The Stars and Stripes title page shown during the presentation

Mass Communication Week at Texas State

Copy editor of ‘Stars and Stripes’ Melissa Field shares her job experience

By Vianney Strick

 SAN MARCOS, TX — To be the copy editor for the military news source “Stars and Stripes” was not Melissa Field’s first career choice. Field spoke to a classroom of students at Texas State University during the school’s “Mass Communications Week”. “I had a goal when I started college and that was to be an engineer,” Melissa shares. After skeptically taking a career development course in school and discovering her love for journalism, Melissa became involved in her new career path. She believed that editing would bring more stability for her and that there would always be options for jobs. She attended the University of Maryland and was part of the school paper. After graduation she got the job as wire editor in “Stars and Stripes” and is now the desk chief editor with a 17-year work history with the company. A normal work day for Field includes looking at page layouts, choosing where pages and stories are located. She put emphasis on the importance of simplicity. “If you’re looking at an image of people doing things, just have a caption telling the readers about the people doing the things” shares Melissa.

Melissa Field pointing at a slide of her presentation

showing a page of Stars and Stripes

“Stars and Stripes” provides the readers with military news, headline news and also some coverage of sports. The news shared are very critical to the readers as they also report about life-changing events. Melissa explained that “9/11 was the worst day of [her] work life.” She encouraged the students to stay motivated in the work environment. “Every editor has strengths and weaknesses, they become apparent pretty quickly to the supervisors. Embrace your strengths and acknowledge and work on your weaknesses, and you’ll be fine,” Melissa advices. The students in the classroom reacted positively to the information she shared. “The speaker had a lot of useful advice, not just from an editorial aspect, but as far as writing in general to make for a better piece no matter what it is,” electronic media major Kristopher Tondre explains. Melissa Field taught the students that the end goal is not always what someone believes it is but they should embrace and work hard whatever their future career has in store for them.

Vianney Strick is a student at Texas State University majoring in Electronic Media