ON BEING AN EDITOR: DONE AND DUNNING-KRUGER

Writing About WritingPersonal GrowthJournalism

27 Oct

Recently, as part my MA course, I was involved in a mass group project intended to simulate a day in a newsroom. If it hasn’t become obvious from this section of my website yet, the course is in journalism so a project of this kind isn’t exactly unexpected. It did, however, lead to some interesting discoveries about myself and my level of readiness for the field.

On this project, which consisted of five teams of four, I was appointed as the ‘editor’ of my team. I was fairly chuffed with this. I’m only a couple of weeks into my course, so to have that responsibility handed to me was a nice challenge and a bit of a note to myself that I can’t be doing all that badly.

Whether that appointment was by design or by random lottery is entirely beside the point though, because the outcome either way led to some interesting thinking points on some previous conceptions I had about myself and where I stand as a professional.

Fitting the profile.

I like to think of myself as an organised person. My career history and trajectory so far has made me that way. Whether professionally or in an amateur capacity, I enjoy directing and managing projects.

As a project manager, I love exploring different processes and approaches. As a writer, I pride myself on learning formats and structures through osmosis and close observation.

I am the kind of person who has very clear ideas on how things can work and how goals and milestones can be reached (read: I can be a bit of a control freak and have a spreadsheet for everything – including Christmas presents and whether or not they’re purchased and/or wrapped yet).

These are qualities that an editor has. But these qualities in isolation do not an editor make. It was over the course of this project that I realised I am nowhere near ready to even take a shot at the editor’s desk.

The comfort of planning.

I believe I nailed it on the lead up to the day. In my preparation, I can objectively say that my performance was stellar.

I had a spreadsheet for everything. A neatly laid out cloud resource for the other members of the team to engage and share content on. I even had a series of well-researched, glossy multimedia templates built to suit the brand of the project and drive social engagement and reach when the articles required as part of the project were to be shared across social.

More important than that, to me at least, I made myself active and available to everyone on the team to talk about ideas, pitfalls, worries, pitches, whatever. Because this is something I believe a good leader does.

The best project managers don’t bark orders and tell people what to do, they allow team members a safe and creative space to find their own way to do what needs to be done.

As I say, on the lead up to the day, I was good. But once the simulation started, the cracks started to form.

The chaos of the newsroom.

A great editor, like a great ship’s captain, can keep a cool head in a hot situation. Given my own space and pace, I can do that too. But dropped into the hectic environment of a bustling and noisy newsroom, where many different things are unfolding at once, I discovered that a lot of the level-headedness and organisation I had prided myself on began to falter in the face of relative (simulated) chaos.

That’s not something I attribute to anyone but myself, by the way. It’s not a complaint, it’s an observation and an acknowledgement of room for growth.

My brain gets fuzzy when faced with too much stimulus. The newsroom on that day was a hotbed of stimulus (in the least gross and creepy way possible mind).

In my old job, people were almost afraid to make noise around me. I would (politely) make it known that compulsive pen clicking and foot tapping were public enemy number one.

Unpredictable and repetitive noises run through my brain like a Harland and Wolff ship through an iceberg. So, packaged with the fact that I had been working remotely for more than two years previously, the intensity of the newsroom was not something I was prepared for.

The overload of stimulus caused me to slow down a lot. And in trying to make my brain work more quickly, I tended to forget things. Attempting to run triage with my team on their issues – amongst the sounds of the other teams doing the same thing – left me a little breathless and therefore less useful to those I was working with.

The funny thing is, in all of that chaos, it became hard to maintain the thought that some of the team members put lower down on the hitlist after triage could easily be helping each other out or diversifying their workload in the interim. Luckily this was something I cottoned on to quickly enough.

The point is, in the face of the active part of production, I realised I hadn’t yet developed the skills or mindset to be able to excel. The pre-production side I’ve got down. The rest is a work in progress.

Self-awareness as an asset.

Some people feel that finding and acknowledging flaws in oneself is fatalistic or pessimistic. I don’t think so. Not if they’re grounded in fact and not flagellatory.

I’ve often been complimented on my self-awareness by managers and higher-ups. At least I believe it’s a compliment – either that or old bosses just weren’t sure what else to note.

I can find patterns and flaws in processes easily enough, even with only a small amount of confidence or competence in an area. That ability to recognise format structure and patterns serves me well. But I always try to keep the Dunning-Kruger effect in mind whenever assessing myself or my expertise in anything.

For anyone not familiar, the Dunning-Kruger effect (often confused with the Pareto 80-20 Principle) says that the lower a threshold of competence in something someone has, the less likely they are to realise how low their threshold of competence is.

Simply put, if you don’t know a lot about something, you probably don’t realise how much about that thing you don’t know.

You see examples of Dunning-Kruger everywhere. A lot of very beautiful examples of the effect in action can be found in just how confident the public at large are at the moment in their opinions and thoughts on virology because of the pandemic. Suddenly we’re all experts on viruses and R numbers.

I firmly believe that operating without clarity on your level of competence can make someone a real liability. So I constantly try to remain aware of how I’m doing and how much I really know about what I’m talking about.

It’s this awareness that made me realise, in the moments of chaos in the newsroom, how little I know about being an editor and how that lack of knowledge made me less effective in medias res.

Moving on, not moving up.

Changing careers at 31 is challenging. I’m loving it, but it takes the kind of humility one gets when considering their own place under the microscope of the Dunning-Kruger effect to be able to step back and say: “You know what, I’m not quite ready for this yet.”

I can confidently say, you know what, I’m not quite ready to be an editor yet.

This isn’t negative criticism of myself. Self-awareness tells me that I shouldn’t expect myself to be ready to be an editor yet. I’m a student of journalism currently. If I knew the things I needed to know to succeed, I wouldn’t need to be sitting this course.

My biggest takeaway from the newsroom simulation project, and I believe it to be a valuable one, is that I’m delighted that I’m not ready to be an editor yet.

I’ve got years of being a reporter and making mistakes and learning more about how to handle the stimulus of a busy newsroom ahead of me. I’ve got lots more patterns and formats to discover and put into practice. And those will be exciting years.

I am comfortable and content being outside the door. For now.