The discussions and the stories are getting better

Today we distributed our newspaper and we had a number of positive comments from our readers and the reporters in class. We have changed our postmortem discussion to focus our attention on how we are covering the school in a socially responsible way and what quotes and pictures add the most dimension to the stories.

Not all of the kids engage as much as I would like them to, and they likely never will, but the students that do engage are pointing out the good things we are doing, the gains we have made as the year has progressed and challenging people to be better journalists. Our discussions are more focused and today we had as good of a discussion as we could have on a Friday.

The highlights are: a lot of students talked about our c-spread which was an under cover investigation of how students will friend people they do not know on facebook. The results were quite interesting, and the students at our school were talking about it.

We had a story about a teacher who is challenging the standardized testing officials. The teacher got feedback from colleagues congratulating her on pushing like she is.

We had more opinion stories than we could put in, and each of them were localized and relevant to our community. This is probably the area we have made the greatest strides in.

We have a strong team that will be interested in being leaders next year, and I am excited for the relevant and strong journalism in our program to get even better.

Our kids are moving in the right direction

Our next issue will come out next week, and it will feature opinion pieces about the value of teachers, a news story on a push to increase the rigor in our classes, athletic stories about how our sports teams are funded, a back page feature of home schooled students, and a c-spread about Facebook and privacy.

All of these stories are interesting and relevant to our school, but I am particularly proud of the work my students did regarding the facebook story. They created a fictional student that attended our high school along with photos and a back story, and they got 70 students to accept their friendship request within in one week, and two students requested them as friends. They put together a story on the risks students take in their list of friends on facebook with information from experts about how students should use facebook.

We have started, again, a process by which all students will be contributing content to the web. It is a lot to manage, and it seems like it could even be its own class, but hopefully, we'll have content coming in on a regular basis.

Online us where it is at

This past week, we developed for the first time some real enthusiasm and momentum towards our web product on the student end. Students have created a twitter account and are pushing information out to people on a regular basis, and we have developed a plan for our online content that looks sustainable and relevant to our community.

Our local Patch has been following us as well as the Star Tribune editorial page. That has created excitement and a sense of competition, I hope. Patch is profiling students, reporting on games, reporting on the school board, and providing all kinds of multimedia. They are beating the crap out of us in coverage of our school, especially online, and I would like to see that change. I am happy to say that some of my students would like to see that change as well.

So, in addition to fulfilling the social role my kids have committed to doing and are increasingly doing in a more substantive manner in our print product, we will have a more frequent & relevant presence online. Every week, on an alternating basis, half of my students will be required to submit content for the web in the form of coverage of an event, breaking news or as a companion piece to their print product. It could be a video, photo slideshow, podcast, or web story.

I have tried for about three years to get our web product off the ground with varying success. Moving forward, we have students interested in managing this and enthusiasm from my student leaders that is driving this forward. That is what it will take for this to be successful.

A new term, continued momentum

We started this week with some good momentum coming off of our last issue, and the students have done even better with the story ideas for this issue. When we solicited story pitches this week, I put up the following quote from our class a few weeks ago:

"A newspaper that does not challenge its community's values and preconceptions will lose respect for failing to provide the honesty and leadership that newspapers are expected to offer.”

I also made it a requirement that at least one of their story ideas they pitched needed to challenge our community's beliefs. This was a really good way to frame our discussion because the students did not come in with generic topics; they came in with well-thought out directions for stories they wanted to pursue.

Even, and maybe especially, the students who were new this term came in with ideas regarding students being assigned classes they claim they did not register for, the gigantic gap in class expectations, atmosphere and rigor between the AP classes and the mainstream classes that is resulting in so many kids signing up for the AP classes, and several other stories that are more relevant to our school.

The editorial board is planning on a c-spread expose into social media. They would like to establish a fake facebook profile as a student at our school and see how many students friend them and what kind of information they share with them without even knowing who they are. I have urged caution on this, so that they do not share data and information which would have had the expectation of privacy, and we have talked about the ethics of misrepresenting yourself online and then reporting about it. I have also prepared them to expect that perhaps, they will receive very few friends, and there may not be a story. If we don't get a lot of traction on this early next week, it may have to be pushed to the next issue, and it may even be better that it is.

