Expressing student freedoms – and responsibility – through substantive reporting
In a survey taken at the San Antonio JEA and NSPA convention last November, students and advisers reported censorship was alive and well in America’s schools. Forty-two percent of students and 41 percent of advisers responding said school officials had told them not to publish or air something. Fifty-four percent of students indicated a school official reviewed student media content before publication or airing.
Both groups also incited self-censorship was an issue, prompting SPLC director Frank LoMonte to lay some of the blame for situations like these on the 1988 Hazelwood decision.
“Schools will continue to be disempowering places where no meaningful discussion of civic issues takes place so long as Hazelwood censorship is practiced,” he said.
Fortunately, some schools can and do tackle important issues and are not limited by misguided administrators. Others can learn from their efforts.
One example where students tackled substantive issues is the Verde at Palo Alto High School, in California, where they reported on a “rape culture” at their school. Another is the Triangle of Columbus North High School in Columbus, Indiana, which published on sexual assault. Both stories reinforce the importance of issues teens face as seen in events in Steubenville, Ohio, and Saratoga, California.
Below are links to these students’ reporting, and related stories. These stories are models of reporting student media is capable of when communities, school administrators and advisers support critical thinking and student decision making.
In the next several weeks, we will also report other efforts not only to limit Hazelwood’s impact but also to recognize schools around the country through our Make a Difference through substantive reporting project.
The SPLC developed its Cure Hazelwood website to help combat the effects of that 1988 Supreme Court decision, and JEA’s Scholastic Press Rights Association prepared its Seeking a Cure for the Hazelwood Blues and Teacher’s Kit for Curing Hazelwood materials to educate all parties about the lack of education value in prior review and restrict by school officials. A myriad of essential curriculum materials and information about fighting Hazelwood exists on the Scholastic Press Rights Commission website.
For more information about the Verde and Triangle stories, see below:
* Palo Alto high students talk about ‘rape culture’
http://www.kqed.org/a/forum/R201304151000
* Palo Alto high-school journalists expose ‘rape culture’
http://www.ktvu.com/news/news/crime-law/rape-culture/nXJct/
• High school students teach us how to talk about rape
http://www.alternet.org/high-school-students-teach-us-how-talk-about-rape
• High school students school us about rape culture
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/11/high_school_students_school_us_about_rape_culture/
• Steubenville Ohio articles over the last 30 days
http://interceder.net/latest_news/Steubenville-Ohio
Encouraging diversity in new staff selection
by Megan Fromm
For most publications staffs around the country, the post-spring-break season is officially new staff recruitment time—the chance to build the ideal team for next school year. Applications start rolling in, would-be editors wait anxiously for their new assignments and advisers endure the emotional rollercoaster of deciding who belongs where and why.
Typically, requirements such as editing skills, leadership potential, design ability and time commitments take precedence when selecting a new staff. But what about ideology? What about personal perspectives or cultural understandings? Building the right publications team demands a deep understanding not only of your students technical skills, but also of their personalities, dispositions and background.
Advocating for diversity among your staff members is not just the politically correct thing to do—it should be an ethical imperative. When your staffers’ family background, religious ideologies or cultural upbringing reflect a range of experiences, your publication is more likely to exhibit that same diversity.
If you haven’t yet considered how diversity plays a part in your staff-building process, consider taking a survey of your current students and potential staffers or making a diversity reflection part of your application requirement. The point is not to force students to answer questions about politics or religion or race, but rather to encourage them to open up about personal perspectives that demonstrate and celebrate their own uniqueness.
Ask questions like:
- What is most important to you outside school?
- What cliques or stereotypes do you feel you most relate to? Which ones least define you? Why?
- What are you doing (or where are you physically) when you feel most “yourself?”
- Where (or to whom) do you go for inspiration?
If all the responses sound eerily similar, you might want to rethink your recruitment strategies or the students you target for your publications programs. On the other hand, if the reflections show a range of distinct answers, consider how those students might help encourage the same diversity in coverage by being a part of your publication.
