As you can see from looking through our website, TKS is getting back into the swing of things with our first articles of Winter Term. As we make our plans for what we’ll be covering in the upcoming months, we wanted to make another public call for students interested in joining, telling you how much we welcome your involvement, and how easy it is to get started.

With the unusual conditions created by COVID-19, we expected this to be a challenging year to get new students involved with TKS. Having less writers does make it more difficult to keep up with our publishing schedule, so of course we want new writers to keep the paper in healthy shape, now and going forward.

But, we also want to encourage volunteering because we know how great of an opportunity TKS is for students. This newspaper is an outlet for what a lot of students want from college, which is a real hands-on experience. It consists of writing regularly, conducting research and interviews, editing and eventually getting to see the work you contributed in a published format.

As editors, we’ve found that experience highly rewarding, and have learned as much from TKS as anything else at Knox. If you have any interest in journalism, TKS is your chance to get started, and if you put some time in, can very easily end up with a paid position with us doing engaging work.

As for how you can get involved (and anybody can, as long as you are a student at Knox, no prior experience required) — you ideally would get your start by attending one of our Monday meetings, which are at 5:15 PM Central Time every Monday. You can email [email protected] to join our email list and receive the link to our meetings every Monday.

At the Monday meetings, our editors will read off ideas for future articles and discuss projects they are already working on. You’re also free to bring your own article ideas to meetings. Anyone present is invited to sign up to write an article. For students who can’t make our meetings, we try to send out a list of articles that are available to sign up for afterwards.

If you sign up for an article, you’ll get a flexible deadline, information about who we think you should interview for a story and be in contact with an editor who’ll try to help you out as problems come up. Once you’ve done the research and put your article together, you can submit it to the editor who will have suggestions on how to improve it. Once it has gone through our review process, it’ll be ready for publication.

If you’re intimidated by immediately taking a story, you are welcome to shadow an editor on a story they are working on. This entails coming along with them (virtually this term) on interviews to see how the process works. You can also ask to co-write an article with someone to share the workload.

We hope you’ll enjoy the process of writing articles enough to do it regularly, but there’s no commitment when you’re volunteering. We usually have writers who take articles every week, but there’s no problem if you just want to occasionally volunteer to do one.

As mentioned, starting off as a volunteer can easily lead to a staff position, whether it’s as Staff Writer, or as an editor for one of our sections (News, Mosaic, Discourse, and Sports). Obviously all these positions come with time commitments, but are great opportunities to get paid by Knox to do writing and editing work.

We’ve mostly covered how you would go about writing an article, but there’s of course other ways to get involved with TKS. If you’re interested in opinion writing, photography, graphics, video or podcasts, you’re also welcome to contact us about any of those and we’ll help you get started.

As seniors, we’ve gone through the process of coming in new to TKS, learning from an experienced staff and eventually having the baton passed down to us. We want there to continue to be great journalism happening at Knox after we’re gone, so we’re eager to see newcomers pop into our virtual meetings, and to help you get started with being part of this newspaper!