High school journalism: downsized into oblivion - Column

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), Jan, 1997 by Joe Saltzman

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 served a vital function, acting as a comprehensive bulletin board telling readers what officially was going on in their community. But all too often, student journalists were not content to just print the good news around them. They wanted to explore the darker elements of the school and, when they did, they and their advisers were in trouble. Angry administrators' immediate reaction was to try to silence any negative press, but faced with an array of freedom of the press arguments from the student journalists and their friends on and off campus, most administrators backed down and bit the bullet.

The continuing crisis of funding public education, however, gave administrators the opportunity to strike back. One of die first targets for downsizing became high school journalism. No administrator cried when the weekly student newspaper was forced to publish monthly, and fewer still lamented die demise of die newspaper entirely due to lack of funds. For some administrators, it was the perfect solution to the possibility that a young journalist might open up a Pandora's box of problems simply by asking questions and demanding answers. Administrators would rather operate in a quiet dark corner than in the glare of publicity. Parents and alumni would rather think the school was doing fine than read the opposite in a student newspaper. Harried teachers didn't need more problems to worry about.

When student newspapers were involved in a freedom of the press controversy, the news media would leap to their defense. Local and national exposure usually forced a publicity-sensitive high school administration to back down. But the news media apparently were asleep when high school journalism was downsized into oblivion. Administrators, wary of public censorship battles, simply got rid of the newspaper the old-fashioned way - through the purse. And that was that. No more potential problems. No more embarrassing questions. No more negative publicity.

As someone who spent many a long hour in the principal's office because of something reported in my school newspaper, I remember my high school journalism days with a mixture of awe and gratitude. Like so many other students before and after me, high school journalism gave me an understanding of how to go into a chaotic situation and come out with a reasonable account of what happened, how it happened, and why it happened. It taught me how to ask questions and listen to the answers. It taught me to look at a situation critically and not to accept what I was told without questioning the source. And it also taught me and all my student readers the importance of a free press in telling us about the world in which we lived. It gave most of us a respect for the printed word and an understanding of how important that word was, and this was a message we carried inside us for the rest of our lives.