Be sure you give students a chance to authorize your “release” of this information to returning staff members who might be helping in the recruitment/selection process. And, when your staff is finally complete, encourage members to share these reflections during team-building.
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Building a credible brand: Stick to the facts
by Candace and John Bowen
April 1. April Fools.
JEA listservians have carried out a lively discussions on the merits and demerits of publishing April Fools editions. SPLC executive director Frank LoMonte even said to keep his center’s phone number and e-mail address handy if students published such an issue.
Tough decision. Some commercial media publish such pieces. Why not scholastic media?
We think there are two core reasons for not publishing an April Fools issue:
• The information is known to be false. We spend the rest of the school year developing our credibility over controversy and defending students’ rights and obligation to print the truth. Then in one day we throw caution to the wind and go with information that is not only untrue but even could be taken to be misleading.
• We give others the right to know what is coming. Prior review. Prior approval. We do this, in some cases, with the best of intentions, so sources will not be caught unaware, and to make sure information is not too far out of line. We might even mix the untrue with the true, hoping our audiences can tell the difference. This scares us. We, including those of us carrying out JEA’s official position, argue and rant daily about the educational dangers of prior review. So in this case we want to say, here, check it out ahead of time? What will we say to those, now used to prior review, when they ask for it on something of substance?
Various journalism experts stress that ethical journalists do not add what is not there.
That includes making up information that is not true, or real.
Think about what you want your brand, your reputation, to be. Stick to credible journalism.
Modified and reposted from an original piece March 2, 2010.
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Censorship by any other name
Students in Prague work on deadline for the publication. (photo by Candace Perkins Bowen)
by Candace Bowen
The good vibes that come from creating a publication that’s yours know no language barriers. And when someone in power tells students what they can and cannot publish, it’s demoralizing and sucks the life-blood out of what could otherwise be a great product. Even talented writers and designers can’t overcome that, no matter how good the teaching is.
Time: Summer 1998
The Place: Prague and Bratislava
Instructors: Candace Perkins Bowen and Merle Dieleman, hired by the Open Society (Soros Foundation) to teach “fact-based American journalism” to teens in the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
In Prague, our Center for Independent Journalism contact set us up in a nice facility for teaching, made sure we had good interpreters, gave us a lab for the last two days when the students were to produce a newsmagazine and then she left us alone.
Typical 16-year-olds, the 25 we worked with were passionate about the interviewing and writing. Some took on more than they could handle, and, with four hours left until deadline, mild panic ensued. But the sensible editors made the rounds of their staff, encouraged, coached and told some just to focus on one story and not try to finish three. They also made sure everyone would have something in their publication.
Even when we faced challenges like a PageMaker menu bar in Czech (How do you say, “Drop cap?”) and missing cutlines and cables, it was a crazy wonderful time. As we broke from a giant group hug when we met our deadline, one of the Charles University interpreters said excitedly, “I think I want to be a student media adviser!”
When we distributed the paper the next day, students were all thrilled. Sure, some of the photos were fuzzy, and no one knows where the last line of the street car story went, but they were excited and pleased. It was theirs.
Fast forward to Bratislava for the next two and a half weeks. Different center, different director. Much different philosophy. She wanted a PR piece to make her Center look good. She hired a designer and only one of the 25 students had any hands-on opportunity with actually putting the pieces together. All stories went through her, as she edited, changed, eliminated articles without any input from the 25 students, who shyly complained to us at first. Then, when we could do nothing either, finally they just did some articles, but without enthusiasm.
Teens in Bratislava, who had no real say in the content of their publication, as less enthused. (photo by Merle Dieleman)
When their publication was distributed the last day of the workshop, the expressions on their faces told the story. The newsmagazine looked appealing and, I’m sure (though it was in Slovak and I couldn’t read it!) had articles with perfect spelling, punctuation and mechanics. But the students didn’t care. The publication had none of their voices, their passion. It wasn’t theirs.
