High school journalism: downsized into oblivion.

AuthorSaltzman, Joe

The painful demise of high school journalism is one of the great silent American tragedies. In the last few decades, the student newspaper, once a proud weekly, has become, in the best of circumstances, a monthly edition, and in many schools it has dropped out of sight altogether. Many high school journalism advisers have been reassigned, and without their spirited support and without the constant reminder of a campus newspaper, there is little incentive for students to become involved in what used to be the best training ground for future journalists and much, much more.

What high school journalism did was establish in the minds of future citizens a familiarity and acceptance of the press that stayed with them for the rest of their lives. It established a life-long relationship with the printed word and created an invaluable habit: the need to read a newspaper.

A newspaper that contains immediate and pertinent information to a specific community becomes a valued friend and confidant. The high school newspaper taught generation after generation of students the value of a continuous weekly source of information. It was usually a student's first experience with freedom of expression and censorship. The more aggressive the student reporters became, the more conflict between publisher and journalists. And this gave the student body a bird's-eye view of the problems of maintaining a newspaper that brought all the news of the campus to them and the value of a free press. It was instructive because it created a debate that is vital to a free society: Who should decide what is news and who should decide what should be printed in the newspaper? It hit the students where they lived and so it became important to them. They wanted to know: Why couldn't the student newspaper talk about cigarette smoking, alcohol, and drugs on campus? Why shouldn't it print a story about a teacher who was fired for incompetence or an administrator who had stolen funds from the school budget? Wasn't the school newspaper a place to explore racism and sexism on campus, to investigate those members of the football team who were being given easy grades for their skills as athletes, to argue student points of view on a variety of issues facing the school's leadership?

Most high school newspapers, under constant pressure from the top, became cheerleading public relations vehicles printing only positive news about the school and never rocking the boat. Yet, even these newspapers...

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