Have you ever wondered how the Golden Arrow is made? Here is an inside look on how our school newspaper is produced.

First, the staff participates in a brainstorm meeting. All of the staff pitches in a variety of story ideas for the month. The ideas can come from the writer’s personal knowledge as well as his or her beats, which are their personal informant on campus. This process usually lasts for two days.

After the editors gather the pile of ideas, they determine the ones that are going to be written. Factors that go into deciding whether a story is written or not include time relevancy and importance.

The stories are assigned to writers whom the editors find best fit for the story. If the writer is involved in the story content, he or she cannot write the story because personal bias would break our journalistic integrity.

The writers typically take about a week to go through four drafts in which they take advice from three different editors. First, the story goes through the page editor to ensure the story is going in a good direction and determine additional interviews are necessary. The draft is then sent to the editors-in-chief for a more detailed look at the writing and whether the story follows AP style (journalistic conventions). After, the draft is sent to our adviser, who catches the mistakes missed by the student editors. Finally, the draft is sent back to the page editor for final tweaks before putting it on the page.

The Golden Arrow is produced using Adobe InDesign for layouts. The editor carefully lay out the story for maximum readability before we send the final version of the paper to the printer.
We receive the paper the next day, stuff the paper with advertisements and distribute it to you!