We also had a story fall into our lap, which will require some work and investigation and may need to run in the last issue of the year, but it could prove to be very interesting. One of my coworkers is challenging the MN Department of Education and the Pearson company which creates the standardized tests that all students take. She has two students who did work that she judges as equal on a test. One of them passed and the other did not. She has asked why they did not pass, and received answers such as: there are other factors on the rubric that the classroom teachers do not have access to; you cannot use other student essays or the sample essays they give out to compare student papers,you must use the anchor paper, which is housed at the state offices and cannot leave that building; the people who grade the essay are given two days of training, and they are not required to be certified in English . This is especially frustrating as the people who teach are under such increasing scrutiny for their content and skill delivery, but those that assess to determine the teachers' and students' success don't even need to be content specialists???

At any rate, we have a couple of stories that could shape up to be really important to our school community and maybe beyond, and they are exactly the types of stories I would like my students to be talking about.

On break

My high school is on spring break this week, but the assignments we did for this week's class remind me of the perilous edge that advisers walk each day. A good adviser will encourage students to take risks and even be controversial in the topics they choose to cover, and a good principal will encourage the students to push the First Amendment to its legal and ethical boundaries.

Unfortunately, a good adviser cannot facilitate this kind of rigorous environment in the journalism classroom without a supportive principal. I have heard horror stories of other schools where the publication has been or has come under prior review. I would like to say that most of those examples I know of involve principals who fear bad press for their schools above a desire to make a sound pedagogical decision.

I do have to wonder if some of the instances I am familiar with are a result of careless reporting. The media most frequently reports when a student has been censored and/or a paper has come under more restrictive review after they have been notified by a newspaper staffer. After all, a school is not going to alert the media that they have decided to be less permissive with their student media. I always want to know what the backstory is regarding what has been taught in the class, what ethical and legal standards have the students been held to, and what discussions advisers have had with students about specific or generic controversial situations.

While I do hold that a principal should encourage a rigorous First Amendment laboratory, I hold the adviser equally responsible for enforcing the responsibilities that come with those rights.

Best issue of the year

We distributed our paper yesterday morning, and I have to admit I was a little nervous about this one. I expected to get phone calls from a couple of different people because of the stories we ran, but my phone remained quiet through the day. I stand by the content of the stories, but I know some people in our community just don't like us talking about certain things. This batch of stories was probably the most solid batch we have run all year.

Our c-spread and cover story was about the rise in fights at our school this year. My students discovered that 47 students have been suspended for fighting so far this year, and we had 30 all of last year. They had data for each grade level and quotes from the principal, police liaison officer, students, hall monitors and teachers. When I returned to my office after distribution, one of my coworkers immediately told me it was about time we talked about this story.

One of the veteran English teachers at our school took the time to rip out and comment on two stories that her former students had written because she was impressed by their depth and voice. It was the first thing she did that morning. She has always supported us, but she has never done this before. One of the stories was an editorial about why we can't pull ourselves away from watching the fights. I talked to her briefly and she gushed over this student's insight and leadership on this role. The interesting thing was when we talked more about the larger topic and our c-spread, she seemed to think we shouldn't have done it as a c-spread because it makes our school look bad.

The other story I expected to take heat from was the story in the variety section on the selection process for the a capella choirs at HHS. There is some angst among singers about the fact that current members of the a capella choir members get to have input on who will succeed them. I asked several choir members in my classes and they confirmed this angst. I personally think it is a petty frustration after reading the story and finding out what the process is from current members and the choir director. Nevertheless, the choir director approached me asking that any story we cover about his program be done so in a positive manner. I said we would be fair and verify our facts. When my student went down to him to verify his quotes, he solicited two other music teachers to try to convince her that running this story would make people who do make the choir feel like they did not earn it and that it would discourage others from trying out.

I don't think the sky in the choir room has fallen yet, but I have not heard from him. I hope he found the story fair, as 90 percent of it was dedicated to factually outlining the process of auditions and he and his a capella choir students were given significant ink.

Our issue can be found @ http://issuu.com/royalpage/docs/marchissuu.

Today reminds me of why we need journalists

I woke up at 3 a.m. last night dealing with a sinus infection. It drove me to the basement couch where I turned on the television and was immediately taken with the images from Japan that I was seeing on CBS. I followed the story all day, listening to the live updates on the radio on the way in to school, checking CNN.com and the StarTribune.com for updates on tsunami damage and the growing threat of a Nuclear Meltdown. All of this is possible because we have professional journalists who are reporting accurate and important information.

Yes, they are showing pictures that citizen journalists have sent in, but it is the state media's, NHK, helicopter that is capturing the awesome pictures from the air of the Tsunami as it makes its way across the country. These pictures will tell us invaluable information about the behavior of tsunamis and will document this historic and horrific event in a way that no "new media" journalist can.

