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.