Evaluating the use of unnamed sources
Part of JEA’s Scholastic Press Rights Commission’s Constitution Day lessons and activity package:
1. Lesson: THE USE OF ANONYMOUS SOURCES
For any journalist, the use of anonymous sources creates a true predicament—one in which the newspaper’s credibility is on the line, and the reporter takes full responsibility for the authenticity and accuracy of whatever the anonymous source says.
This is a difficult and precarious situation to be in, and it is one all student publications should enter knowing the possibilities.
Primary Common Core: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.11-12.7
Secondary Common Core Standard(s) Addressed: CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.9-10.8
21st Century Skills Incorporated: Communication, collaboration critical thinking
Supplies, Technology, Other Materials Needed: Handouts, online resources, computers and recording tools
Length of the Lesson: 125 minutes (3 class periods)
Evaluation tools: Student created products and application
Appropriate for Grades: 9-12
Created by: John Bowen, MJE
Brief description of lesson:
Students will examine the positive and negative potential in the use of anonymous sources, participate in activities examining the roles of anonymous sources and develop policies to guide their future use in local student media.
Read MoreIf you need assistance or information
JEA’s Scholastic Press Rights Commission has a range of information and activities to gain assistance and information for those needing assistance with legal and ethical issues
For legal assistance
• Consider pushing our Panic Button. That action and completion of couple informational questions will alert members of the commission to your situation and they will contact you as soon as possible. They might offer help, they might direct you to information on the commission site or work to put you in touch with additional help.
• Check out our Foundations materials.
• Investigate our wealth of information on Hazelwood, a Teacher’s Kit for Curing Hazelwood and that of the SPLC, with its Cure Hazelwood materials.
• We also have a thorough list of court decisions affecting student expression here.
• Of course, the most reliable and most official resource is the Student Press Law Center. Contact it for specific legal advice and information.
For ethical assistance
The commission offers a range of materials, including:
• Ethical guidelines for online media. This package includes a link to the Social Media Toolkit, a set of lessons and activities to help you move online ethically. It also contains JEA’s guidelines for online media.
• Ethical yearbook guidelines. Ethical issues facing yearbooks often are neglected. This material from some of the nation’s leading yearbook advisers should offer assistance.
• Ethical guidelines for visual reporting. The material provides support for those visual reporting questions that can cause issues with new – and experienced – staffs.
In short, assistance is available. Just be sure to ask.
Our next blog will focus on new information and materials.
Read MoreWhat to look forward to this fall
With the beginning of another new year, we thought it important to let you know what the Scholastic Press Rights Commission has been working on to better meet your legal and ethical needs.
• Our third set of Constitution Day lessons will be available around the first week of September on this site.
• Also available early in September will be the first of weekly blogs on a range of legal and ethical issues such as using FOIA records, news literacy, journalism education and prior review.
• Members of the commission worked with Quill and Scroll to update the Principal’s Guide, which will be available online as well as in print. Date to be announced. To support teachers in helping their administrators with the principal’s Guide, check out Talking Points prepared by commission member Lori Keekley.
• The Tinker Tour announced its itinerary. Follow along here .
• Our second set of reporting called Making a Difference, identifying and evaluating articles that created change in their communities, will also be available on this site later this fall.
• Need legal or ethical advice? Facing prior review? Use the commission’s Panic Button, which will put you in contact with members of the commission.
We have a wide range of information and activities planned to share with you this fall, so stay tuned. In the meantime, let us know your needs; what you would like to know, or questions you have, about law and ethics.
In our next blog, we will share where to find key legal and ethical information, and lesson plans, available from the commission.
Read MoreIn articles of substantive reporting, use anonymous sources?
The use of anonymous sources continues to raise issues within journalistic circles.
Given our recent post on the importance of substantive reporting at the scholastic media level, we find this article, Are you really willing to go to jail over your anonymous source? by Poynter’s Kelly McBride interesting and full of important discussion points for scholastic classrooms.
Given the need for more such reporting on teen-related issues, it should bring valuable discussion. Let us know how the discussions went.
For more information on the use of anonymous sources and disclosing sources, go to:
• Use anonymous sources with care
http://www.jeasprc.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/SPRC-Foundation6-anon.pdf
• Welcome to the sausage factory
http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/columns/imperialcity/12025/
• Anonymous sourcing
http://ethics.npr.org/tag/anonymity/
Student decision-making: Learning to act ethically
by Jeff Kocur
The student government at my school made a questionable attempt to spice up our March Madness spirit week, and the assistant principal let it happen.
He is new this year, and it was a refreshing presence of ethics from the assistant principal’s office, which has previously ruled with a pretty heavy hand.
I saw the whole thing happen as I waited to meet with the student government adviser.
The students wanted to designate a spirit day called “Bros versus Hipsters.”
Our school is quite diverse and the assistant principal, himself a black man, was sitting down with the student government students to discuss what kind of message might be portrayed when students dress up like a bro. In our school and in our community, a bro would be closely affiliated with inner city culture, and we had a history of other incidents with sports teams full of white boys dressing up with do rags and such in the name of spirit.
The assistant principal listened, presented his concerns, and then allowed the students to make the decision about changing the spirit day.
The decision was unanimous to keep the spirit day, and they hung signs up within a day to advertise for the next week’s spirit.
It didn’t take more than a day for the student government members to remove the bro designation after they received some negative feedback including a homemade sign taped to their spirit day signs that read “just because we are black does not make us bros” or something to that extent
I spoke with the assistant principal, a man I am still getting to know. I told him how much I appreciated his process with the students, and his response was encouraging.
He explained his principle is that he can’t come into an environment and tell kids how to act ethically because then they aren’t practicing ethics; they are just following orders. They aren’t growing as people if they aren’t allowed to do some questionable things and perhaps suffer the consequences of those actions.
Student leaders have not been so empowered before at my school, especially when it comes to the newspaper, so I am encouraged we have someone who is speaking these truths.
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