One year ends. The next day, journalism Fall ’24, begs for attention. Your reaction?
Vault 3: Possibilities to help journalism students prepare for Fall, 2024, Day 1. The question? How will they react – jump right in? Ask for several weeks off first? Say ‘what’s the rush, bosssh?’ Any can work. Which works best for your student team? And, what issues do you face? Photo illustration by John Bowen.
by John Bowen, MJE
When one year of student media ends, the opportunity to update your student media before the next comes when students decide to report controversial issues or set up ethical guidelines on the use of artificial intelligence.
A sometimes crucial ending task for this year is to make the most time to brainstorm the best student decisions before time is short and needs immense.
Our year-end Vault series can provide students with access to lessons, articles and journalistically that can revitalize and create stronger guidance and reporting practices.
For example, before student journalists take to the streets to cover protests, a myriad of information exists to help students produce thorough, accurate and contextual reporting. Other information and guidance can help keep reporters be safe. Information about do’s and dont’s of the biggest story of the year –– covering protests
Our packages focus on several areas. Adapt, but feel free to adopt SPRC information instead of just copying it. Adaption enables information to best fit your needs and issues.
Among SPRC information available from this site:
• More on the journalism core (mission, policy, ethics, process)
—Empowering student decision-making: The role of the adviser in student-run media incorporates teacher, coach, counselor, listener and devil’s advocate.
Does prior review have educational value?
Or, what students learn when they submit to prior review?
From SPRC Vault 2 | Prior Review
by John Bowen, MJE
The last From the SPRC Vault focused on April Fools and other knowingly false and potentially dangerous publishing. It is potentially dangerous because it could lead to legal, ethical and negative situations that bring prior review, fear of negative public relations and misperceptions about the role of student journalism.
A recent story from a Kansas high school showed the strength of effective student journalism. It also delivered a timely message how and why prior review can limit knowledge communities need to know.
Journalism students at Lawrence High, Lawrence, Kansas, convinced administrators to remove journalism students’ files from an AI driven surveillance system.
Four journalism students spent months, they said, interviewing administrators and others about how the surveillance system invade student privacy and might violate First Amendment protections. Kansas is one of 17 “New Voices” states protecting Student First Amendment expression.
To see the article about the students’ fight, go here. Prior review art by Pixel.
If we closely examine reporting about prior review by school officials, we would likely find prohibiting unprotected speech ranks lower than squelching protected speech. These aren’t the only causes given for prior review. Others include: bad pubic relations which make the board, city, voters nervous and threatened. Plus anything school officials don’t like, afraid of feedback and the principal sure the school will greatly suffer.
Why? Because articles resulted in three phone calls? Or seniors did less than well on recently changed state graduation tests and the controversial book banning attacks from the local, and active? Review is the common solution to deal with highly charged issues. It existed before the 1950s.
As a novice publications adviser in 1972, one of my first tasks was to peruse newspaper archives which beginning with the first issues, 1921. Since the paper was well-known was because students published weekly as a broadsheet medium and printed in the school’s printshop.
The first obvious example of school official content intervention was in the ‘50s and involved removal of reporting teens motorcycling to school, bopping at all hours on the streets and all the anti-society issues that follow motored bikes. Or that movies suggested happened. Administrators found out about the story and asked to see it.
The magic word, instead of controversial but well done, seems to be control.
You can guess what came next.
Admins banned the story saying such radical content would enflame the community, parents would complain and property values would drop if publication occurred..
The article was published, but not for the public. They missed seeing the figurative red tide of knowing about motorcycles.
Reporting in the ‘60s did not ease fears or prior review.
Times changed after the ’50s. The 1969 U. S. Supreme Court Tinker v. Des Moines decision was the first of many cases (some sources say at least 60) reinforcing the idea school publications should be more than public relations tools.
Student journalists had opportunities to practice constitutional guarantees in some schools, but not everyone was thrilled with the Tinker decision. Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter Susie Gharib wrote in 1982 many greater Cleveland area administrators said, “…image is the issue” over content of school papers, and that “school administrators don’t want parents to have a bad image of their school.”