I saw an interview with a Reuters reporter from Tokyo, and he outlined the way that the government used the media to get information out to their citizens. Our country established long ago that the public airwaves of television and radio were to be used for public service in the event of natural disasters or emergencies. They established that the owners of the companies that use the airwaves have a clear social responsibility to provide a streamlined medium with which to communicate with citizens in the case of an emergency. We see this most frequently when severe weather strikes, but in the case of today's earthquake, it was clear that Japan had a structure in place by which journalists could serve the role of social responsibility by giving instructions, advisories and updates through the media.

Social media does allow us to be much more connected with what is happening in all corners of this disaster. I have a high school and college classmate that had to evacuate her hotel in Hawaii with her husband and 6 month old, and I was interested to hear her updates today. Citizen journalists are also providing photos and updates that will prove helpful, but it will only be helpful if that information is funneled through fewer sources. In an emergency like this, media consumers will look to media they trust, and they will expect them to fulfill, above all else, the social responsibility role.

We are nearly ready for layout, and this will be our best issue of the year.

This push to be more socially responsible in my newspaper has resulted in some real, substantive change in my classroom. In our news story selection, our editorial selection, and our editorial discussions surrounding this edition, my students (especially the ones who are leaders) are looking at what they do with a more serious lens.

The c-spread story about fights at our school has produced a solid 1,000 word draft. Our C-spread stories are not usually that long, but I am glad this one is breaking the mold because it is the most important one we have done. Our writers who collaborated on this project interviewed the Principal, the registrar, the school police liaison officer, two students who broke up a fight, teachers that have broken up fights and hall monitors. They have real data on how many fights we have had this year as compared to last year and the consequences.

In my first draft critique, I suggested they contact the school psychologist, parents, students that have been in fights and find data on neighboring schools of similar size and demographics. The registrar provided them with a lot of information and explained a lot of stuff to them, but he told me he "left out some information like the race of those who have been suspended for fighting." My students also didn't ask about it, so we'll see if they can take some hints and solicit that info.

The editorials are the most substantive pieces we have had all year. My news editor made a specific point to comment on how he was impressed that even a normally less-serious writer tackled the more reflective and substantive topic of why his classmates know so much more about Charlie Sheen than they do about Libya. My news editor also wrote an editorial connected to our c-spread about why we can't turn away when a fight happens at our school.

So far, I would call this experiment a success in so far as my students are purposefully making editorial decisions and they are writing better stories.

The story has some good momentum

We are working at a story about the rise in fights at our school as our c-spread. We have given more time to this story than we usually allot to deadlines, and I think it is paying dividends.

So far, I know the students have talked to the following people: Dean of students, Police Liaison officer, Principal, star basketball student who helped break up a fight, teacher who helped break up a fight, hall monitors & students who have been suspended for fighting. I am happy with the net they have cast for reporting this story, but in the time before the final draft, I will encourage them to contact some people outside of our school that may be experts on student violence and the effects of it, as well as neighboring schools. These are all things they brainstormed.

They have already come up with some c-spread art, and they are working in a group of three to gather the information for the story. By next week, we should have a complete rough draft for review by the editors.

Now, in the category of not being socially responsible, I was contacted today by a teacher at our school who wanted to make sure that we "keep the view of what takes place in our school as positive as possible." Which I believe to be code for, "don't make my program look bad, even if people have some frustrations." My response to him is that we will be fair and verify our facts and quotes for accuracy.

Our big project

Our last issue has come out with little fanfare. We covered the issue of diversity at our school, and we have heard some rumblings that we got some information wrong, but no one has approached us yet, and I don't know what it is. Ultimately, we covered an issue that is important to our school because we have a changing demographic that has created some tensions.

Our big issue is coming up. We have seen many more fights this year at our school, and it is something my kids have been talking about, but it is now something we must cover. We can't avoid it anymore, especially after one of our hallway monitors resigned (supposedly) after the last fight. This is not going to be easy. Our school will not want to talk about it and call attention to the fights that happen in our school. We must make sure we talk to the right people and get the right information. Any errors will make us a target, and I know people will look for what we do wrong. We have to be on our game with this one, and it will be the most socially responsible story we tackle this year.