What an opportunity she had denied them. They didn’t wrangle over what content to include like the kids in Prague. They didn’t have to decide what was most important or plan what got front page and what had to be buried inside. They didn’t spend time coaching each other or double checking source names. They didn’t try just one more time to reach that reluctant source. They didn’t learn to think. And they definitely didn’t meet their deadline with a group hug.
Read MoreEthical decisions are important,
sometimes carry a cost
by Jeff Kocur
I am encouraged by the stories of some former students who have encountered ethical dilemmas at their college newspapers.
One of my former students resigned as managing editor at a college newspaper on the East Coast after he said he watched his editor-in-chief repeatedly breach standard journalistic ethics in gathering and reporting information. Several other editors accompanied him in his very public resignation.
Good journalists act as a watchdog and expose the truth even though it may have a cost. This journalist had the courage to accept a very personal cost when he saw the editor-in-chief operating in a way that was not acceptable, and he did journalism a favor by standing up to it.
Will it change anything? Will the editor-in-chief understand his breach of ethics? Will he ever work as a professional?
I don’t know.
I do know that my former student, who is enrolled next year at the Medill School of Journalism for a graduate degree at Northwestern University, understands clearly what harm can be done by acting unethically in his profession, and I hope we see more people coming into this profession that see things like he does.
For more information about this situation: http://www.thejustice.org/forum/alleged-sexual-assault-represents-problem-with-greek-life-1.2988498#.UUC0ctHF1uI This commentary in the other campus newspaper at Brandeis discusses the issue at the Hoot, which was one of the three reasons the editor resigned. It also discusses several other things connected to the issue, but not specifically related to the ethics of the editor’s actions.
Read MoreThe Ides of March
by Ellen Austin
What is it about March? Even Shakespeare noticed it, putting the soothsayer’s warning out to Caesar about the time span that begins this week.
So the bad news from the early Ides of March rolls in …
I read with great surprise and shock this weekend the news that a well-known and professionally recognized colleague posted to a Listserv about losing his current position as a journalism adviser at in suburban Chicago.
It reminds me of a quote attributed variously to Saddam Hussein, Stalin, and others of that ilk whose names have become synonymous with suppression: “If you have a person, you have a problem; no person, no problem.”
The ultimate form of censorship is eliminating a person’s ability to do or say the thing which might cause concern. It’s also the pernicious form of censorship that too many high schools and universities have used to quell and control the student voices they really wanted to affect.
That adviser is one of our very best, a leader who has devoted himself not just to his students but to the greater cause of scholastic journalism, including outside-of-school service to JEA and state journalism organizations.
If you’re reading this, know that you are also “skin in this game.” It’s not just about this colleague or others whose names flash by on the marquee of a Listserv. It’s about all of us, and the collective work we do. We work at the flash point in our schools, the place where we really get to see what kind of climate of free expression exists on our campuses. I remember being told by a mentor early on, “Be prepared: you will probably lose your advising job at some point, if you’re doing it right.”
Earlier this week, my colleague Paul Kandell and I are heading over to neighboring Mountain View High School to sit in on the board meeting in which the journ advisers are being asked to discuss their programs. Amy Beare, the adviser to the Mountain View Oracle, will be presenting to the board, with (I hope) a room full of supportive parents and students around her.
It’s Monday, and only a couple of weeks after our celebration of Scholastic Journalism Week. This is hard, but meaningful work that we do.
What am I trying to say here? Guess I don’t really know. Mostly, here’s my Monday note to say that this is a hard hard job — and one which sometimes requires us to say, “How much do I believe in this? How strongly can I stand for what I believe? How willing am I to face the cost that may come with standing?”
Good luck to all of us this week as we go through our classes and our deadlines. I will be crossing my fingers tonight across town in the hopes that a neighboring school board sees that student free expression is a scary, but wonderful thing. Love that U.S. Constitution.
Ellen Austin is Dow Jones News Fund Teacher of the Year for this year
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