All of these rolls are necessary:
The publisher creates a place for everyone to work and publish and maintains it. He endeavors to protect the interests of the news organization, website, and staff, and he works to make the organization and site profitable. The organization and the site depend on him for existence.
The news director broadly directs ongoing themes and coverage.
The chief editor does a lot of the hard work that is unseen, and chooses and modifies stories, and is generally ultimately responsible for what goes out.
The section editors are responsible for the same thing, arguably more responsible in their particular area. They edit the work of journalists who are not able to reliably self-edit (editing is not the most important thing for journalists, in part because they can depend on editors and instead concentrate on writing the news). Editors should be expert in headlines and first paragraphs, especially, in order to detail the broad and specific news that gets in front of the eyes of readers, as well as understand AP style, news article organization, etc. They should also be able to coordinate their writers, for example if they see that one writer could benefit from the knowledge or contacts or work of another, and they have a broader scope of information which they can tell their writers about when they see their writer could use something from outside their current scope. Editors are also usually responsible for interacting with readers and addressing in a proper way complaints and criticisms.
The journalists write for the readers. They report the news so people know what is going on. They write it so that readers are informed and aren’t misled. Journalists are responsible for fact-checking at The Speaker. This responsibility is not just passed on to the editors. They are responsible for presenting both sides of controversial stories. All they should pass on to the editors is the actual final edit of the writing and any discretionary finishing touches, as well as an audit if anything isn’t organized well or there is extraneous information, and journalists should really try to reach a point where they need no editing of their writing and can just benefit from their editors finishing touches and titling ability. Writers should be more specifically expert in their story coverage areas than their editors.
Accounting and accounts payable, marketing, advertising, social media, website maintenance and coding, business planning, human resources, training, art, and art direction are some of the other roles involved in publishing The Speaker.
You should try to understand what you really want to do. ‘Moving up’ as some people misleadingly call it isn’t really moving up unless it’s moving toward where you want to be. A news organization isn’t a corporation. It’s an art and a service. Editors aren’t higher or better than journalists. And changing rolls isn’t necessarily a road to greater happiness. If you want to be a writer and write the news and do journalism, it won’t serve you to change rolls to editor and take on those responsibilities. It will mostly just waste your time and energy on a detour which you may find yourself having to head back from at a later point, lamenting the time you could have spent becoming a master at what you want to do. Editors, in turn, won’t be served in trying to become publishers unless they want to give up their involvement in the understanding and choosing and forming of news and instead fill their plate with a bunch of business, management, and platform creation tasks that will take them away from actual news. If you know what you really want to be doing, you can have the confidence to dedicate yourself to become great at it and you will enjoy it. The publisher of The Speaker, for example, would some day like to not be Publisher but just work as News Director or World Editor and Journalist like he once worked as, since those are the things he feels he can do better than anyone else in his way and feels are most important. However, it’s not too easy finding someone who has experience in all roles of a news organization, can competently make them happen, and is trustworthy enough to protect the integrity and interests of a news site and it’s staff, as well as having an original and valuable vision for what the organization is to become. The famously below-living wage of a journalist isn’t a deterrent since the publisher of The Speaker makes no income from it and pays the staff from other work and sources — in other words, works for a loss in money terms.