Editor-in-Chief candidate Maddy Arrowood wants to connect the paper and community

Maddy Arrowood has done it all.

Since the UNC junior joined The Daily Tar Heel three years ago, she has been a staff member on three different desks — copy, city and investigations — she was summer editor and is currently copy chief.

Now she’s running for Editor-in-Chief and she wants to bring the paper closer to its audience.

Because she has served on both the writing and the production side of the newsroom, she said she thinks she has gained a unique perspective on how all aspects of the news producing process fit together.

“We’re all one newsroom, we’re all doing the same thing and that has opened a channel of communication,” she said.

She said one telling experience she had with this transformation was how the newsroom organized Hurricane Florence coverage.

“I do think we are moving toward a digital-first focus and I don’t know if that’s just because I’m on the production side necessarily, but if you think about things like during the hurricane, I would come over and sit with (City Desk) and we would figure out how to get out lists of stuff, like maps of where you could drive and where it was flooded,” she said.

She said this contributed to her realization that the connection between the newsroom and production staffs in this new digital age is the direction in which the DTH is moving — and for the better.

Her focus for next year will be remembering that not everyone wants an in-depth look at the news all the time, so reporters should focus on identifying what questions readers have and how to efficiently answer them.

“It comes by encouraging the idea that when there’s a big snow storm, you don’t always need a big, in-depth enterprise piece about what the implications of the snow storms are,” she said. “Sometimes you just want a list of what restaurants are open.”

Above all, she hopes she can further integrate the DTH in the UNC and Chapel Hill communities.

“I’ve talked to a lot of alums and they all express this sense of a cult love for the DTH, not just because they worked here, but because everyone on campus would pick up the DTH and it was part of campus culture,” she said. “It seems like when people think of the DTH now is like ‘We do real journalism here, you wouldn’t understand,’ and I hate that because I want it to be a resource for people on campus and people in the community.”

She said she wants to remind people that DTH reporters do real journalism, but they’re also students and they’re here to listen.

“If we aren’t covering things that you think we should be, then we want you to tell us,” she said.

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