Center for Scholastic Journalism Blog

If you think Twitter just has people talking about, “Hey, I’m going to eat an apple now” and other mindless self-absorbed messages, you might want to think again.

During the summer, while there’s a little more time to poke around and explore, I thought I would check out whose tweets and which hashtags are useful to journalism advisers. For instance, I started using #YourStories last year as a way to post content ideas for student media, and then others — Sarah Nichols and Tracy Sena, for instance — have used that as well. I also have also started #JTeachingTips (yeah, it’s too long but oh well).

Summer training and workshops have been tweeting good stuff, too. At least two of the ASNE-Reynolds Institutes have done that: #ASNEmo and #ASNEKent10. Also, we have been putting out tips from Poynter’s NewsU Boot Camp for High School Journalism Advisers with #NewsUBootCamp. (I know, I know….I really have to work on that hashtag length.) Just now there’s #bsujw from the Ball State University summer workshops and I’m sure others, too.

JEA’s Scholastic Press Rights Commission uses jeapressrights with updates, info and alerts to new blog posts, and the Certification Commission posts tips leading up to testing at conventions from JEACertified with #CJE or #MJE. There’s also jeadigitalmedia with alerts to new info going on the committee’s site.

National, state and regional organizations have a presence in the Twittersphere. Of course there’s SPLC_org. NSPA has lots of tweets, along with using special hashtags for each convention. (NOTE: This fall JEA/NSPA convention is #hsjkc.) There’s jeaNorCal and MIPAMSU, for instance.

Of course don’t forget about APStylebook to follow — lots of good info plus answers to your questions, and following various local and national media outlets can be helpful.

In 140 characters, I have to say, “If you think Twitter is just mindless personal updates, check out what scholastic & commercial media folks are sending out to you!”  (Woo. That still leaves me 10 characters for one of my overly long hashtags. Let’s see….)
cpb

Now that President Obama has announced Solicitor General and former Harvard Law School Dean Elena Kagan as his nominee to replace retiring justice John Paul Stevens, many individuals and organizations are scrambling to determine where she stands on the issues that matter to them.

For those who care about scholastic journalism and student press freedom, the signs in Kagan’s limited public record appear few and far between.  Unlike recently confirmed Justices Sotomayor and Alito (both of whom had written or joined opinions relating to student First Amendment rights), Kagan has never been a judge.  Thus no court opinions to examine.

But one interesting fact: Kagan was a law clerk for former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, one of the Court’s strongest defenders of student free expression.  Marshall’s one paragraph dissent in the 1985 case Bethel School District v. Fraser, in which he said that the Court should have applied the standard it adopted  in the 1969 case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District to the school’s punishment of Fraser’s sexually suggestive speech was clear, concise and entirely logical.  Had Marshall’s view of the law won the day we would have a much clearer set of standards for student expression in school than we have today.

The fact that Kagan clerked for a justice who cared so strongly for those with the least voice in our society is probably a good thing for student expression.  And we know that chances are excellent that Kagan discussed Marshall’s views on student First Amendment rights with the justice first hand.  The period she clerked was 1987-88, the term the Court handed down its decision in the case Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier.  Marshall joined Justice William Brennan’s dissent in that case, endorsing strong First Amendment protection for student journalists.  Their views did not command a court majority, but perhaps they impressed a young law clerk who 22 years later may take her own place on the Supreme Court.

Some stories happen every year. There’s Homecoming, Prom, the spring musical, the first day of classes. The challenge, whether you’re writing for the newspaper or the yearbook or broadcast, is avoiding the “same article, new names” approach. And none of your readers wants that.

Scanning articles about May 4th at Kent State University is another example of that challenge. Every year media in northeast Ohio and beyond cover the commemoration of the National Guard killing four students during 1970 war protests on campus. This year, which marks 40 years since the event, we’ve seen print, video and audio postings from as far away as the BBC.

But much of it is the same old, same old. In fact, because it’s a historical event, the names and faces don’t even change much. The stories are pretty much the chronological events, often told through the eyes of one source (and sometimes one with a decided slant — check the BBC version for that!).

Thus it’s refreshing to spot some new ways to tell the story. One this year is a thorough audio slide version from WKSU’s M.L. Schultze with archive photos and a wide range of sources. Digital technology can help us give our audiences more than we once had time or space to give.

Another is a new angle: the much-photographed victory bell on the KSU Commons. Akron Beacon Journal reporter Mark J. Price found the former president of Alpha Phi Omega, the national service fraternity that donated the bell to the university in 1950. Eighty-one-year-old Rev. Gene Toot said in the article, “We had this idea that Kent didn’t have a victory bell, and we thought that was something that we’d like to do.”

The rest of the article includes interviews with those who helped donate the bell and their views of the meaning it has gained since 1970. William Kohler, 81, another fraternity member, said he isn’t as interested in the bell now “because it’s related to such a sad situation.”

Even Prom can have a new slant when told through audio slides or interviews that provide a new angle no one has explored before. Media have been covering the Kent State May 4th shootings for 40 years. If journalists can find new angles for that, there’s hope for those same old, same old high school stories, too.

