By Charles Langford

Job shadower for the Southern Standard

For a job shadowing assignment, Irving College eighth-grader Charles Langford visited the Southern Standard. He interviewed employees in the editorial department and wrote his own article about his job shadowing experience. Below is the article written in the third person. 

An eighth-grader visited the Southern Standard Friday afternoon to see how the newspaper is made and wrote his own article about the experience.

Charles Langford, 14, learned about the Southern Standard and what it is like working in the editorial department while he job shadowed for his school, Irving College.

Managing editor Seth Wright showed Langford the printing room first. He explained how the press worked, and what colors were used. The press uses a CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black) system for the colors. Those four inks mix to create all the colors that appear on the page. While talking with Wright, Langford learned that the pictures in the paper are made up of tiny dots. These dots consist of the CMYK colors and, if you look closely, all the dots can be seen layered on top of each other to form an image. 

While job shadowing, Langford also learned that the editorial department deals with writing and editing the articles, and making sure they come out clean and with as few mistakes as possible.

Langford interviewed those who work in editorial. He first interviewed Wright, who started working at the Standard in 1997 as a graphic designer, but later got promoted to the position he holds today. Langford proceeded to interview Taylor Moore who deals with crime and city government. Then, he interviewed Bethany Porter, who deals with county government and other interesting stories. Langford asked the writers  about some stories the staff has covered in the past.

At the end of the day, Langford was able to write his own article on deadline and have it published on the front page.