was my first time ever doing it completely by myself, being my own independent reporter,” Garcia recalled of the first article she wrote for the Post.
I, too, felt intimidated before delivering my first pitch, speaking at an almost indecipherable pace. But few of the people I interviewed for articles—ranging from constitutional law experts and tenured professors to orthodox rabbis and Afghan resistance fighters—knew I was a 21-year-old college intern. If I spoke with enough self-assurance, my age didn’t matter.
“I’m a reporter on an end-of-day deadline,” my cold-call solicitations began. “If you could speak to me, sir, I’d only need ten minutes of your time.”
With each pitch, with each call, my voice became clearer, slower, my inquiries more probing. I could sow enough trust into the voice on the other end of the line that they would answer my tough questions. Or I could push back and hit them with the cold, hard truth of a convincing counterargument.
“When you walk into the room, you’re smarter than anyone you interview,” my editor assured me before I spoke with the man leading the affirmative action case against Harvard. Perhaps he was just wielding his signature dry humor, puffing up a young rookie before her first at bat. But by the time I left the newsroom, 18 bylines on highly contentious issues in tow, I came to see how that confidence could serve the story, pushing me to trust my instincts in conversation.
Returning to the Independent this fall, my last semester as your editor-in-chief, I hope to fuel the same fire in our writers. Although the Harvard Independent’s 2022 Style Guide is less pedantic on the proper use of “reveals,” the conviction that any story can be our story if we chase it hard enough exists all the same.
In our first storyboard meeting on campus, I won’t be able to help but ask: “What’s your headline?”
Mary Julia Koch ’23 (editorinchief@harvardindependent.com) asks her writers to speak just one word a second.