Reporting school news challenges newsroom pros, students

Posted by Candace Bowen on Oct 15, 2023 in Blog | Comments Off on Reporting school news challenges newsroom pros, students

Reporting school news challenges newsroom pros, students: Part 3/4

My original blog idea started as a simple little suggestion to encourage high school student journalists to cover school board meetings and educational topics in communities without commercial media – those rural and urban areas considered news deserts. But it’s grown much bigger than that. These will be the weekly installments.

Content this week: Reporting school news challenges newsroom pros, students

Part 1: We’ll explore what happened when a student reporter offered a story about her school to a local “news and digital marketing platform.” It was posted – and then….

Part 2: What do those involved with student media legal issues say about this? We’ll talk to the Student Press Law Center about what rights such young journalists have.

Part 3: How do the hyperlocal web outlets see their role when working with students – or do they see that as a possibility at all? 

Part 4:  Are there ways we – advisers and journalism teachers – can help students and communities get vital information, especially about local education? How can we educate those who might be working with student journalists but have no background in scholastic media and student rights and responsibiliti

•Content by Candace Bowen, MJE •Pullquote from Rachel Dissell, Cleveland journalist http://www.pexels.com/photo/wittered/trees-on-desert-80454/

_{Getting information about school boards and other educational issues to communities without local media has been a growing challenge. Living in such news deserts makes it hard for voters to be accurately informed about levies, school board elections and much more.}

_{The idea of student journalists contributing local reporting isn’t new, but making it really work isn’t easy.} 

_{Parts 1 and 2 for this blog series looked at what happened when a well-meaning high school junior tried to use a local news website to inform her community about what her school was doing to protect students from gun violence, then what happened when a district official intervened, and what a lawyer at the Student Press Law Center thinks of that.}

_{Parts 1 and 2 for this blog series looked at what happened when a well-meaning high school junior tried to use a local news website to inform her community about what her school was doing to protect students from gun violence, then what happened when a district official intervened, and what a lawyer at the Student Press Law Center thinks of that.}

_{But what do other editors and CEOs of a growing number of community-based and usually web-based news organizations think about working with students? Local set-ups can vary from media that is supported by advertising to those that are non-profits and sometimes have healthy grants, but they’re all working to counteract news deserts.}

Training student reporters is like an extra job

_{No matter their set-up, the challenge is the same. How experienced are the students who would work for them? What do those students need to learn to be effective reporters? And, maybe more important sometimes, what do the professionals working with them need to know, especially about legal and ethical issues, to make the set-up work.}

_{“You have to understand this isn’t like running a temp agency,” Ben Wolford, editor-in-chief of the online Portager, serving mostly rural Portage County in northeast Ohio since 2020. “In the early days, the bulk of our reporting came from journalism students at Kent State. We probably wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without them,” he said in a phone interview.}

_{But Wolford understands even those students were not seasoned journalists, and high school students have even less experience. They aren’t ready for some of the intricacies of local politics, don’t know how to question if someone is telling them the truth or has an agenda, aren’t sure what “off the record” means.}

_{The editors of media outlets with student journalists “have an extra job  – intern coordinator, editor, mentor to these people,” Wolford said. “If you think you’re going to get free labor out of those kids, you’re assuming the job of all those people who helped you when you were beginning. The students may be getting a few bucks, but I’m paying them with a lot of my time.”}

_{It’s a big investment, but Wolford plans to grow a cadre of student high school reporters from as many area high schools he can attract so they can provide content for The Portager.} 

_{Rachel Dissell is an award-winning reporter and Community and Special Projects editor for Signal Cleveland, “an independent, community-led, non-profit news startup,” according to its website.}

 _{It’s also home to Cleveland Documenters, a program that started in Chicago and has grown to Detroit and Cleveland and eventually to other cities. These are adult residents who are trained and paid to cover public meetings in their communities.}

_{Dissell said she uses the same training approach with the 10 Cleveland Metropolitan School District students she work with that is used with the adult Documenters. Before they write stories, she makes sure they are “getting the grounding to become watchdogs of local government.”}  

Grounding students as watchdogs of local democracy

_{They use a template to see what interests them. It includes places to put three summary points of the meeting, follow-up questions, what didn’t make sense to them, what they didn’t understand.} 

_{“It’s a little different than writing a full story at this stage. They cover a meeting, taking notes and crafting follow-up questions,” Dissell said. Currently, her students cover public safety meetings, learning what to listen for, how to use attribution, direct quotes and paraphrasing. Students in this program are paid, as are the adult Documenters.}

