Autumn Phillips

Executive Editor, The Post and Courier, Charleston, SC Education: Goddard College, master of fine arts in creative writing Number of years in news media: 25 years

What advice do you have for other young professionals aspiring to become an editor extraordinaire?

1. Exercise — and do it in the morning before work. The stress, long hours, and poor eating habits of journalists will destroy you if you don’t.

2. Have a life outside of the newsroom. Journalism can satisfy everything you need out of life — social life, intellectual challenge, creativity, a sense of purpose. But having a rich life outside the newsroom will make you a better journalist — bringing depth to your work. 3. Create a learning culture in the newsroom that encourages everyone to take risks. The easiest way to start is to always seek out great writing and reporting and discuss it with your staff in chats, brown bags, and one-on-one conversations.

What has been your proudest moment as an editor?

We launched a project years ago called Rising Waters, a new way to look at the increasing pace of climate change in our area. We created a series of project-length stories and deployed them over a year as breaking news — projects written with real-time details of flooding. The first time we did it, it took all day to work through the logistics, and we published at 7 p.m. We were proud of that. But we got better each time and got to the point where we had planned all the logistics, deployed as soon as the flooding began, sent in feeds to the lead writer and published in a couple of hours. The kind of teamwork, creativity and communication it took to pull that off was a huge learning experience for us and some of the most fun I’ve had as an editor.