Three Kalamazoo College students—Lily Stickley ’25, Bernice Mike ’26 and Kennedy West ’27—have joined the office of Marketing and Communication this term as social media ambassadors to openly share their on-campus experiences with prospective students and families. Lily, a Loy Norrix High School graduate from Kalamazoo, is a double major in English and women, gender and sexuality. Her activities include serving The Index, K’s student newspaper, as its co-editor-in-chief.
We asked Lily to give us a behind-the-scenes look at producing an issue of the paper and here’s what she had to say. Look for the latest edition of The Index across campus on Thursday, November 14, or find it online at index.kzoo.edu.
The Index is the Kalamazoo College student newspaper. Established in 1877, it is the oldest college newspaper in the state of Michigan.
I started writing for The Index my first year at K, when the whole newspaper was only six people in total. But I fell in love with journalism when I was writing for my high school newspaper, Loy Norrix Knight Life. Knight Life was entirely online, so when I came to K and was able to write for a physical paper and see my name in print, I was beyond excited!
Because the staff was so small my first year, I almost immediately became the news editor for The Index. I have stayed in that role since. I have stepped up to start working as the co-editor-in-chief along with Jose Lopez Bernal ‘27 while the actual editors-in-chief are studying abroad. An editor-in-chief at The Index is like a club president, but because we are writing and publishing, they are the people who get the final say in whether something gets published. We also make the final edits to the papers to make sure they are ready to be printed!
The Index meets at 4:30 p.m. every Monday in the Nest at Hicks Student Center. During weekly meetings, students pitch their ideas for the articles that they want to write for the paper. In other meetings, we workshop articles to help people who are stuck on a certain element of their article. We also edit each other’s articles to improve our writing and help students learn the skills of writing in a journalistic style.
I also work on creating the newspaper layout. We use the program Adobe InDesign to format the paper. InDesign is a complicated program that takes a long time to figure out. The first paper of the fall term is coming out on Thursday! Jose and I spent basically the whole of our weekends in The Index office working on layout.
As it was our first time ever using InDesign, we did not know what we were doing, but we eventually started to get the hang of it. One of the complicated things about using InDesign involves adding photos. It requires us to shift everything around to fit it perfectly. That’s fine, but rather time-consuming. However, spending time to make the paper look good is what matters the most to me!
I also work to upload the articles to our website, index.kzoo.edu, where everyone is able to read them! As my high school newspaper was published exclusively online, I am much more used to this format, and I can make more creative choices to make the articles look nicer than in the print edition. It will also not take me an extra 20 minutes to fix something if I accidentally mess it up.
I have really enjoyed working as co-editor-in-chief. I am glad that I had the opportunity to take on the role for the term! I am also happy to give it back.
