On November 13, Shira Keitner ’27 and I shadowed Seynabou Seck ’27 at the Noble and Greenough School as part of the Milton-Nobles newspaper exchange. There, the two of us got to see The Nobleman, Nobles’ official news publication, in action by attending their editorial meeting. Unlike The Measure, which meets outside of school, The Nobleman lives within a credited Journalism course that meets four times a week during school hours. Little did I know, our meeting schedule was just one of numerous differences I would discover between the two school newspapers.
Walking into the spacious journalism classroom, I saw rectangular desks that connected to form a circle, windows that stretched from floor to ceiling, and hanging lamps that glowed with warmth. Around 20 students sat around the circle, which Seynabou, Shira, and I joined. Standing by these gigantic windows, Nobleman faculty advisors Zeynep Isvan and Kim Neal greeted us. As a whole group, we discussed similarities and differences in The Measure’s and The Nobleman’s publication cycles.
While The Measure is made up of 60 writers, each of whom gets assigned around two articles per month, The Nobleman is much smaller, with 10 writers contributing to each issue. While The Measure publishes biweekly, The Nobleman publishes once a month. While The Measure welcomes students from all grades to write, The Nobleman does not allow any underclassmen to join the team. While The Measure consists of writers who specialize in different sections—News, Opinion, A&E, and Sports—the ten people who write for The Nobleman are encouraged by the Editors-in-Chief to write for a variety of sections.
One of the biggest differences is that the writers of The Nobleman are always in direct communication with their editors. Because of the sheer size of The Measure, it’s difficult for section editors to have much contact with their writers beyond the occasional check-in text or section meeting. In contrast, thanks to the small class size and the advantage of having four seventy-minute lessons each week to meet as an entire team, editors of The Nobleman get to give advice and provide feedback immediately and much more personally. Nobleman Managing Editor James Hazen ’26 stated that he was in “super close communication” with all the staff writers. “It’s not like, oh, you’re trying to get this work done for some nameless entity,” said staff writer Nathanael Jean-Gilles ’26. “You actually have a personal connection.”
Another key difference is that the role of The Nobleman Managing Editor is much more defined than it is for The Measure. Each staff writer has their own Managing Editor, who helps the writer with various parts of the article development process, such as composing interview lists and deciding what angle an article should take. Additionally, the Managing Editor is the one who goes through the first round of article edits. For The Measure, the section editors take on the role of guiding and checking in with their writers, and every member of the editorial board helps with edit round one. As a result, as Measure Managing Editor Leah Li ’26 put it, “the role of the Managing Editor falls into a fuzzy area.” Measure Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Li ’26 said that she and co-Editor-in-Chief Eli Berk ’26 have been trying to address the “mystery” that is the Managing Editor position by asking the Managing Editors to coordinate columns with feature pieces or guest articles.
Other than differences in how the two publications operate, there are also significant differences between Milton’s and Nobles’ journalism classes. Because Milton’s journalism half-course is detached from the activities of The Measure, students who take the course have more time to delve deep into different article types and engage in compelling discussions about topics such as bias and censorship. For example, Jennifer Li, who took the course, remembered that she and her classmates would take home lengthy handouts and even had to listen to a twelve-hour podcast. “We got to explore the many nuances of journalism that I don’t think you can capture in less than half a year,” she said. Journalism class at Nobles consists of beginning-of-the-year introductory presentations on topics such as conducting interviews, shifting from an academic to journalistic writing style, and avoiding subjective adjectives when writing a news article. The rest of the year is dedicated to working on The Nobleman. “I definitely want to talk more about actual journalism itself,” said Nobleman Editor-in-Chief Ruby Delinsky ’26.
There is no right answer to how to run a publication. In the end, regardless of the differences, The Measure and The Nobleman both aim to keep students informed, as well as to get students thinking. The fact doesn’t change: no matter what publication it is, the student journalists put sincere effort into every issue.
You can read articles from The Nobleman, including Seynabou Seck ’27’s article about Milton, on their website: thenoblemanonline.com.