iIrish Presents: Meet iIrish Editorial Assistant Jayde Gavlik
By Ava Barton

I’m here with Jade Gavlik, the editorial assistant for iIrish. Tell me a little bit about your role as the Editorial Assistant.
I have been helping iIrish newsmagazine move from print to digital. When I joined, the website looked pretty good from the beginning, and I just was coming in to tweak it a little bit to make it a little more mobile friendly and up to the standards of SEO, which is search engine optimization, just to help us get on the Google searches and a little more on social media as well.

I saw that you’ve done a lot of literature and communication-based work. What do you think led to that passion for the English language?
Like all English majors are going to tell you, they’re going to say it’s a love of reading. It’s a love of getting lost in a world. And also, as you read, you become a stronger editor, you become a stronger writer. So it’s a natural career path to want to be an editor and help make works the best that they can be.

How did you connect with iIrish?
Through a colleague, classmate, friend, coworker. She got an internship with iIrish and I asked her to introduce me, to see if they needed extra help with anything, and the interview went really well. I’ve been here since May.

And how do you like it?
I really love it. I like that I have a little more power, I would say. I am a bit new to the editorial field, because I thought I was going one direction, but I’m deciding to go in this direction (instead). So I had to deal with a lot of like internships and leadership roles.

I’ve always been in an internship role in this, as an editorial assistant; I can take a little more control over the website and give my input, give my feedback and whatever John wants to happen, I can help make it happen.

What is your Irish background?
I don’t think I have an Irish background. I think maybe my family did come from Ireland. I know my grandma’s last name was O’Neill, but that’s all I know.

And I honestly didn’t know a whole lot about the Cleveland Irish community until coming onto this magazine. So, I’ve been learning a lot and I’ve been really enjoying it. Honestly, I hadn’t really looked into Irish culture, literature or anything like that yet. It’s been a good learning experience.

What do you find like meaningful or interesting about that culture? Or that community?
I appreciate how much Irish culture has built up American culture. A lot of things in literature or in, say, labor rights, has come from the Irish community, and they’ve brought a lot of traditions with them as well, including food and music. So, I appreciate that.

The culture is so strong that it can permeate into the rest of culture and so much so that it becomes normal. Not normal, but familiar.

Going back to your role as editorial assistant, you said you’re doing a lot with the website and SEO, and sounds like some social media as well? Do you have any particular project or thing that you’re working towards right now that you’re excited about?
Yes, mainly getting the numbers up on social media, the followers and engagement. It’s been a learning curve with that, but our main goal right now is to get 10,000 followers on Facebook, as well as to up our numbers on Instagram, which skews a bit younger. We’re trying to break into that because young people can come in and take over the magazine and keep up the tradition, once John stops doing it, maybe when I stop doing it, whenever that is. Not for a long time, I hope.

So, we’re trying to reach outreach to the younger generation, improve on social media, get more clicks into the website, and try to become an authority on Irish culture within the Northeastern Ohio area and beyond.

Do you create the social media posts for each of these platforms?
Yeah, I’ve been, I’ve been the one mainly making the posts for the columns. When the monthly issue comes out, I’ve been posting about the columns and posting links to it.

John’s been posting advertisements and things like On This Day in Irish History.
I’ve started to create posts to be a little more interactive.

Interactive in what way?
There’s a couple of jokes – we have a column called Wise Craics, which is just a humor column. We also have Irish trivia and the iIrish crossword. So, I’ve been reading a couple of posts that require have a little more call to action, in that, if you got the answer right, or tell us your own funny joke at the bottom, something to be interactive.

We’ve also been trying to figure out how to make the crossword interactive online, but that’s been a little bit harder, because we’d have to either stretch from scratch or pay for something else.

Do you have anything else that you want to add or share about your role or working for iIrish or anything?
It’s a great place to work. John is very much hands off. He’s not hovering over all your projects, which I really enjoy about that. But then when you need guidance or you need an opinion, he’s always there. As well as, the message of the magazine is really great, upholding Irish culture. Like John says, it’s not all leprechauns and… red hair contest, it’s about so much more than that. So, I’ve really enjoyed it.

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