Building on Student Press Freedom Day and Year of the Student Journalist
This week began free expression celebration with Student Press Freedom Day, introduced the Year of the Student Journalist and showcased lessons and information on the 50th Tinkerversity.
For those who might have missed or wanted this information and more, here is relevant information all in one place:
- Year of the Student Journalist activities start a calendar year of national and individual events and programming that will raise awareness of student journalists’ role and struggles they face. For more information, go here.
- Tinker Turns 50 is a celebration of the 50thanniversary of Tinker. Scholastic journalists will be able to follow the Tinkers, John and Mary Beth,through events and programs as they return to Iowa, Feb. 18-28. Livestream and educational resources information are available. General information and links to the full schedule, here.
- The Schoolhouse Gate is a project to enable student journalists to tell stories about young people and free speech. Students from Parkland will gather submissions from around the nation about how free speech is being celebrated, challenged and used locally. See more information here.
- Celebrating Student Press Freedom Day is a JEA project of its Scholastic Press Rights committee with lessons, resources and daily free speech activities. Find those materials here.
- RFK Human Rights program extended the nomination deadline for its 2019 Journalism Awards student categories until Feb. 8. For more about the awards and guidelines go here.
Proactivity can help face a challenge
by Stan Zoller,MJE
Watch just about any team sporting event and at some point, there will be challenge to a call. Or challenge to the rules.
It’s no different with some scholastic journalism programs. Despite New Voices laws in 14 states, and bills introduced in three others, challenges to the rules, or in this case laws, are not unusual.
Read MoreBringing light to relevant issues, past and present, defines journalistic leadership
by John Bowen, MJE
“I’d rather be a hammer than a nail”
“Blowing in the Wind“
“Find the Cost of Freedom”
“Ohio”
“Where Have All the Flowers Gone”
How do these lyrics and titles relate to scholastic journalism?
- They all came at a time when people questioned the media, its role and its leadership.
- They all came at a time when citizens and journalists complained of government mis-, dis and censored information.
- They all came at a time when activism and protest – from multiple viewpoints – clouded not only the truth on timely issues but also many people’s minds.
Sound familiar?
Fifty years ago, The U. S. Supreme Court upheld students wearing of black armbands as protected speech during the Vietnam war. That war also spawned events and issues that continued to bring activists, protestors and media together.
The war brought new levels of violence against expression some called unAmerican. “America, love it or leave it” was a forerunner of today’s “Enemy of the State.”
Such verbiage frustrated citizens who sought the truth about issues: The Pentagon Papers. MyLai 4. Lt. William Calley. May 4, 1970. The impact of drugs.
2018 and 2019 highlight a tumultuous new era with key similarities to the past.
Distrust of government and news media. Who tells the truth? Whom can citizens believe? Who lies?
And the current issues: Availability of guns, health, drugs, the environment, misinformation and lying. Growing amounts of stress in student lives.
Sound familiar?
We began to learn from Mary Beth and John Tinker and others who opened the schoolhouse gates to free expression, social awareness and creation of change. Free speech and press are important.
If we truly believe the social responsibility role of the news media is an essential partner with freedom – at all levels – we will empower student journalists to seek the truth, to dig for the whole story and to always question authority. They then question what authority tells society as the Tinkers and others modeled 50 years ago.
Reporting will add new meaning to journalistic leadership, advocacy and solutions.
Consider, as a New Year’s resolution, expanding your journalistic studies to include current issues as well as their historical perspectives. Content choices include:
- The Public and Journalists: They Disagree on Core Values
- How to verify – and when to publish –news accounts posted on social media
- The newsonomics of how and why
- My dad predicted Trump in 1985 – it’s not Orwell, he warned, it’s Brave New World
- Values reside at the core of journalism
- Why ‘truth’ is James Comey’s word of the year
- Lighting the way: leadership for the future
- The universe of people trying to deceive journalists keeps expanding, and newsrooms aren’t ready
- A guide to self-checking the news
- It’s high time for the media to enter the No Kellyanne Zone – and stay there
- 8 essential skills for anchors (& any journalist) covering breaking news
- Journalism isn’t dying. But it’s changing WAY faster than most people understand
- It’s time for the press to stop complaining – and to start fighting back
- Is journalism a form of activism?
And, as we move into 2019, the hammers, not the nails, will bring clearer insight and exert stronger leadership in today’s societal issues.
Read MoreStudent journalists should heal and transform the world
JEA president Sarah Nichols, MJE, gives Rachel Simpson, principal of the Convent of the Sacred Heart in San Francisco, her JEA Administrator of the Year award Nov. 3 at the JEA/NSPA convention in Chicago. Here are her comments. Photo by Mike Simons.
JEA Administrator
of the Year, Rachel Simpson
Thanks to the JEA for this award. It is an honor to be here and an extraordinary privilege — and a wonderful surprise, frankly — to be recognized in this way.
Gratitude to everyone in this room for your work motivating student’ voice and student publication. Specifically, in relation to my own school — Convent of the Sacred Heart High School which is a division of Schools of the Sacred Heart San Francisco — I would like to highlight the excellence of our student journalists and Tracy Sena’s role as their trusted adviser.
I don’t believe the concept of scholastic press freedom would be possible without the trinity of dedicated and ethically minded students, supported by a deeply committed and responsible advisor within a school culture that upholds the empowerment of student voice and agency as a core value.
Read MoreNew Quick Tips listing can help provide
solutions, guides to media issues
Working on a sensitive story? Looking to add new ethical guidelines to help students deal with new technology? Want to finalize the process to use if students wish to run political ads or endorsements?
Quick Tips can help with ethical guidelines supported by reasoning and staff manual procedures to reach outcomes you desire.
If you or your students have suggestions to add to our list, please contact SPRC Director Lori Keekley.
This is our latest Quick Tips list. We hope you find its points useful.
Each newly posted QT has a short annotation and a link to the materials. Each addition also has links for more depth and related content.
To see a list of already posted Quick Tips, please go here.
Read MoreSolutions Journalism
Solutions Journalism doesn’t offer its solution to issues. It does report on what others haveworked and what has not
by Kristin Taylor
David Bornstein co-authors the “Fixes” column in the New York Times, a column focused on solutions journalism. In his 2012 TED talk, Bornstein explains why he has pursued solutions in his investigative journalism rather than simply focusing on the problem.