An interview with Jamie John and Zanna Buckland.
Photo: Natalie Yu for Felix
Daylight streams into the west basement, making interior lighting quite redundant. We’re discussing one of the biggest stories of the year, and the final issue featuring Jamie John as FelixThe editor in chief. For someone who became a news editor early last year, it’s fascinating to see how he’s mastered the role: finding new leads to follow, finding people to contact, navigating the university bureaucracy, and putting the story together. the page, all with apparent ease.
Zanna Buckland, the other half of the senior editor team, joins us. The Materials graduate and the Master’s student shared the top position in the second half of last year after the resignation of that year’s editor, but this year he has settled into the deputy position, which involves serving as a liaison between the different teams of people who maintain Felix run. In addition, he manages the Books section and his own Outside The Box, a branch of the Environment section where he publishes weekly essays on sustainability issues.
Pushed to join in her sophomore year by the TV show Gilmore Girls, Buckland jumped into the deep end as a book editor. “The guy who was doing it at the time hadn’t really done anything for a while,” Buckland says of his meeting with then-editor Sam Lovatt, “so he said to me, if you feel like you’re ready to have a job as editor of section, you can start and do it.”
The role, which she has held for nearly three years, involves getting new submissions from new and returning writers, interviewing authors, and fielding review requests from editors.
John’s quieter start as a copy editor (checking spelling and grammar before printing articles) was ruined by the COVID lockdown, forcing him to work remotely. “We use Teamviewer to access everything. “It was really horrible to work on, because… you would click on something and there would be a delay of a second or two before anything happened.”
He chuckles as he remembers that the newspaper never credited him as a copy editor. “I don’t think we released many numbers that year because of the pandemic, but it was great to see the numbers that came out. I could see that he had a role to play.”
After overseeing the Science section the following year, John was appointed deputy editor in 2022 and began specializing in news writing. It would prove to be a crucial year. An inexperienced and overwhelmed editor-in-chief caused a poor result for Felix in the first term. Buckland tells how, as motivation and submissions waned, the paper shrank. “We definitely had very little participation, we weren’t getting writers and the editors didn’t really have anything to do, so they didn’t come.” By Christmas, it had been reduced to just eight pages, little more than a pamphlet.
Clearly, something needed to change. As complaints from section editors mounted, the editor resigned the following January; John and Buckland, along with fellow reporter Isabella Ward, took over the following month.
FelixThe readership of is much smaller than that of typical newspapers, because it is linked to a university. For that reason, John explains, it is even more important for the editor to take charge: he has to “be proactive in encouraging people to write.” The couple has done exactly that. John has consistently tried to dispel the impression that contributing to the newspaper requires existing literary talent, in order to attract a wider range of potential writers. “Felix It is a very good opportunity to learn to write and explore things. You are allowed to make mistakes. You can learn as you go.” In fact, I owe my own foray into news writing to his initial encouragement and subsequent patient tutelage.
Part of the duo’s success is because they established a routine. On the Sunday before print, editors add their section’s articles to the pagination, a document that specifies the content of the next issue. The editor-in-chief finalizes it on Tuesday, cutting or adding pages as necessary. Once the articles have been edited and distributed on the page, they are handed over to proofreaders for review. The completed document is sent to the printer on Thursday and returned the next day for distribution on campus.
But it is the best hits, those unusual stories that remain engraved in people. With just one issue left in his tenure, Ward and John published one of FelixThe biggest revelations of recent times: an investigation into the physics department’s chronic failure to provide student well-being (Felix #1821). “It really exploded,” Buckland says. “When that article came out, everyone was reading it and telling their friends to read it, because it was about people’s experiences with the Physics department.” “The news I’m most proud of is work like that, which has a huge impact,” John adds.
There are also some from this year. Making a copy of Felix #1840 from a stack on a nearby table shows me Sir Ernst Chain’s heating story in the foreground: the building’s heating system had failed, subjecting the researchers to freezing temperatures throughout the winter season. It is true that it is difficult to know to what extent the article contributed to improving the situation; However, it provided a platform for students to talk about his experiences and shed light on the university’s denial and mishandling of the issue.
And the things you would rather forget? “There was an article, a news article, that was about this guy who was stuck in Gaza. We were working on a very tight deadline, I had spent all my time working on the front page story,” John smiles at me. “Do you remember this?” I certainly do. Inside former imperial student Nael Qtati’s sobering description of life in Gaza (Felix #1834) was an excerpted quote (a quote from an article, written in a larger font for emphasis) from a happier Food&Travel segment about a mountain range. The truth is that I may have had something to do with it.
When the shame finally wears off, I ask my interviewees about their plans for the coming year. John speaks modestly about the graduate program in the Financial Times that will begin in September, a remarkable achievement for a STEM graduate. Buckland, whose twelve-month master’s program has not yet ended, is looking for several jobs, many of them geared toward sustainability, such as public service and consulting. “Felix “It has given me a really good portfolio of content,” he says. “It’s been great to be able to use it as a way to gain experience writing and demonstrate my knowledge of sustainability.”
