The State Press leadership gives a tour of the people behind the various stories and multimedia content produced at The State Press. Join Editor-in-Chief Kimberly Rapanut and Multimedia Director Alfred Varela as they tour their desks and sit down with Magazine Editor-in-Chief Molly Stellino.
Transcript:
Tom Blodgett: College journalists coming together to cover their campus and form their craft and prepare to launch into the professional world.
Tina Giuliano: The State Press is completely student-run, so for me, this means that I can be an actual reporter and not just an intern or student. I am the reporter, I am the editor, which is a special experience for me and I think for everybody. As you know, I go through my college career.
Kimberly Rapanut: This desk is The Echo it's run by MacKinley Lutes-Adlhoch. Look at her lovely desk. They're wonderful people. This is a new desk that I created solely for the purpose of honoring creative writing and non-traditional journalism and I think they do a very good job at it.
MacKinley Lutes-Adlhoch: People ask me all the time what The Echo is or what it means. And honestly, it's pretty hard to say. I think mainly you just kind of have to read it to get a sense of what it is. But it was created with the intention of being a home for writers who care a little bit more about narrative, voice and style, kind of pushing the boundaries of what traditional journalism is, with essays and outside of the box reporting.
Kimberly Rapanut: This is our business, science and technology desk. They do a great job at covering ASU research and technology and business news it's run by Rayan Vatti. He's wonderful, very funny.
And this over here is our Politics desk. So they cover everything from local campus politics like USG to local politics, like city council, the Leg. and stuff. And then they also cover national politics sometimes and how it applies to ASU in Arizona and Savannah runs that desk and she is great. She's very wonderful.
Andrew Howard, one of the managing editors, and Adrienne, one of the other managing editors. And they oversee the senior reporters, which is why they're kind of just chillin' in here now where they hold their meeting.
Andrew Howard: I'm fact-checking the story right now, which means that I'm going in and I'm seeing what every statistic is on the golf scores. So, for example, this player had 10 birdies. So now I'm checking the golf statistics website and confirming that she did indeed have 10 birdies. Which was the most on ASU's team. We do this for every sports story. Make sure that all the statistics are correct.
Alfred Varela: We here at The State Press sort of have a responsibility. We have sort of a duty to the students here being the sort of leading student news publication here to keep them informed, to sort of keep people accountable here at the university and to make sure that all these students are sort of being served in that fashion.
Molly Stellino: When someone brings a pitch we have come with a list of 10 sources that they can reach out to because magazine pieces are typically longer than pieces on the digital side. So it's always better to have too many sources than not enough. And then we also require like background research just to make sure that we have a strong foundation to go off of before we start reporting.
Jay Perez: I actually jumped ship over to the magazine. I used to be a digital kid for I think, three semesters and that was really fun. But I just saw the mag and what they were doing and just kind of the creativity of the whole thing about something I really wanted to be involved in. And so, you know, I came over here and I feel like I've had a chance to go a little bit more in-depth in the stories and to kind of just let those creative juices flow a little bit more on this side than the digital side.
Kaleb Martinez: We cover basically all ASU athletics, from football, basketball to smaller sports like soccer or volleyball. We take a lot of pride in reporting objectively and to bring the ASU community in the loop with our game coverage.
Alfred Varela: So this is Podcast. This is one of the many multimedia desks. They do long-form audio stories on everything from politics to community-oriented stories and a bunch of other original content stories like I just said we do original content, but we also do supporting content for our other desks if they so need it. But for the majority, the most part, they're doing stuff on their own, which is pretty cool.
Alfred Varela: Another multimedia that's we have this Video right here. They are in charge of making all these sort of video content that comes out from The State Press. That includes sports recaps, normal recaps or the bevy of original content they sort of work on.
Connor Child: We have kind of a unique opportunity to tell stories in a different way and kind of capture some true feelings on camera and provide a really cool visual aspect for stories.
Kimberly Rapanut: So this is our Opinion desk and they write opinions, from things about politics to sustainability, to sports. And they do a very great job on showcasing the diverse voices and opinions of the ASU community, I believe.
Alfred Varela: Inside, we have the Illustration desk, which is, I am rudely interrupting their pitch meeting right now, but they are in charge of making all of the visual elements for all of our stories, the ones that aren't photos anyway. All of the pretty graphics, all the pretty artwork that you see on social media and our website is done by these kind folks.
Joey Coalter: So we were debating on what is more 90s, is it Reptar with the jazz pattern of the paper cup, or is it a Tamagotchi.
Kimberly Rapanut: This is our Community and Culture Desk. They cover general campus news. They do some great cultural coverage of breaking news. They really do it all. Ellie Borst and Itzia Crespo run this desk, wonderful ladies highly recommend.
Jessica Myers: Alfred!
Alfred Varela: Hello Jess.
Jessica Myers: Are you busy?
Alfred Varela: A little bit. I'll be... one second. OK. And this is Photography. This is the other side of our visual elements here. Where all our other headers go that aren't some graphic art. All of the photos for the sports games, for all of the community stories, for politics stories. It's all done by these kind folk as well. They are, and again, another important part of the state press making sure that we look nice. All of our stories look nice. They have nice multimedia elements accompany all of our stories.
Sabine Galvis: There is very few opportunities where everything is run by students and these young people get to take a really active role in creating these journalism products that really serve our community. So The State Press, it exists on a couple levels for me. On one hand, it's a news organization. It's kind of, we aim for professional standards and it is a job in that sense. It's also a family and a friend group to me.
Kimberly Rapanut: For a lot of people, including myself, The State Press means family. And it's the first place I ever really felt like I was a journalist.
Reach the reporter at zvanarsd@asu.edu or follow @ZachVanArs on Twitter.
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Zach Van Arsdale was the head of the multimedia department from August 2020 to May 2022, shaping design and multimedia storytelling at The State Press in addition to designing article experiences, illustrations and taking photographs. He has previously worked for The Howard Center of Investigative Journalism and on the Carnegie-Knight News21 project: "Unmasking America."
