New Beginnings
Senior Mackenzie Roberts obtains new skills to help her take on a new role on her yearbook staff
The yearbook is a timeline, a time capsule, a love letter. It has to encapsulate what that specific year was like while it happens, which is not an easy task. It takes many difficult hours of dedication. Editing, designing, reporting, the hard work of many staffers. It’s long nights staring at a computer screen, redesigning spreads and graphics, and correcting proofs. But it’s all gratifying in the end when the book gets sent out, with excited faces of students picking themselves out, and the staffers know what their work was worth it.
One of those dedicated staffers was senior Mackenzie Roberts, senior editor at the Hamilton Southeastern Sceptre Yearbook. She was in charge of the senior portraits, senior ads, seniors ads, and the people section is her responsibility.
“Toward the end of the semester, I was given the opportunity to be in charge of all the seniors,” Roberts said. “Senior quotes, Senior pictures, just like all the senior people really, like freshmen, and the people section.”
Roberts also had many responsibilities involving graphic design. This past year with her Intro to Journalism class, she helped make some pages for the book and quickly picked up a knack for design and loved doing it. So, when her teacher offered her a position for this year, she took it.
“Our school does the writing class and then you do a few pages of the yearbook while you’re in that class,” Roberts said. “So then I met my teachers second semester and my teacher was Martin, and she was talking with our, at the time, our editor-in-chief about a page. And so then I offered to, you know, give her like some samples just because I overheard them. And so I did some designs like graphic design, just some different options and that’s how I initially got involved.”
In her time in Intro to Journalism, as mentioned Roberts contributed many pages to the Sceptre. One of those pages was a graphic for a spread regarding gun violence. It contained a list of schools where there had been school shootings, an illustration of a gun and a large line of people, with the main colors being black and red with in bigger texts the words “NO MORE” and “47”. It was used in the book, and it was so well done Roberts’ advisor suggested she submit it for a Women’s Press award. Roberts submitted the graphic, and ended up getting 3rd place overall all for it.
“I created a graphic to go along with the story that I was chosen to write and it was gun violence,” Roberts said. “So, I created a graphic based on that, and later on, it was second semester, there was a Women’s Press award and I submitted it thinking nothing would happen and then I got third place, which is great.”
With this award and skill, Roberts hoped to contribute more this year with an actual editor position on staff, with her design and other skills she acquired over the year. And while at IU High School Journalism Institute, Roberts strived above and beyond to achieve this for her book, wanting to adapt new ideas and design concepts to make her section as good as it could be.
Story by Keira Hacker, Carmel High School