Experience as a Newsletter Editor

I woke up with a message this morning “The final PDF is in your inbox. Check and let me know”

No it wasn’t someone from work asking me to review a presentation or code; it was someone from my Newsletter team. So it’s finally over now I thought. This was the last edition.

I started drafting the mail for the launch. Copy pasted the template as usual , changed the link and month name and was about to hit the send button ,when my gaze was fixed at the last line “…..also please send articles for the upcoming edition to d41newsletter@gmail.com”
I had to remove this line. Every time I pressed the backspace to erase the characters, memories flashed in front of my eyes thinking about the past 12 months.
Launching newsletters was hectic , demanding  and frustrating at times  but it helped me realize a lot of things about myself which I wasn’t aware of.

When I was bestowed with this opportunity in the month of July 2014, I was a little scared and I immediately contacted the then District Newsletter Editor, Umesh . He asked me to form a team and comforted me with some words which seem more meaningful now than they seemed then.

Forming a team was a challenging task since I had to work with these people located in different parts of the country. After asking for nominations and short listing people, on board with me were Poonam , Sagar, Ravi and Arijita. I had not met them in person ever , were not aware of their capabilities and was of course not informed of their shortcomings if any while I was introduced to them.

The second challenging task was to collate articles. While most of them promised an article, they failed to mail it to us before the deadline even after numerous follow ups. Maybe they were not taking us too seriously  :D

The third challenge which we faced was of plagiarism and articles full of grammatical errors.

Well this was it……….It wasn’t only about challenges for sure. It was all about a journey where we learnt and grew.

Talent knows no distance and boundaries :

The team was placed at different locations and we were working with people we had never met, still we managed to work coherently maybe because we were not very close and around to irritate each other :P

My team is an excellent bunch of people who worked tirelessly and raised the bar of quality with each edition.

When one door closes many windows open :

While some promised to give an article but didn’t, we had people who willingly mailed us beautiful articles relevant to the theme.

At times wrong things teach you the right lessons:

And yes finally grammatical errors were irritating at times but they helped us improve our writing skills.

And plagiarism made us read more and google more :D

When you lose yourself in something, you discover a new you.

It was a beautiful journey where I discovered how patient and creative I could be.

It brought out the writer in me. Reading personal experience of people as they penned their emotions was a treat and yes finally receiving appreciations from toastmasters all over the district for the efforts put in by us for designing, layout and content was overwhelming.

Thank you everyone who contributed, reviewed, gave suggestions and most importantly read the issues. It was a fulfilling endeavor and I will surely miss working with my team, following launch deadlines and yes connecting and following up with people for articles.

Signing off with something I always say …….” If you feel it then just don’t say it, pen it”