A 1985 article in National Association of School Administrators by Lu Fulbright, “Tips for Principals,” noted “Principals have been tossing and turning at press time since 1969, when federal judges ruled in Tinker students do not ‘shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.’”
The problem, Fulbright wrote, was “how do you formulate rules that uphold all students’ rights and protect the school environment?”
Common topics concerning school officials then were prior review, which included the war, the draft, poverty, racism, drugs and other ills of society. These helped Fear escalate an uneasy of sensitive concerns. Prior restraint, already saturated with plenty of Fear. Increasing instances of prior review was the napalm of education and not far behind.
As prior review and restraint continued to balloon in the ‘60s and ’70s, changs in scholastic media seemed to accelerate accordingly. Attitudes of Question Authority, about the war, the draft, Imperialism, drugs and death quickly mutated in an already toxic atmosphere. In some ways scholastic media, assisted by court decisions, particularly Tinker, mirrored the tension fanned by Fear and censorship.
In many ways, student journalism opened people’s eye on hatred and racism as music heightened ideas of social responsibility. Society and schools moved as quickly to shutter eyes just opened to society’s ills.
Today, as then, the outcome of lawsuits, protests and walkouts supporting free expression in schools, along with other student concerns, is mixed.
For example, few if any federal court or Supreme Court decisions prevent prior review. None I know of mandate it. That suggests no formal or legal standard exists of “Tinker” or “Hazelwood” states. Schools may follow Tinker or choose Hazelwood, depending on defining responsible legal terminology. The state does not dictate review status.
Concepts such as “legitimate pedological concern,” forum for student expression, who has decision-making control of content and editorial policy become almost subversive in the fight to end censorship.
Important questions remain about challenging review
In 1983, following numerous court cases granting students expanded free expression rights, graduate student Nicholas Kristoff (and later professional journalist, columnist and activist) further explored the intensity of Fulbright’s views. Kristoff conducted a national study which he called “a conservative view” reflected four main arguments in support of restraining expression on high school campuses:
• Free speech would lead to insubordination and would undermine respect for teachers to the point students would learn less;
• High school students are not yet mature enough to handle publishing responsibilities;
• Censorship is not an issue of rights, but an issue of how to teach good journalism. The paper is not seen as a forum but a laboratory project for the teacher to use in the journalism class;
• Censorship is a practical necessity to screen for libel and to prevent community outrage.
Kristoff strongly disagreed with Fulbright and offered four counter-arguments against administrative censorship. He called them the liberal view:
• Rights, not authority and discipline, prepare students for roles as citizens in a democracy;
• Potential for abuse is not seen as a sufficient reason to withhold a right or privilege;
• Since a newspaper is a forum of ideas, with ideas there is no right or wrong;
• The solution is to hold the students and the newspaper, not the school, liable for damages.
The conservative view, he wrote, “reflects an authoritarian tradition in education that sought to imbue youngsters with respect for their elders as a moral value.”
“It would be absurd,” Kristoff continued, “if a student could criticize his congressman but not his principal, if he could protest draft registration but not his school’s attendance policy –- those things the student has the greatest chance of affecting.”
Censorship, he wrote, is the greatest threat to order because the conflicts it engenders spill over to the classrooms and distract students.
Student journalists able to ask thorough questions about prior review or restraint, suggests students make sound journalistic decisions and actions without review and restraint. They should have knowledge of court decisions and how to apply their interpretation. They should have situational training in ethics. They should know their publication’s mission statement and how it works with an editorial policy and ethical guidelines All interact tone a foundation for journalistic excellence.
Student journalists need to explain positives/negatives of working as designated public forums so stakeholders trust and believe in student actions, without uninformed administrative interference.
Students need questions to ask those who favor unfettered prior review, among other legal and ethical issues. And, they need to perceive and respond to answers. Actions need to calmly, rationally and clearly outline the crux of issues so others see training, skills and principles journalism students bring to their work.