_{“They’re getting a grounding in government,” Dissell said, “and building civic muscle. It’s an exercise in democracy and getting them closer to writing the whole story.”}

_{Editor Sue Zake of the soon-to-be-publishing nonprofit news outlet Signal Ohio,had plenty of experience working with college journalists. Previously, she was student media adviser for Kent State University.  She said she would welcome student reporters, especially for education-related stories.}

_{If someone complained about a story – no matter who wrote it – she said she would say, “Tell me what you think isn’t correct – what didn’t we do right?” Just because it doesn’t make the school look good doesn’t make it wrong, she said.}

Those who spend public funds have to be accountable_{“Covering public venues like schools is important,” Zake said. “They are spending taxpayer dollars, so they need to be held accountable.”} 

_{Mike Shapiro is CEO of TAPinto, a network of “more than 90 independently owned and operated local news and digital marketing platforms,” according to the company’s website. The Flemington/Rariton outlet where Emma’s story ran briefly is one such franchise.}

_{The company’s website also says, “More than 2,000 towns in the U.S. have no local newspaper or local news site. As a result, there is a lack of local news reporting in our towns, less information available, and democracy suffers.”}

_{The “marketing” part of the company’s description may be concerning to some. Journalists are taught about the importance of the “separation of church and state” –  keeping the advertising and news functions of media totally separate.}

_{Shapiro said his media outlets are “advertising-based, enabling local businesses to tell their stories to the audience.”} 

_{Could that be a conflict of interest, mixing news and promotion? Not in the 15 years since Shapiro started the company, he said. “When advertisers write about themselves, It’s labeled ‘sponsored content.’ We’ve never had any issues,” he said.}

_{“If it’s newsworthy, advertisers we’re going to cover it if they’re an advertiser or not,” he said. The franchises in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Florida “must follow SPJ ethics and must run at least one original news story a day,” Shapiro said. Shapiro said he didn’t know about Emma’s situation “until many months later” when her former journalism teacher told him.}

 _{“We don’t censor our own reporters, and, when students write for us, we consider them our reporters,” Shapiro said.}

TAPinto doesn’t censor employees, wouldn’t limit student

_{He just submitted a grant proposal to the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium to enable TAPINTO to hire a program director to help train student journalists in New Jersey. His plan, he said, is to “start with 10 students in 25 programs across the state, especially those in economically distressed areas.”}

_{Shapiro foresees three kinds of situations. Some schools may already have a program, and those would be able to have their publication hosted on the local TAPinto site. This is already happening with The Highlander from Governor Livingston High School on the Berkeley Heights site.} 

_{Other appropriate support and training would be provided to schools that have an adviser or a journalism program but no publication or to students in a school with no program, he said.}

_{In each case, Shapiro said, he will work with administrators to ensure they know they will have no prior review of student submissions. He hopes to “build a pipeline of reporters for New Jersey with these students.”} 

_{Although they won’t get paid – he pointed out that would be hard with about 250 students per year – each will receive a certificate and a graduation a gift card “from someplace like Starbucks” at the end of the year and attend a banquet with a well-known speaker, encouraging them to go into journalism.}

_{Most of those interviewed have even more ideas of how to train student journalists to cover the tough local stories that should be included.}

Building civic muscle

 _{The fourth and final part of this blog will explore what these students need to learn to be successful, some ways they may be able to best gain that knowledge and what we, as journalism educators, can do to help them. What we don’t want is students covering only car wash fundraisers and winning football teams.}

_{Of course, those won’t be censored or pulled down from a website, but they wouldn’t be serving the purpose of “building civic muscle” for the student journalists or getting vital information about a school district out to local voters.}

Read More

Expanding upon the JEA curriculum to teach the SPJ Code of Ethics

Posted by John Bowen on Nov 3, 2023 in Blog | Comments Off on Expanding upon the JEA curriculum to teach the SPJ Code of Ethics

by Kirsten Gilliland

This school year, I am teaching intro classes for the first time, including photo/digital journalism and Journalism 1-2. The past four years I’ve only taught production classes (broadcasting, newspaper, yearbook) and intro to photography/intermediate photography.

Like many journalism teachers, I turned to the curriculum section of the JEA website for guidance. After looking at my lesson options and sample curriculum maps, I created my own course layouts with ethics towards the beginning. 

