Skye Swann and Angeli Mittal Week 7

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In this episode of The Weekly, sports editor Skye Swann and print editor Angeli Mittal outline the North West men’s basketball record win over Purdue, the Spring Sports Preview and a few other headlines.

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ERICA SCHMITT: From the Daily Northwestern, I’m Erica Schmitt. It’s The Weekly: a podcast that breaks down our top headlines each week. Welcome to the third quarter recap.

ERICA SCHMITT: Today I’m here with sports editor Skye Swann and editor Angeli Mittal. They will tell me about the sports office and some recent titles in the Daily. First of all, Skye, what are some of the previous areas of The Daily that you’ve been part of?

Skye Swann: I was an associate sports editor for two quarters before, and I was also an associate editor for Gameday. In the role of Editor, I served as Development and Recruitment Editor and Newsletter Editor. So all these different jobs kind of helped me go into this quarter with the mindset of being able to plan and be really organized because that’s what it takes to be an editor . But adjusting is also about making sure that for late night sports, there may be groundbreaking things or things that are out of your control. So being able to just go with the flow and be able to produce anything on the fly.

ERICA SCHMITT: What does the sportswriter do?

Skye Swann: I budget all the sports content published by The Daily Northwestern and I assign my reporters at different rates and they go to the games, and they cover and we write fun features, recaps, little side pieces and columns about the different sports .

ERICA SCHMITT: Skye says the biggest project she worked on this quarter was the Spring Sports Preview, a special edition of The Daily which was published on February 16. The issue focuses on what’s to come for the spring sports season. She says she started creating a list of planned stories, also called a budget, at the start of the term.

Skye Swann: This quarter as a sportswriter is kind of like my watershed moment. I started creating my budget the third week of the quarter, just knowing that we want to cover lacrosse, softball and baseball and trying to get some sort of precedent, or what to watch, just a few key points takeaways for this season, some feature pieces on some of the key players from the three different teams. And also, making sure that maybe we can get some audiovisual aspects, but that’s always more difficult, just contact the sports communication team. Once the budget was released, we asked journalists to take reports. Then we tried to get most of the content to come a week before so we could speak with the design and have things placed with the web developer, design team looking for photos and cutouts that way, on Wednesday print night, we’re basically sailing smoothly.

ERICA SCHMITT: What has been the biggest challenge for you as a publisher?

Skye Swann: A SID (sports information director) is a sports communications person, so to go and talk to an athlete you need to go through one of the North West sports communications workers and then they will arrange the interviews . The challenge was to get the SIDs to react. No matter how many bumps, emails I send, they send, it’s been, like, a no-show on their end. So it was a challenge, but all of my reporters did a great job of being flexible and overcoming that hurdle.

ERICA SCHMITT: What advice would you give to other women pursuing a career in sports journalism?

Skye Swann: Sometimes a woman can feel discouraged to be a woman in sports, because it’s a male-dominated field of journalism and very patriarchal, very misogynistic. I learned that whatever you do, you can accomplish. It just takes determination and all your best skills to make it happen. Whatever you want, don’t be afraid to do it because it’s achievable.

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ERICA SCHMITT: Angeli, you are one of three print editors this quarter. How has this experience been for you so far?

Angeli Mittal: I have mainly worked with digital, although my first role at The Daily as an editor was that of deputy to the city. So, it’s kind of a throwback to first year – it gave me those vibes. Being a print editor, like this, is quite different, like editing print stories is a totally different atmosphere. But I think it’s really fun. Mainly because I really like writing for Le Quotidien. It’s kind of cool to go back to that and read what other people write because I feel like I don’t have as much time to spend on that, reading other people’s stories. And now that I’m editing them, I hear about the cool stuff, like education stuff going on in Evanston, or politics, or weird things happening on campus.

ERICA SCHMITT: As a former digital editor, Angeli says she liked seeing more incorporation of multimedia content with print.

Angeli Mittal: It was pretty cool to see how well we integrated multimedia into print content in general, as in particular with the similar establishment of the data visualization desktop. There are so many printed stories that go like, with graphics. There are also a lot of cool maps I’ve seen in print stories, which was really interesting. And also, there were a ton of stories from the city along with videos. Which I thought, “That’s a very interesting take on this.” And so it’s very, very cool to see.

ERICA SCHMITT: It’s a really big change, but I’m glad you like it! Can you tell me about some recent print stories that you like?

Angeli Mittal: One that is particularly striking is the Starbucks story that was recently written for the campus. These were the seemingly free items that students thought they were getting when they bought things from Starbucks in Norris (university center) but ended up being charged retroactively for the items. To be one of those people who lost a ton of restaurant dollars because of this, seeing this story and hearing about other experiences like this, it really hit home and I think the story was really well put together.

ERICA SCHMITT: Angeli says one of her favorite stories comes from the pace of city office education.

Angeli Mittal: A story that I was watching, like an audio piece that I thought was really good. It was about how black students were disproportionately disciplined compared to white students at ETHS. And the two journalists who covered it did it very well and I think the quotes were so powerful. So I was really excited to read that. I’m really proud of the content circulating this quarter. And I am particularly happy to be part of it.

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ERICA SCHMITT: And now, a historic headline The Daily covered last week: The North West men’s basketball team won over No. 1-ranked Purdue on Feb. 12.

Skye Swann: It was predicted that Northwestern wouldn’t even get a win because Purdue, their opponent, was ranked number one by AP, which is the Associated Press, for Division I college basketball. So the stakes were high, and Northwestern entered the game as an underdog, but to take them out with that tight, tight finish and that win was pretty epic. I mean, I couldn’t go to the game but I was watching on TV here in the newsroom and seeing people storming the Welsh-Ryan arena was pretty dope.

Angeli Mittal: It was the first game I was going to attend, not for The Daily – I usually photograph some men’s basketball games. But I went there, didn’t I? And I was in the stands. And then once halftime started, I was like, ‘Okay, there’s no way we’re winning.’ So I left. I made a mistake. I should have stayed. I didn’t really think we were going to win. Like apparently we got so many points towards the end of the game. Like, we were going to lose but somehow we were like scoring – it’s crazy.

Skye Swann: Senior guard Boo Buie, as he did, finished with 26 points, then (one of the other guards) senior redshirt guard Chase Audige, his first-half shot was really bad. Like he couldn’t make a good bucket, but he had a 15-point surge in the last eight minutes of the game and it helped the Cats win.

ERICA SCHMITT: It’s definitely a crazy victory. Thanks to both of you for taking me through the sports desk and some headlines from week 7.

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ERICA SCHMITT: From the Daily Northwestern, I’m Erica Schmitt. Thank you for listening to the third weekly episode of the quarter. This episode was reported and produced by me. The Audio Editor of The Daily Northwestern is me, the Digital Editors are Joanne Haner and Olatunji Osho-Williams, and the Editor-in-Chief is Alex Perry. Be sure to subscribe to The Daily Northwestern podcasts on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or SoundCloud to hear more episodes like this.

E-mail: [email protected]
Twitter: @eschmitt318

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