Ah, yes, the sun and warmer temperatures have returned to northern Ohio. And the time couldn’t be more appropriate.

This week, March 14-20, mark’s the annual national observance of “Sunshine Week,” an effort of both the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the American Society of News Editors to promote access to public records and government proceedings. More information can be found here: http://www.sunshineweek.org/Home.aspx

Open-records and open-meetings laws (commonly referred to as “sunshine laws”) were created to allow all citizens the right to see how their government is operating. The goal is to ensure that the public’s business is conducted so that all might be able to know how their tax money is being spent and how key decisions are made.

The effort is something scholastic journalists should take very seriously. All good journalism is an effort to keep government power in check. This especially includes local public school boards, whose job it is to inspire intellectual growth of today’s youth.

Many students are surprised to learn how much information about their school is public record: bus inspection reports, salaries of teachers and administrators, costs of textbooks, aggregate data about students’ performance on state standardized tests, etc. Each of these could be used to create powerful stories that enable students to better understand how their school operates and to have a voice in how it is run.

Using the data from public records shifts the balance of power from the source to the reporter. It’s a basic rule of journalism: Reporters are better able to illicit specific information from a source when they do their homework. Good data leads to focused questions, which lead to better stories.

The laws on this issue vary by state, so it’s essential to have some understanding of the standards in your jurisdiction. The Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press provides an “Open Government Guide” on its site with information about each state’s law: http://www.rcfp.org/ogg/  

The Student Press Law Center also provides a wealth of information on its site, including more information about routine public documents and open meetings, as well as an automatic letter generator that creates a public records request. Users just need to supply some basic information like their name, state and name of the record being requested. https://www.splc.org/legalresearch.asp?maincat=2

(One key point, as the Ethics Code of the Society of Professional Journalists states, newsgathering is never a license for arrogance. Especially when requesting public records, a little politeness and confidence go a long way.)

We’d like to hear from you—how do your student media use public information to better your reporting? How could you start if you’re not already?

My Facebook status message a few weeks ago encouraging my students to do well on the J-School’s Grammar-Usage-Punctuation test (the GUP) clicked with a long list of friends.

“Tell me what they need to know!” asked one high school teacher from Ohio. A few others chimed in with similar requests.

Announced a retired English teacher in Illinois: “Here’s my list–tense, person, tone, number, voice, faulty parallelism, vague pronouns, commas, run-ons and comma splices, and other punctuation marks as you can.”

And her list is pretty good, though I would rearrange a few of them. COMMAS are by far the biggest errors in the papers the generally quite intelligent (and often Honors College) students produce when they begin my Media Writing course their freshman or sophomore year. That’s not surprising either because they have often been taught The Comma Breathe Rule.

No, of course there’s no such thing, but some teachers act like there is. And, if they can’t explain how to put a comma before a coordinating conjunction in a compound sentence (and know what that means), they need SOME way to help students decide where the danged things go. Lots of times someone DOES need to breathe about the time a comma pops up, so….the idea seems to work.

But if the person writing the passage has asthma, does that mean he or she uses more commas?

So the first suggestion to those who wanted to know what their high school students should be taking with them to college as far as grammar goes: a solid enough grounding in the language to know the REAL comma rules and to use them correctly.

Best ways to help them learn this? “When Words Collide: A Media Writer’s Guide to Grammar and Style” is a super GUP book with a slight journalism spin. Of course there’s much to be said for the old (Last edition I could find was 1963.) “Warriner’s English Grammar and Composition: Complete Course.”

Want something a little more high-tech? The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) is outstanding. For instance, the site has 12 different pages of comma exercises, and, yes, you can click to the answers….with explanations. For something a little more fun, “Grammar Bytes: Chomp, Chomp” is full of interactive — and sometimes even silly — exercises. The results are immediate with such comments as, “Ouch! You hit the wall with that answer! With that poor choice, you’ll be walking rather than driving,” and a photo of a wrecked car is below. The correct answer, with a photo of a convertible with its top down, says, “Good choice! You’re cruising with no cares or worries.”

Can students carry the mastery of exercises into their own papers? Sadly, it’s often not that simple. But additional blog posts will suggest ways to help them make that connection and eliminate the hyperventilation that Comma Breathe Rule could give them.

Ohio House Bill 407 now under discussion could mean schools that use up their “calamity days” might substitute online work instead of extending the school year.

In the Midwest, of course, “calamity” usually means snow days, and 2009-2010 has been a bad one for those. Other parts of the country have had the same problem this year. In a story from WDTN in Dayton, “Snow days could be made up online,” by Jordan Burgess (Feb. 24, 2010), both a video and print story cover the suggested change.

What do you think? Could it work from a learning standpoint? What would teachers have to do to make their material appropriate for the Web? Would school districts have the technical support to help them do so? Or would it just be busy work?

Could it work from a student standpoint? What are they missing when they don’t have class? Could reading or writing or viewing a video take the place of what they miss?

As someone who knows online learning can be both rigorous and thorough, I know it COULD work with the right support. But….what do YOU think?