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.