Our editorial board decided this would be our c-spread, so our cover and c-spread will need good art that does not sensationalize the issue, but rather adds context and depth to the discussion. We also spent the first thirty minutes of class on Wednesday casting a wide net as far as who we will need to talk to? The students were impressive. I asked them to write down what we needed to know to cover this story well. Who we needed to talk to. What the consequences were for doing it well, and what they were for doing it poorly, and most importantly, who we needed to talk to. Students that have been in the class for many years and students who had only been in the class for a few weeks were asking good questions that we needed to answer in the article and they created an impressive list of people to talk to. If they contact half of them, I'll be ecstatic.

I think several students were excited about writing this story, and we have several different angles we are pursuing. Our students want to know the story behind one of our hall monitors suddenly resigning, and they are contacting him and the principal to get a straight story. It may not come, but we are trying.

We will have about two weeks to work on this story, and we have already contacted the principal. I sat down with him briefly and laid out what the kids were doing, how we would do it, and why were doing it, and he said he would talk to my students and help them get the info they need. My students are scheduling an appointment with the principal. I hope to report that my kids have made contacts, gathered good info and are moving on the story next week.

Social Responsibility is becoming part of our daily dialogue

I don't think we are doing a very good job of applying it, but I am glad that we are talking about it.

When two of my strongest thinkers and writers provided milquetoast editorials last week, I urged them to do better. One of the editorials was about sometimes leaving the pressure behind and playing basketball or watching TV. The other was about settling or not chasing your dreams because they probably aren't achievable.

Could we be any more depressing? These are bright, motivated, smart kids, but these were not exactly stories that would have any real impact on our school community or tell them anything they hadn't thought about. I told them as such. I even used the term milquetoast and suffered the derision for the rest of the week.

What the discussion immediately turned to, though, was that the stories were not socially responsible. And it was the students who mentioned the term. They weren't applying the theory, but when I criticized their work, they did recognize, albeit tongue-in-cheek, their lack of social responsibility in their editorials.

We talked through what they could do differently, and they came in with revisions the next day, but I am still disappointed with the topics they chose. They have done better in the past, and they will do better next time because they will consider our discussion of how they fell short in being socially responsible. Our discussion, and my critiques, will be in the back of their minds when they next brainstorm, and they will do better.

My other disappointment is in the sports section. We have been working on a story regarding how money is spent on athletic teams, and what it costs to run each sport for the last two months. We have a reporter who has been meeting with the A.D. weekly and poring over the books, and it is an interesting story that will provide fresh information for our community. The sports editors chose to preempt it for another month in favor of 1200 word feature story about a teacher at our school who is a swimming coach for the paralympics. It is a great story, but we also ran a story on him last year, when he was actually coaching in china for the paralymipics. It is a good story, but the editors chose to run that one instead of the A.D. story. I think it was the wrong choice, but having student leaders means that sometimes they will make decisions you disagree with.

One good thing that may come from the editorial choice, though, is that we need to get more people in the athletic funding story. The reporter will be able to talk to coaches, player and parents, and he hasn't done that yet. This could end up being a much bigger story worthy of a full-page.

We are going to print on Monday. I will post a link to our website, and a pdf of our issue when it is live.

Struggles with the stories and some new ideas

We had our editing day today where the section editors read all of the stories, and I worked on photo editing with the new students. Most of my students were quite happy with the work that was being done this week. We have a lot of new students in the class, and it was hard to nurse their first stories, but hopefully many of them found success.

Of the stories we are covering this week with a special emphasis on the social responsibility role, we have made some good progress. These are the ones I am most excited about:

Sports-How much money is spent on each athletic team including averages per person and where it comes from. (This has been a two month story with cooperation from the Athletic Director.)

I read a rough draft of this story yesterday, and I sent the writer back to the Athletic Director to get some clarification. The A.D. has been surprisingly forthcoming with info. It will work out to be a great story, but it needed to be refocused. The reporter is focusing on the cost o playing sports at our school. Including what the athletic fees pay for, how much revenue each sport brings in, questions about sponsorships from athletic manufactures and how much it costs to run each sport. He found out that our state champion basketball team brings in the most revenue, but it costs $1,000 less to run our basketball program than it does to run our volleyball program. Sports are not funded based on their popularity or revenue generation; some of the sports that are least popular are the most expensive to run.

C-spread- Racism at our school in the context of black history month celebrations.

This is going to turn out to be one of our most powerful spreads we have done. The editor has a fantastic design and has written a 1,000 word story. We will go in depth with this issue instead of telling a bunch of smaller interesting pieces of info in sidebar format. This is an important story for our school with a growing minority population that previous staffs have tried to tackle rather immaturely. I am confident this staff will do it much better.

