Freedom of off-campus publishing comes with a price

A combination of cuts in high school journalism programs and the ease of web publishing could start driving more students away from traditional student newspapers. Especially if more administrators start clamping down as a couple principals in Georgia and California have recently.

The web offers opportunities for end-runs around campus censorship, but future student journalists may miss out on the positive influences of faculty advisers. If that happens, others will have to step forward to guide them.

When a Georgia principal halted publication of a school paper in May, the students took their battle online and posted the final issue and an email trail. Now, a similar battle is brewing in Bakersfield, Calif., where a school principal felt an edition about gay students on campus would be too incendiary. The East Bakersfield High School student staff has filed suit with the backing of the ACLU and lost their first round. If they feel they've lost their voice in The Kernal, perhaps, they too may be tempted to dodge the school's red tape and create their own independent publication.

Interestingly, the Bakersfield Californian in its coverage (registration required) of the lawsuit has published redacted versions of the student paper, using the legal filings.

The Pebblebrook High School principal in Georgia canceled the journalism class to fund other programs and stopped students from publishing the final issue of BrookSpeak. The principal announced those decisions after complaining about the paper's focus on negative issues.

The National Scholastic Press Association reported in 2003 that the number of journalism courses offered in California had dropped more than 10 percent since 1996. In California, given the condition of the state budget and poor financing for public education, it's quite likely the number is even lower now and will continue to drop. According to a survey produced by John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s High School Initiative this year, "Of the high schools that do not offer student newspapers, 40 percent have eliminated student papers within the past five years. Of those, 68 percent now have no media."

Meanwhile, it seems like every middle school student has a MySpace or Xanga site. These sites tend to be more about who likes whom and who wears what than about any substantive issues (at least in the mind of this 44-year-old, but what do I know?). If, when today's middle schoolers get to high school, they want to tackle bigger issues and don't have an outlet for publishing a student newspaper, what will they do? They'll put up a blog or find some other citizen journalism outlet.

Off-campus publishing gives students lots of freedom, but if faculty advisers disappear completely, that will be a loss. I'm sure there are some crappy advisers, but student journalists often have great things to say about their advisers. Read the BrookSpeak email trail and see how Pebblebrook High's Jonathan Stroud stood up for his students.

Mike Orren of Pegasus News, which plans to launch a citizen journalism project later this year, wrote the school principal and offered to provide advice to student journalists by phone or email. That's generous of Mike, who was in attendance last month when citizen media pioneers met in the Bay Area to talk about issues involving the training of citizen journalists. That discussion at some point should include a component specifically targeted at high school citizen journalists who are publishing independently.

RELATED
High School Editor Heads Off Campus For First Amendment Rights (Poynteronline)

High School Journalism Program (Poynter)

Future of the First Amendment (John S. and James L. Knight Foundation)

Student Press Law Center

High School Electronic Journalism Project

Off-campus Web sites: How to stay out of trouble (National Scholastic Press Association)

High School Journalism (ASNE)

Comments

[Lisa Williams]

I'm surprised that none of the stories I see talking about the recent high school paper flaps mention Tinker, the Supreme Court case which basically said that students don't have First Amendment rights that the school principal can't overturn. Given this, the advent of web publishing seems to me to be a real boon to student journalism -- all they really needed from the school was money for printing anyway, which they had to pay for with their First Amendment rights.

[Ari Soglin]

The Student Press Law Center does a great job of explaining two key court rulings -- the Tinker and Hazlewood cases -- here: http://www.splc.org/legalresearch.asp?id=4

SPLC explains that in Hazlewood (1988), "the Supreme Court said that the rights of public school students are not necessarily the same as those of adults in other settings. The student newspaper at Hazelwood East High School, it said, was not a 'forum for public expression' by students, and thus the censored students were not entitled to broad First Amendment protection.... Therefore, the Court held that the school was not required to follow the standard established in Tinker ..., a case where students were suspended from school for wearing black arm bands in protest of the Vietnam War. In that 1969 case, the Supreme Court said school officials could only limit student free expression when they could demonstrate that the expression in question would cause a material and substantial disruption of school activities or an invasion of the rights of others."

The Hazlewood ruling "said that a different test would apply to censorship by school officials of student expression in a school-sponsored activity such as a student newspaper that was not a public forum for student expression. When a school's decision to censor is 'reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical concerns,' it will be permissible. In other words, if a school can present a reasonable educational justification for its censorship, that censorship will be allowed."

That's a pretty wide opening for school administrators, especially when funds are scarce and the budget cut argument can be used. So, I agree with Lisa that web publishing may be a boon. It could start giving administrators some pause. If you push student journalists off campus, you lose control; if you keep them under the auspices of the school, you keep an eye on what they publish. But the kind of administrator who would censor may not be the kind to think that way.