Students, who have been censored and not encouraged to think for themselves or research material for themselves, will not see any need for the media to do so. Those who have been censored and told the tenets of democracy exist only in textbooks and only for those of a certain age may come to believe it.
Question Authority was a common activist saying in the ’60s. In the next several decades journalists added: And question what they tell you.
Authoritarian governments, when seeking control, “always first control the press because they control the way people share information and ideas,” wrote Robert Dardenne in his Poynter Paper, A Free and Responsible Student Press in 1996.
We seem to be back to the magic word: control.
Dardenne indicated the student press and the professional press share information with their communities, which are sometimes the same, and thus should be treated the same.
“Students are not exempt from responsibility and decision making,” he wrote. “Therefore, they need information a free student press can provide and help them share. The student press provides a model that helps all the students in the community learn how to form and discuss ideas, think critically and analyze information and it encourages them to get involved in their community.”
Remember, it’s not prior review and restraint that brings educational value to those who need accurate, complete information in context. It’s the credibility and integrity of student journalists who appl values of what competent advisers encourage and guide.
These are issues student journalists might raise, questions they might ask so all sides can move forward … together.
• What is the purpose of the review? To prevent misinformation? To protect the school’s image? To enhance student learning? To provide accurate information to the school’s communities (including voters)? Which of the reasons given for review are educationally valid fitting within Hazelwood’s framework?
Questions students could ask those who support prior review
JEA suggests anyone faced with prior review ask administrators the following questions:
• How does prior review help students learn and advisers practice journalism?
• What is the purpose of the review? To prevent misinformation? To protect the school’s image? To enhance student learning? To provide accurate information to the school’s communities (including voters)? Which of the reasons given for review are educationally valid fitting within Hazelwood’s framework?
• What happens after review? Deletion of all or part of a story? If deletion, or telling students to remove copy or change it, how does this affect the truthful and accurate reporting a school’s community should expect from its media?
• Would this review be better carried out by students trained in journalism? What skills (and motives) do administrators bring to the review? How does review affect the school’s curriculum, especially student learning? Does review provide the lessons curriculum intends?
• How does administrator review of student work affect the school’s liability? Does administrative or faculty review, since the reviewers are agents of the state, reflect our democratic traditions and heritage? Does review change how community members perceive the truth?
• Isn’t there a better way? JEA understands not all advisers are permitted to practice without review and restraint. We understand it is often hard for teachers to fight it. We know the pressures that can be brought to bear on jobs. All we ask is advisers and teachers do the best they can to show the educational weakness and lack of logic in prior review.
• We know teachers sometimes have no choice, no alternative. It is up to JEA to try to create one.
More questions about prior review:
1. What other definitions of prior review might exist in the professional journalism and educational communities? In administrative communities?
2. What does Hazelwood really say about prior review? What is the basis of the court’s decision and what does it really mean? What have other courts said about the general concept of prior review and restraint?
3. What are valid educational reasons for prior review? Not reasons of personal comfortor generalizations about school safety? Learning and classroom reasoning. How do we answer the question “how can I prevent illegal content or unprotected speech from publication?”
4. If we can agree prior review has no legitimate educational value, what can we design that can take its place and still leave a feeling of protection for all the stakeholders in the educational process?
5. What can we create that will show this? Is there a history we can showcase to prove this point? How has this prior restraint improved the educational process or safety of schools where it exists? What provable educational studies/research/standards exist to show the effectiveness of prior review or restraint?
6. Why don’t these “learned societies” respect the educational value of prior review of restraint? Why do administrative or other school official groups condone the practice of prior review?
7. Can we show case studies where prior review does not exist and use these models to build a process of avoiding prior review?
8. Can we summarize these studies and build from the recommendations for a process to replace prior review?
9. What does a cross section of commercial media personnel have to say about prior review? What journalism and both the freedoms and responsibilities that go with it?
10. Why does the Journalism Education Association suggest its Adviser Code of Ethics might be a good initial replacement for prior review?
