Student Spotlight: Trinady Joslin, Managing Editor at The Daily Texan

Have you ever wondered what your legacy will be at UT? In 50 years, where will students look to reflect on the university’s history--and the people that told its story? After the COVID-19 pandemic shook the world and changed the lives of UT students, Trinady Joslin decided she would be the one to tell the story.

Trinady Joslin is a third-year journalism student at Moody and serves as the Managing Editor at The Daily Texan, a student-run newspaper that delivers content to the UT community. Her role involves overseeing all non-opinion content, ranging from news stories and infographics to social media and the video department. She joined The Daily Texan as a freshman, including in her application her desire to redesign the paper’s website. Fresh with new ideas, Joslin supported the team in launching the first new redesign of The Daily Texan website in over a decade. However, her energy, grit, and spirit did not stop there. 

When UT extended Spring Break and moved classes online last spring, Joslin was serving as a lifestyle editor for The Daily Texan. Her role involved editing stories about human experiences, and Joslin wanted to produce something to reflect UT students’ experience in the pandemic. The Daily Texan is a 121-year-old publication, recording lives of students and the overall UT community. 

“I wondered who would document students and their feelings in this ‘new normal’” noted Joslin. “The awkwardness on Zoom, online classes, the very real mental health crises students were experiencing...I wanted to capture it.”

Joslin and her friends at The Daily Texan began to brainstorm ideas for March 12, the year anniversary of the day COVID-19 struck the UT community. On February 15, directly after the team worked tirelessly to cover the winter storm, Joslin and her friends got right to work on the March 12 publication.

“The ultimate vision from the get-go was to produce a paper that showed people 50 years or more in the future what life was like when the pandemic hit,” Joslin said. To prepare for the creation of the special publication, she spent over 60 hours looking through every story The Daily Texan had run through the last year, assessing the significance of each and working with a design editor.

“I would call Christina Peebles (member of The Daily Texan staff) literally in the middle of the night and be like, ‘can you hop on In Design really quick? I have an idea,’” recalls Joslin. “I told my professors I’d send them a copy when I was done because I was honestly spending more time on the paper than my assignments.”

Joslin, Peebles, and other members of The Daily Texan staff worked long hours, tirelessly creating a paper that would chronicle the story of COVID-19 hitting the UT community. She noted that everyone with a by-line in the paper, as well as many on the staff, put in maximum effort to curate the paper. Now published, their efforts are incredibly evident. Joslin said that she plans on taking a break this summer, and is hoping to be accepted to UTNY in the fall. It sounds to us that this is a break well deserved.