For photo/digital journalism specifically, I taught the “Legal and ethical considerations in photojournalism” lesson. Students at my new school are at a lower level academically than they were at my last school.

‘So, instead of providing the recommended 10 minutes to read the SPJ code of ethics individually, I decided we’d do it in chunks as a class to make sure everyone received the content and understood—they could ask questions and I could summarize/provide examples.  

Read More

Self-care mitigates the stress of advising and advocating

Posted by John Bowen on Oct 28, 2023 in Blog | Comments Off on Self-care mitigates the stress of advising and advocating

by Mark Dzula

Working as an adviser can be wonderful and rewarding, especially as you work with young journalists as they take risks, realize their potential and dig into work in the field. It can be gratifying to watch a team coalesce, support each other and develop a sense of efficacy.

At the same time, our work can also be isolating, overwhelming and stressful—especially as we advocate for students’ rights and navigate conflicts with stakeholders.

That’s also part of the gratifying work, though, right? Knowing that your work as an adviser has impact in and out of the newsroom lends one a sense of professional purpose. At the same time, acting as an adviser and advocating for young people can be emotionally taxing and at times overwhelming, especially if you come into conflict with stakeholders. This blog will discuss some possible stressors and also offer suggestions for self-care and self-preservation that may help stem fatigue and protect against burnout.

Read More

Scholastic journalism aid regrowing news desert communities by reporting education issues, info

Posted by John Bowen on Oct 23, 2023 in Blog | Comments Off on Scholastic journalism aid regrowing news desert communities by reporting education issues, info

by Candace Bowen, MJE

This 4-part blog’s premise: Student journalists may be able to help communities in news deserts – places that have no local media coverage and thus no good insight into local government and nothing to help them make important decisions at the polls. 

Education seems like a natural coverage area for student journalists. School boards in particular make decisions that will impact a community for years to come, but if no one writes about what’s happening in their meetings, no one questions their plans and proposals and how they spend tax dollars, how will anyone know if they should remain in office – or step aside for those with better ideas?

One way is to cover more about school board decisions and other local government issues that impact the teen audience in our student media. That can be a plus – and blog content later in the year will cover some ideas about how to do that more effectively – and safely.

Having students intern or write for local community news sites, many of them grant-supported, is another way. The plus with this is the news gets to all the community. It also gives students another venue for their reporting But, with the background from the first three parts of this blog, it’s clear this won’t be easy. The question now is: How can we do — those who understand what student journalists want and need to be effective —to help the editors they might work with on these websites.

What things might such an editor need to know about a potential “employee” who’s 16 years old:

• “Just tossing them into [writing news] just doesn’t work,” said Rachel Dissell, a former student journalist and award-winning reporter with Signal Cleveland. She’s working now with 10 students from the Cleveland Metropolitan School District, and she knows they need foundational skills first.

• For Dissell, that means first some lessons in civics and government. “Students need to understand the decision-making process.” She shows her students a video of a government meeting, and they discuss how to know who’s there, how to spell their names, how to attribute quotes or to paraphrase, and how to summarize what happened.

• Ben Wolford, editor of the Portager, hopes to find students in each high school in Portage County to cover educational issues. He said he knows it will take coaching students from the inception of the story to who to talk to and what questions to ask. “They haven’t had a lot of experience dealing with the subtleties of sourcing like what to do if they say it’s off the record,” he said. Yes, that will be a lot of work, but he said that’s how he and others like him learned. 

• Sourcing is a big challenge for anyone working with teen journalists. Dissell helps her students learn about attribution and paraphrasing and also about accessing data and using databases to support their meeting coverage.

• Some other things we educators know, but the newsroom pros might not:

• Teens are certainly capable, but sometimes, out of necessity have spread themselves too thin. Jobs, classes (AP or an extra load), home responsibilities, often with younger siblings, sports, clubs…..)
  • Some really top students have not had grammar and punctuation training the editors might expect.
  • Some really top students have not had the government and history background the editors might expect.

• And then there’s the “long arm” of the school. As reported in Part 1 of this blog, not all editors would know students have First Amendment rights. “If students are going to be engaging in a total third-party activity in reference to the school district, if it is off campus, not using any sort of campus equipment, not during school hours,” as SPLC lawyer Jonathan Gaston-Falk said, the school can’t censor or regulate their speech.

This may be the biggest a-HA moment those just starting to work with teens should know. No matter if the principal makes the school look bad, no matter if he or she finds an article awkward or embarrassing.

Bottom line: Is it true?

Read More