Why JEA condemns Prior Review
We believe prior review:
• Contradicts the school’s responsibility to teach and maintain, through example, the principles of democracy;
• Enables school administrators, who are government officials, to decide in advance what people will read or know. Such officials are potential newsmakers, and their involvement with the news-making process interferes with the public’s right to know;
• Creates the possibility of viewpoint discrimination, undermining the marketplace of ideas and all pretext of responsible journalism;
• Leads toward self-censorship, the most chilling and pervasive form of censorship. Such fear eliminates any chance of critical thinking, decision-making or respect for the opinions of others. • Stifles growth of students so they do not grow into thinking, discerning, effective contributing citizens in the democracy; • Impairs the ability of a school’s communities to discern the truth about the school and the accuracy of information citizens need to make accurate decisions and cast intelligent votes;
• Negates the educational value of a trained, professionally active adviser and teacher working with students in a counseling, educational environment. Prior review simply makes the teacher an accessory, as if what is taught really doesn’t matter
;Instead, we believe
• Rights, not authority and discipline, prepare students for roles in a democracy as thinking, discerning, contributing citizens;
• Student media best serves their communities only when editorially independent as they present truthful and accurate information;
• Student media are safe and peaceful places a for dissemination of ideas, and with ideas there is no clear right or wrong;
• Ultimate civic engagement and involvement only occur where students learn that they can practice constitutional guarantees;
• Responsible journalism occurs when a qualified faculty adviser, clear publications policies and professionally oriented journalism curriculum exist;
• Prior review interferes with the dynamic process of learning. Such review and censorship are the last resort of an educational system failing its present and future citizens
First and perhaps the most crucial question to ask: Prove prior review has legitimate pedagogical/educational value.
Read MoreWorld Press Day: Its freedoms ‘carry responsibility’ for us all
by John Bowen, MJE
May 3 is World Press Freedom Day. A day to celebrate press freedom.
On her Facebook post May 3, colleague Barb Hipsman Springer wrote, “as journalism goes, so goes democracy. Remember that freedoms carry responsibility for you, too.”
Noble words and commitments. Such statements often receive forceful agreement. Cheers and applause. A raised fist. All warranted, but maybe not enough.
April 29, Plain Dealer editor Chris Quinn, in a letter from the editor, raised another idea, one he said might seem out of place, especially to journalists.
The letter from the editor can be found here.
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 MoreRiding out the storm should involve future planning
Scholastic media have important information to convey, this year probably more than ever. In far too many communities, school media are the only source of such information in a news desert created when local and sometimes even larger newspapers have folded in recent years. As we work our way through the storm that is 2020, student-run journalism should learn to anticipate what’s coming next, and how to avoid negative impact.
Part 2 of multiple parts
by John Bowen, MJE
For most high schools, school looms in the coming weeks when students – and advisers – face more of what 2020 can throw at them. Already this fall, journalism programs have faced unforeseen challenges.
• In a state with freedom of expression legislation, student journalists withstood threats demanding prior review, which is often not prohibited by state legislation. The school’s superintendent came to the students’ defense, explaining protection for student free expression.
• In a state trying to pass free expression legislation, school officials made even stronger threats of prior review when students and community members publicized school actions.
• In another state, student photographers were suspended for taking photos of students crowded in a hallway. Most students pictured did not wear masks. Within a week the school faced increasing numbers of those testing positive. School officials also lifted two students’ suspensions for taking the photos.
• During protests earlier this summer, student journalists found themselves targets of police and federal agents as they attempted to cover national events for local perspectives.
Such challenges will continue.
To stay ahead of problems, students can learn to anticipate plan to avoid problems. Such preventative decision-making and problem-solving builds ethical fitness.
Issues student journalists likely will focus around these:
• As the numbers affected by virus continue remain news, scholastic journalists will face questions about how they report it and related local issues:
–How will HIPAA and FERPA affect reporting of Covid-19 related student issues? Should student-run media try to identify those who tested positive?
