Leadership Team
The Hornet Tribune student leadership is composed of the editor-in-chief, media advertising and marketing chief, and the strategic initiatives and development chief. These student leaders are responsible for ultimately leading the staff toward fulfilling the mission, vision, strategic planning, and execution of The Hornet Tribune each week. They are responsible for creating an environment that is positive and amicable for a team of 50 students to achieve the goals that are essential for a productive, informative, efficient, and attractive campus newspaper.
Leadership is about inspiring followers to achieve common goals, which applies to division heads, section editors, managers and chief executives. Leaders at all ranks are expected to take their groups, or their organizations to places they would not likely go if not for the presence of an inspirational leader. Thus, good leaders, by their very nature, must be risk- takers unafraid of taking on calculated risk. Combining an appetite for risk with creative thinking can result in innovative action that is the hallmark of the behavior pattern recognized in successful entrepreneurial leaders.
Leading a news organization in an era of instant distribution, social media commentary, and economic uncertainty is fraught with challenges. These challenges became especially pronounced in a politically polarized climate when the sitting President castigated the press “as an enemy of the American people” and adapted the phrase “fake news” to describe any reporting he found unfavorable.
Declining revenue, shrinking audience, industry consolidation – have all accelerated in the post-Internet era resulting in a news industry in transition and chaos. For example, newspaper industry employment has collapsed, falling by more than 60 percent since 1990. There are now more people working at online publications than at newspapers. The transition is rippling throughout all forms of the news media, forcing smaller companies to align with larger ones, others to divest and many others to significantly restructure. Billions of dollars of new risk capital are flowing into a market where old capital is looking to escape. Mergers and acquisition deals in the media sector reached $180 billion in 2015, “exceeding the combined value of transactions completed over the preceding four years.”
Neil Shapiro, former president of NBC News, described the journalistic context this way: “There is something honorable about finding the truth and doing the best you can to eliminate your biases, and say that wherever the story is going to take me is where I am going to go.” The news industry has long cherished its role in American democracy and used its Constitutional protection found in the First Amendment to attract journalists interested in the work as a noble calling. The maintained the news business “must have higher ideals than making money, responsibilities beyond keeping shareholders happy.” He acknowledged, however, that producing news is a business venture, which required profits to remain viable.