BackPage- The things we carry. What students use and carry on a daily basis and how it may be harming them. (Overloaded backpacks, loud earphones & etc.)

We have a lot of kids working on this story that are very interested in helping. This will focus on many things our kids use every day that have long term consequences for them. It has been pretty easy to get this, as it involved research and some readily available info. Still the reporter went to the nurse and a health teacher who is particularly concerned about student well-being to get some local context, and interviewed several students who are known to always wear headphones and carry heavy backpacks. The art for this page will be really good, and the editor has a history of doing really great, socially responsible things.

Next week, we'll be putting it all together, and my writers will be working on a new set of stories.

Week #1 story selection

This is a new semester with a lot of new kids. We had to get going right away with a lot of student press law, ethics, and discussion of our roles in the school and community. I probably rushed through a lot of it, but I laid the ground work for our discussion the rest of the year.

Day #1: The students were asked to identify the words they associate with the following terms:

Objective---Local---Impactful---Ethical

As a class, we shared what those words meant and discussed being objective in journalism. We also watched a clip from the Daily Show that bemoaned false objectivity in reporters who perpetuate lies in order to look objective.

As homework, the students had to write a personal journalist mission statement using at least two of the words we had been discussing, specifically addressing the social role our media should play at our school.

Day #2: Press Law & Ethics (one 80 minute class did not do this justice, but it was an important opening discussion of their rights, some ethical considerations, and some legal boundaries they may not cross.

Sharing mission statements and discussion of our social role at the school. The students decide we have a social responsibility role to fulfill.

Some Student Mission Statements: (they still have a ways to go.)

-The Royal Page is a paper of truth, community, and significance. As a writer for this paper, it is my job to stay local relate the stories to my peers.

-I plan to confront national and regional issues and stories and make them hyper local. The stories we write should have a strong authorial voice, but remain objective.

Day #3: Brainstorm stories for deadline #6 in sections. Each section should select stories in the context the four words we put on the board and at least one story must help fulfill the social responsibility role.

Some story selections from each section

Feature- Diversity in places you don't expect it.

Variety- Valentine's day--safe, fun, and cheap things to do.

Op/Ed- People who handle pressure in positive ways.

News- Thefts and the consequences of it in our school.

Sports-How much money is spent on each athletic team including averages per person and where it comes from. (This has been a two month story with cooperation from the Athletic Director.)

C-spread- Racism at our school in the context of black history month celebrations.

BackPage- The things we carry. What students use and carry on a daily basis and how it may be harming them. (Overloaded backpacks, loud earphones & etc.)

Day #4: Your role as a reporter. Rules for interviewing and gathering information in a respectful, ethical manner.

At the end of week #1, (it was a four day week) it is clear to me that we still have a ways to go, and our discussion and application must be refined even more. The students understand the concept, but we must still work on filtering our story selection through that concept. I know it will take time to change the mindset of these students, but it will come with repetition.

A new way to talk about journalism at HHS.

I'm starting a new project in my newspaper class when the new term begins next week. We will make an effort to be something much more important to our community of students, teachers and parents by fulfilling the journalistic theory of social responsibility. We will use that term in our story selection and brainstorming and make an concerted effort to fulfill that role for our school in our final products.

I have taught for a long time that my newspaper students must tell the stories of our school, and they must use students at our school to localize bigger stories like the economy or teen issues. They do this pretty well. We have told stories of teen pregnancy in the context of teen mothers at our school; we have told the stories of war in the context of students who enroll in the army or alumni who graduate and are fighting in Afghanistan; we have told the struggles of coming out in the context of gay students at our school. But we have never done it with the conscious mind that we were fulfilling a role of social responsibility so much as we were telling interesting stories of the people at our school. Ultimately, we were fulfilling a social responsibility role by accident.

Starting next term, it will be part of the language of our class. What samples of social responsibility can we find in the mainstream media? in the emerging media? in the online media? What stories can we do at our school that make us relevant to the school. Yes, we need to report on trends and school plays and people doing really cool things, but what if each issue had to pass a social responsibility test? What if each section editor had to defend his or her story selection as being socially responsible? What if we talked about our c-spread in terms of social responsibility?

I think it would make a much more relevant product, online and in print, for our community. It would be harder to do, and it would take a lot more legwork, including some Freedom of Information requests, to do it right, but it would be an excellent way to frame what we do in our newspaper program.

I'll chronicle the project on this blog over the course of the next term. I'll update on what stories they select and how they defend their selection in terms of social responsibility, and I'll discuss the frustrations and successes the students have.