–How will journalists handle sources’ requests concerning privacy? How much will your students inform their communities about journalism and privacy?
–What are student rights and responsibilities concerning visual reporting of those involved in massless participation in music, sports event and more. Think photography in crowded hallways.
–What will your audiences need to know about the virus and its effects on education issues, stories your students can do better than anyone else.
–Who speaks most authoritatively on Covid-19 and fallout that surrounds it?
• Election reporting and student media:
–Will your students run political candidate or issue ads, nationally and locally? Some administrators claim student media cannot to that. Research and determine the staff’s view on endorsements and their legality. Check out SPLC’s guidance. Perhaps students don’t want to deal with endorsement. What are pros-cons of that choice?
How will your students report the national election, one on which, some say, will determine the future of democracy in the United States? Should they emphasize the locally important issues? Focus on what voters need to know and the myriad questions that can follow? Would they run only viewpoint pieces?
Questions to help anticipate potential areas of conflict in this time of change
–How would your students explain choosing not to run such ads?
–How will your students report the national election, one on which, some say, will determine the future of democracy in the United States? Should they emphasize the locally important issues? Focus on what voters need to know and the myriad questions that can follow? Would they run only viewpoint pieces?
–How can, or should they factcheck candidates’ claims? What is your obligation to the truth? What is the obligation to call out lies?
–How far will student media go to expose source and information falsity? Is it ethical to plainly call a source a liar?
–What roles, if any, will objectivity, verification, credibility, integrity and knowledge play. Oh, and those are for reporter, columnist and editors as well as sources.
—What ethical planning might student journalists have to make for visual reporting standards when reporting on BLM and protests, police reform and more? For example, should ethical guidelines be changed when identifying protestors, or other participants, to protect their identities.
–How do you determine whose information to cite? Do you have a process to do that? Which student staffers have final say on publishing questionable materials? How do you define questionable? This and this and this and this.
— How good is this story? Professor William Taylor drilled this motto into us in journalism classes: “It isn’t right until it is right.” Who decides what right entails? Right for whom? What’s right: facts, context, implication, perspectives?
–Can voters count on the information to be complete and cohesive enough to cast an informed vote (and we will share more about this in another blog when we look at prior review and restraint and the roe of administrators concerning student media.
—Can/should high school media do this kind of reporting? Why and how? And this.
• Reporting the truth as best you can find it:
–How do you define “responsible?” What is “Responsible Journalism” and who sets the meaning? It is quite common to find a variety of definitions, and that can cause problems. because the term has become a buzzword for control and censorship.
—Is objectivity the gold standard for news journalism? What does it mean; what does it mean in the school setting? Could a photographer also be a “cheerleader,” supporting the team while performing news functions from the sidelines? Is it possible, and this and this.
–How do student journalists choose terminology accurate about other cultures, the economy, education, religion? When is a terrorist not a terrorist?
–To what degree can prior review and restraint alter the truth and accuracy of information? Do voters receive accurate, factual, complete and coherent information upon which to make intelligent, informed decisions?
–What does censorship teach students and adults about whether what they learn about civic engagement, petition and duty is different from reality? What do they do about that new fact?
—What are journalists’ roles now and in the future? How do we help student media be prepared for the changing journalism landscape?
The first piece of this series on preparing student journalists to face change affecting how they complete their obligations and mission. we referred to the “perfect storm” mixing in to a “seething atmosphere of political unease” to go with the virus, protests and the election.
This blog, second in the series, Riding out the storm, is designed to raise questions about additional ethical training student media need. Student journalists can become more adept at anticipating changes to scholastic media and communities it serves, and and in creating alternatives to.
Communities, student and adult, can then take the information they need to factually engage and build desirable futures.
Alone, each of these issues could deeply stress scholastic journalism’s ethical framework. Together, engaging issues and alternatives, we can craft a path to ultimately unify scholastic journalism’s foundation: mission statement, editorial policy, ethical guidelines and application process.
Read More