Start 2022 with a scholastic press rights refresh
by Sarah Nichols, JEA president, MJE
The first few weeks of a new semester provide an important reset or blank slate. After a challenging fall for advisers, your goal may be to revisit scholastic press rights topics and do more with law and ethics training, especially if the past few months of reteaching and rebuilding called for massive shifts in your curriculum.*
Or maybe January marks the start of a new journalism course entirely, so you’re set to meet a new crop of students and want to begin on building awareness of First Amendment issues and support for student press freedom from the beginning.
In any case, it’s always a good time to include more law and ethics in your journalism program. Here are some ideas for how to start 2022 with attention toward scholastic press rights education.
- Follow the news. Begin with the wonderful news of New Jersey becoming the 15th state to enact specific press rights legislation. The passage of S108 hit right as many schools adjourned for winter break, so this is a great time to discuss it in class. If students haven’t learned about New Voices yet, now is the perfect time.
Key questions: Do students know what press rights protection they have based on where you live? Are you in a state working toward New Voices legislation? Are there ways your students can participate?
For balance, take a look next at this (possibly still-unfolding) not-wonderful news in Colorado.
Key questions: How do you feel after reading the student’s op-ed and the news article about what happened? Why? When it comes to student press freedom, do your students know the differences between public and private schools? If your program operates in a state with legal protection, do your students know what to do if they feel their rights have been violated? Do they know about the JEA’s Panic Button from the Scholastic Press Rights Committee? After reading about the situation at Regis Jesuit, do your students feel called to action somehow? Is this something to write about or explore further?
- Plan for remote learning. Make use of online resources, either to adjust as some schools return to virtual environments or to provide alternatives for students at home due to isolation, illness or other circumstances.
An easy way to provide choice and flexibility is to invite students to choose their own law and ethics session from this free online repository coordinated by Virginia High School League and Virginia Association of Journalism Teachers and Advisers. Students can produce a slide, mini-lesson or other short debrief to share what they learned.
Seniors can work on Journalist of the Year entries and develop their law and ethics section with some extra help from this Portfolio Polish resource.
Prospective editors can build a plan for how they’ll teach important scholastic press rights issues to next year’s staff. Have you added a related question to your editor interview process?
Students of any experience level can also view and analyze these award-winning First Amendment PSAs and create their own.
All of these options work well for in-person scenarios, too, of course!
- Gear up for Scholastic Journalism Week. What gets scheduled gets done, so it’s time to help students plan for #SJW2022 (Feb. 21-25, 2022) and the #AmplifyingVoices theme.
Student Press Freedom Day is a signature aspect of the week-long celebration. The Student Press Law Center has developed a variety of activities and suggestions for how students can take part in advocacy, outreach and more for a day of action Feb. 24.
Look for more ideas — and share what you’re doing — on social media.
If you’re beginning a semester with new or transfer students, don’t forget to match them with a mentor from your staff to provide extra training on students’ rights and responsibilities as journalists.
As we embrace this fresh start, let’s show students how important these topics are by doing what we can to incorporate law and ethics activities on a regular basis in 2022.
* Don’t beat yourself up about what you didn’t get to last semester. Just start fresh!
Read MoreTransparency helps keep air in the balloon
by Stan Zoller, MJE
Al McGuire, the late basketball coach at Marquette University, used to remind folks that championship basketball wasn’t all “seashells and balloons.”
I suppose you could apply that to just about anything – life, final exams, losing a close game or even journalism.
No matter how many laws are passed, policies adopted and awards won, getting that story isn’t, wait for it, all seashells and balloons.
You just don’t go out and get the perfect source, have the editors love your first draft and the hierarchy throw roses at you when the story runs.
It ain’t all seashells and balloons.
Read MoreFree Speech Week:
Which journalistic change can best enhance free expression,
ensure essential information and restore trust?
by John Bowen, MJE
The past two years brought concepts previously unfamiliar to scholastic journalism: asynchronous, hybrid and Covid. Students and advisers practiced new techniques: Zoom, safe distance, remote interviews and more created individually in schools nationwide.
For some journalism programs it was a time of implementing creative change. Others scrambled to publish at all, but creatively attempted to fill gaps caused caused by limited school programs. Some faced bans dictated by community or school rules on publishing photos of school figures without masks, to showing too many students within a six foot space. Teachers and administrators danced swiftly to discuss legally and ethically sound solutions.
Because participants in the long season of change developed new methods or gathered gumption to tackle issues again, and they could have a multitude of issues to tackle.
All just in time for Free Speech Week, Oct. 18-24.
Read MoreUse a planning tool – Futures Wheel – to build better contextual, meaningful content
Futures Wheels were designed by futurists to see what the future might bring, positive or negative. If positive, the wheels could be used to show how to induce something to happen. If negative, how to prevent that. Can it be a part of journalistic story planning, source acquisition and other types of information processing to craft stories that meet audience needs?
Title
Futures Wheels: Developing and refining journalistic story planning to better identify context, background and meaningful events, empowering journalism’s social responsibilities
Description
A Memorial Day incident in northeastern Ohio this year raised the specter of potential First Amendment violations, opened wounds of racial tension and created ethical questions on issues of media social responsibility. How can students localize the event and issues? How could covering these issues lead to improved audience awareness and journalistic social responsibility?
News planning using futuristic tools can provide essential information and credible leadership empowering journalistic responsibility.
Read MoreAfter 234 years, Hamilton’s words remain spot on
by Stan Zoller, MJE
When Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay wrote the Federalist Papers in 1787, odds are more than pretty good that scholastic journalism wasn’t on their minds.
Safe bet.
In one of the 51 essays he wrote, Hamilton noted that “…A government continually at a distance and out of sight can hardly be expected to interest the sensations of the people.”
His point is simple – government needs to be visible and accountable to the people. Pronounced 234 years ago, the point still rings true today and it has obviously been a challenge for the media to be the watchdog of governments, large and small, national and local.
Read More