Reporting school news challenges newsroom pros, students

Reporting school news challenges newsroom pros, students: Part 3/4

My original blog idea started as a simple little suggestion to encourage high school student journalists to cover school board meetings and educational topics in communities without commercial media – those rural and urban areas considered news deserts. But it’s grown much bigger than that. These will be the weekly installments.

Content this week: Reporting school news challenges newsroom pros, students

Part 1: We’ll explore what happened when a student reporter offered a story about her school to a local “news and digital marketing platform.” It was posted – and then….

Part 2: What do those involved with student media legal issues say about this? We’ll talk to the Student Press Law Center about what rights such young journalists have.

Part 3: How do the hyperlocal web outlets see their role when working with students – or do they see that as a possibility at all? 

Part 4:  Are there ways we – advisers and journalism teachers – can help students and communities get vital information, especially about local education? How can we educate those who might be working with student journalists but have no background in scholastic media and student rights and responsibiliti

•Content by Candace Bowen, MJE •Pullquote from Rachel Dissell, Cleveland journalist http://www.pexels.com/photo/wittered/trees-on-desert-80454/

_{Getting information about school boards and other educational issues to communities without local media has been a growing challenge. Living in such news deserts makes it hard for voters to be accurately informed about levies, school board elections and much more.}

_{The idea of student journalists contributing local reporting isn’t new, but making it really work isn’t easy.} 

_{Parts 1 and 2 for this blog series looked at what happened when a well-meaning high school junior tried to use a local news website to inform her community about what her school was doing to protect students from gun violence, then what happened when a district official intervened, and what a lawyer at the Student Press Law Center thinks of that.}

_{Parts 1 and 2 for this blog series looked at what happened when a well-meaning high school junior tried to use a local news website to inform her community about what her school was doing to protect students from gun violence, then what happened when a district official intervened, and what a lawyer at the Student Press Law Center thinks of that.}

_{But what do other editors and CEOs of a growing number of community-based and usually web-based news organizations think about working with students? Local set-ups can vary from media that is supported by advertising to those that are non-profits and sometimes have healthy grants, but they’re all working to counteract news deserts.}

Training student reporters is like an extra job

_{No matter their set-up, the challenge is the same. How experienced are the students who would work for them? What do those students need to learn to be effective reporters? And, maybe more important sometimes, what do the professionals working with them need to know, especially about legal and ethical issues, to make the set-up work.}

_{“You have to understand this isn’t like running a temp agency,” Ben Wolford, editor-in-chief of the online Portager, serving mostly rural Portage County in northeast Ohio since 2020. “In the early days, the bulk of our reporting came from journalism students at Kent State. We probably wouldn’t have gotten off the ground without them,” he said in a phone interview.}

_{But Wolford understands even those students were not seasoned journalists, and high school students have even less experience. They aren’t ready for some of the intricacies of local politics, don’t know how to question if someone is telling them the truth or has an agenda, aren’t sure what “off the record” means.}

_{The editors of media outlets with student journalists “have an extra job  – intern coordinator, editor, mentor to these people,” Wolford said. “If you think you’re going to get free labor out of those kids, you’re assuming the job of all those people who helped you when you were beginning. The students may be getting a few bucks, but I’m paying them with a lot of my time.”}

_{It’s a big investment, but Wolford plans to grow a cadre of student high school reporters from as many area high schools he can attract so they can provide content for The Portager.} 

_{Rachel Dissell is an award-winning reporter and Community and Special Projects editor for Signal Cleveland, “an independent, community-led, non-profit news startup,” according to its website.}

 _{It’s also home to Cleveland Documenters, a program that started in Chicago and has grown to Detroit and Cleveland and eventually to other cities. These are adult residents who are trained and paid to cover public meetings in their communities.}

_{Dissell said she uses the same training approach with the 10 Cleveland Metropolitan School District students she work with that is used with the adult Documenters. Before they write stories, she makes sure they are “getting the grounding to become watchdogs of local government.”}  

Grounding students as watchdogs of local democracy

_{They use a template to see what interests them. It includes places to put three summary points of the meeting, follow-up questions, what didn’t make sense to them, what they didn’t understand.} 

