Isabella Ramírez, (Former) Editor-in-Chief: Columbia Daily Spectator
She just won NAHJ Student of the Year after leading her team through an eventful run of covering protests, a college president's resignation, and more
We were pleased to be joined by Isabella Ramírez for this week’s podcast episode. The day we spoke, Isabella posted an article concluding her tenure as editor-in-chief of Columbia Daily Spectator, the college newspaper covering Columbia University and the surrounding neighborhood.
Isabella and her team worked - at some points - around the clock to cover an eventful year on campus, one that included student protests that received global attention, and the resignation of the college’s president. The real-world experience that Isabella and her news colleagues received will likely shape them going forward for the rest of their lives.
In our interview with Isabella, we reminisced about her tenure, but also talked about other things, including her journalism origin, the skills she brings as a leader, and Spectator’s success at putting women in leadership positions.
Portions of the interview have been shortened for clarity and length (you’ll hear longer answers to the questions below if you listen to the episode).
What draws you to wanting to lead?
I think a really big aspect of leadership for me has always been about teaching.
Even at a high school level, being able to teach people what I knew and also step into this visionary role where not only are you responsible for your independent reporting and writing, but now I'm editing the articles of others, and I'm helping them shape their stories. I'm helping them also achieve their aims in their journalistic process. And that's something that, especially in college, I've grown to really, really love.
In some regards, comparing my experiences as an editor versus as a writer and reporter, I, in many ways, love my role as an editor more because I think that it is a really incredible opportunity to work with such talented fellow journalists, especially at the Columbia Spectator, to sit down with them and really see:
What is their story trying to achieve and how can I best edit it, and also what can I suggest that could really elevate the impact of this storytelling?
Isabella Ramírez
I really love sitting in that backseat and being a fresh pair of eyes or an outside perspective and think both about internally, what are the journalistic aims that we're aiming for here, but also how's our audience feeling, interpreting and reacting to this, and how can we take all of that into account?
So I think one of my favorite parts of leadership has always been about teaching and showing, and also learning from other people and being able to be in this process. There is a pedagogical pillar to what Spectator does. If our first aim is to deliver products and journalism to our community, that helps them understand Columbia, Morningside Heights, and West Harlem, our second aim is to teach people, within staff, how to do those things. So, I think that's really what I've benefited most from in being a leader.
When you look at the early coverage of the student protests and what you were cover now, what do you think about?
I was University News editor, when October 7th happened and all the aftermath. I have been in leadership from the very beginning of the war until now. And so what I've really seen in our coverage as someone who was part of the conversations surrounding the initial stories is that we've really grown in the sophistication of our articles.
I think at the very beginning, it was such a shock. Of course, it was a shock to the whole world. But I think for our newsroom purposes, it was a shock in the sense that we were grappling with what language were we going to use, how we were going to describe what was happening and what people were protesting and what were some of the responses to those protests.
I think we were having such difficult conversations of things that we have not really confronted in the same way before. We've certainly dealt with sensitive storylines. We've dealt with reporting regarding specific identity groups. I think it was just so much more exacerbated during this time.
And it was also being done from even the very early stages, very publicly in the sense that one of our initial stories, in the first few days following October 7, gained a lot of national attention. And that really escalated Spectator's profile in our community and beyond.
Going back to those times, I just remember how much we were really struggling in some senses to figure out what exactly we were doing, who are we following, what standard are we abiding by, and how are we informing our reporters how to do this work. And then as time went on, I think we really began to get the hang of it.
At first we were saying, Israel-Hamas war. Then we sort of transitioned to the War in Gaza. We've used different language, that's a concrete example. But I think there are other ways that we've grappled with similar things.
We were using a lot of the AP style guide at that time. And then that style guide fizzled out. We were looking at outside publications. We were trying to figure out what were the standards being employed just across the board. And we were also dealing with really, really hard sourcing challenges.
In the very beginning, people did not want to talk to us. People were really afraid of this idea of doxing or going public with any viewpoint. I think we saw it everywhere, impacting all types of students. So that was a really great challenge for us in the beginning.
We were dealing with more anonymity than we are now and more requests for it. I really saw so many different factors change, but I think we got much more sophisticated. We got more used to it. We built relationships with groups on campus that took a really long time. And I think those were the strengths that really brought us to a big peak: April (when student protests escalated and a campus building was occupied by students and then raided by police).
It was months of such hard work to build up these standards within Spectator, to build up these sourcing relationships, to do all of these different things that allowed us to do such robust reporting in April, because we knew the people to talk to, and they were willing to talk to us, even when they weren't willing to talk to national outlets who were on the ground at that time. We knew the different, very specific issues facing people on campus and had reported it and spent so much time publishing these pieces.
Isabella Ramírez
I think part of what also made April stand out was for us was it wouldn't have mattered if April wasn't a national or international story. We would have always been there, and I think we would have done better, the same type of robust and dedicated reporting.
And I think that's particularly shown in the months before that, because we were reporting a very high degree what was happening on our campus, whether or not it was gaining national or international attention.
But how it felt so informed by the community that it was impacting, and how close it also felt for us, because, even as people for whom our aim is always to bring the most accurate, truthful, and objective information as possible, it's also as student reporters.
Inherently, we are bringing that sort of identity with us. We're bringing the fact that we're students, and I think that's also what made the coverage feel so close, I think, to many in our community was the fact that it was reported by people who were impacted by the same administrative systems, the same class disruptions, the same theories of different issues as other people, and that experience inevitably showed through in our reporting as well.
Your editorial board was 80% women. What was it like to go through the year with them and what would you say about how you view the state of the journalism industry for women and its place for you?
Our staff, by and large, not just leadership, but our staff, is 75 percent women and that's self-identified.
And that translates directly to our leadership positions. That diversity actually does not diminish at those levels, which is actually incredibly impressive because that's not exactly how it looks in the industry at large. Even for a university that is still a slim majority of women, we see such a more significant population of women on staff. I don't have quite the answer as to why that is the case. But what I can speak to is the fact that it does create such a unique environment.
Many of the decisions that are being made from every single level are being made by women, which is really cool. And I think also contributes to some of the very close bonds that we have on staff. There are not that many spaces, even on Columbia's campus that look that way.
And particularly what's cool to see is in our business and innovations department, we still see that majority, although it's slightly less than our journalism majority. Even on our tech, our engineering, our product design, all the departments that have to do with skills that I think are often associated broadly with men. Coding and software design and all these different skills are still dominated by women, at least at Spectator.
It provides for such a unique space where people have the opportunity to pursue leadership in ways that I think often there are barriers to in other spaces.
I would love to see more people try to interrogate or ask the question and maybe even trying to propose answers or solutions: If Spectator as a student newsroom is majority women or has, more diversity than other spaces, why is that not translating into the industry at large?
Why are leadership positions not seeing the same level of sort of diversity?
Isabella Ramírez
I would love to see how we can push for more women in leadership, how we can push for more different identity groups to be represented by their students in their newsrooms in the way that they are in student newsrooms, particularly at the executive level where a lot of editors-in-chief are leading their newsrooms and they're gaining such unique skills.
I am curious as to where the barriers exist when then going into sort of the professional leadership pathways.
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