PREVIEW: HIGH SCHOOL JOURNALISM --
'WE'RE TRYING TO INSPIRE FOLKS TO BELIEVE AGAIN'
BY LAURA CASTANEDA
Plagued in recent years by censorship,
budget crunches, and embattled or inexperienced advisers, high
school journalism is getting some much-needed attention from an
array of major industry organizations.
Example: The American Society of
Newspaper Editors (ASNE) and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation
have launched an ambitious program to revitalize high school journalism,
particularly in urban areas. Why? High school is considered by
many to be the best place to generate interest in journalism as
a career, especially for minorities, and to turn students into
lifelong newspaper readers.
Knight awarded ASNE a $500,000 planning
grant for three new high school initiatives:
* The ASNE High School Journalism
Institute for teachers. Starting this summer, about 200 journalism
teachers will participate in two-week, for-credit workshops at
six universities around the country.
* The ASNE Journalism Partnerships,
in which newspapers team with local schools to help them start
student newspapers or improve existing newspapers. This year,
$117,500 went to thirty-one schools and twenty-seven daily newspapers;
another twenty-five partnerships will get funding this summer.
* A new Web site at www.highschooljournalism.org
provides exercises, sample lesson plans, updates on scholastic
press freedoms, and links to journalism schools, scholarships,
and awards.
The Knight Foundation is likely
to grant ASNE an additional $4.8 million to expand these programs
for 2001-2003. In a separate but related program, Knight last
year awarded a three-year, $825,000 grant to expand Harvard University's
Program on The Media and American Democracy to five additional
universities. The six-day summer workshop helps high school instructors
teach the media's role in a democracy.
High school journalism is getting
serious attention from other groups as well. The Newspaper Association
of America (NAA) this year will release the Pipeline Project,
a study looking at the role high school journalism plays in encouraging
young people to seek newspaper careers. The spring issue of Nieman
Reports contains a section on youth journalism. And Quill and
Scroll is seeking funding to mail its updated Principal's Guide
to High School Journalism booklet to every public and private
secondary school administrator in the country.
Educators and industry experts are
concerned because one-fifth of all U.S. high schools do not have
student newspapers, according to a national survey by Jack Dvorak,
a journalism professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. He
also found that students of color account for just 15.5 percent
of high school media staffs. And about 30 percent of high school
journalism advisers have been on the job for three years or less,
and may not have much journalism training.
"We're trying to inspire folks to
believe again that this is a noble and useful profession," says
Hodding Carter III, president and chief executive officer of the
Knight Foundation. "Whether or not they actually go into journalism,
we want to touch as many students as possible with the kind of
training and experience that will sharpen their appreciation for
the First Amendment."