_{“It’s a little different than writing a full story at this stage. They cover a meeting, taking notes and crafting follow-up questions,” Dissell said. Currently, her students cover public safety meetings, learning what to listen for, how to use attribution, direct quotes and paraphrasing. Students in this program are paid, as are the adult Documenters.}

_{“They’re getting a grounding in government,” Dissell said, “and building civic muscle. It’s an exercise in democracy and getting them closer to writing the whole story.”}

_{Editor Sue Zake of the soon-to-be-publishing nonprofit news outlet Signal Ohio,had plenty of experience working with college journalists. Previously, she was student media adviser for Kent State University.  She said she would welcome student reporters, especially for education-related stories.}

_{If someone complained about a story – no matter who wrote it – she said she would say, “Tell me what you think isn’t correct – what didn’t we do right?” Just because it doesn’t make the school look good doesn’t make it wrong, she said.}

Those who spend public funds have to be accountable_{“Covering public venues like schools is important,” Zake said. “They are spending taxpayer dollars, so they need to be held accountable.”} 

_{Mike Shapiro is CEO of TAPinto, a network of “more than 90 independently owned and operated local news and digital marketing platforms,” according to the company’s website. The Flemington/Rariton outlet where Emma’s story ran briefly is one such franchise.}

_{The company’s website also says, “More than 2,000 towns in the U.S. have no local newspaper or local news site. As a result, there is a lack of local news reporting in our towns, less information available, and democracy suffers.”}

_{The “marketing” part of the company’s description may be concerning to some. Journalists are taught about the importance of the “separation of church and state” –  keeping the advertising and news functions of media totally separate.}

_{Shapiro said his media outlets are “advertising-based, enabling local businesses to tell their stories to the audience.”} 

_{Could that be a conflict of interest, mixing news and promotion? Not in the 15 years since Shapiro started the company, he said. “When advertisers write about themselves, It’s labeled ‘sponsored content.’ We’ve never had any issues,” he said.}

_{“If it’s newsworthy, advertisers we’re going to cover it if they’re an advertiser or not,” he said. The franchises in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania and Florida “must follow SPJ ethics and must run at least one original news story a day,” Shapiro said. Shapiro said he didn’t know about Emma’s situation “until many months later” when her former journalism teacher told him.}

 _{“We don’t censor our own reporters, and, when students write for us, we consider them our reporters,” Shapiro said.}

TAPinto doesn’t censor employees, wouldn’t limit student

_{He just submitted a grant proposal to the New Jersey Civic Information Consortium to enable TAPINTO to hire a program director to help train student journalists in New Jersey. His plan, he said, is to “start with 10 students in 25 programs across the state, especially those in economically distressed areas.”}

_{Shapiro foresees three kinds of situations. Some schools may already have a program, and those would be able to have their publication hosted on the local TAPinto site. This is already happening with The Highlander from Governor Livingston High School on the Berkeley Heights site.} 

_{Other appropriate support and training would be provided to schools that have an adviser or a journalism program but no publication or to students in a school with no program, he said.}

_{In each case, Shapiro said, he will work with administrators to ensure they know they will have no prior review of student submissions. He hopes to “build a pipeline of reporters for New Jersey with these students.”} 

_{Although they won’t get paid – he pointed out that would be hard with about 250 students per year – each will receive a certificate and a graduation a gift card “from someplace like Starbucks” at the end of the year and attend a banquet with a well-known speaker, encouraging them to go into journalism.}

_{Most of those interviewed have even more ideas of how to train student journalists to cover the tough local stories that should be included.}

Building civic muscle

 _{The fourth and final part of this blog will explore what these students need to learn to be successful, some ways they may be able to best gain that knowledge and what we, as journalism educators, can do to help them. What we don’t want is students covering only car wash fundraisers and winning football teams.}

_{Of course, those won’t be censored or pulled down from a website, but they wouldn’t be serving the purpose of “building civic muscle” for the student journalists or getting vital information about a school district out to local voters.}