By Kiera Butler
To a weary high school journalism adviser, the communications magnet program at Grady High School in Atlanta must seem like the Lake Wobegon of high school journalism, where “all of the children are above average.” The home of the highly decorated Southerner newspaper, a twenty-page monthly complete with a glossy bimonthly magazine pullout, the magnet program draws budding communicators from all over Atlanta. The front page of the September 2005 issue of The Southerner included a story about the Gaza pullout, a story about Grady graduates who had entered Tulane right before Hurricane Katrina struck, and a news brief about a Grady junior who had an article published in an academic journal of astrophysics. While some high school advisers find themselves issuing constant reminders that the world is bigger than homecoming, Dave Winter, the faculty adviser of The Southerner, says his staff itches to cover news beyond the Grady campus.
Take Chelsea Spencer, a seventeen-year-old Southerner editor who has grown up listening to National Public Radio and whose friends sometimes call her a walking thesaurus. “Environmental controversies are kind of my specialty right now,” Chelsea told me one day. Then she launched into an explanation of a story she’s writing about the BeltLine, a proposed transit and neighborhood renovation in Atlanta: the class conflicts that will arise when developers are allowed to build new condos and push out low-income housing, the tax allocation plan that was recently passed, and her doubts about that allocation. “This guy I just interviewed who’s running for city council,” she says, looking deceptively naïve with freckles and long, brown hair, “his main concern is that we’re not actually going to use that money to pay back for the BeltLine.”
I met Chelsea and two other Southerner editors at the largest high school journalism convention in the United States. Cosponsored by the National Scholastic Press Association and the Journalism Education Association, the Fall National High School Journalism Convention takes place in a different major American city each year and draws young people who work on newspapers, magazines, high school radio and television stations, literary journals, and yearbooks. If an alien ship had landed at the convention, the visitors aboard might have come to the conclusion that on this planet we do nothing else but high school journalism. This year more than 5,000 teenagers took over the Grand Hyatt Regency Hotel in Chicago. Their slouching, giggling forms were everywhere — on the chairs and tables in the lobby, darting up and down the escalators, skulking around the concierge’s desk, crowding into conference rooms for hundreds of workshops with titles that ranged from “Photoshop for Beginners” to “Homosexuality: So What’s the Big Deal?”
Out of the sea of kids emerged some recognizable types: the snooty ones (one pony-tailed girl pronounced the hotel’s revolving door “so ghetto” while applying her makeup in the lobby early on the first morning of the convention), the ones who giddily embraced their status as journalism nerds (“We suck at life, but we’re great at journalism,” read another girl’s sweatshirt), and lots of high achievers. But most of the students were white, and after spending four days talking with them, it seemed pretty clear to me that most came from upper-middle-class communities. Many of them, Chelsea and the others from Grady High School included, had paid around $500 in airfare, accommodations, and registration fees to attend. The convention’s organizers are trying to increase racial and economic diversity at the yearly conventions — they offer scholarships to local groups. But a trip with this high a price tag would be hard to swing for an out-of-town student on a tight budget.
The prohibitive cost of the convention made the attendees a particularly uniform group. But considering that a 1997 study by the American Society of Newspaper Editors found that a quarter of journalists surveyed had already decided on a career in journalism by the time they were in high school, it’s fair to speculate that journalism’s low minority employment rate (last year, ASNE put the overall rate at newspapers at 13.4 percent) might not improve any time soon. Earlier this year, a Knight Foundation study called “The Future of the First Amendment” showed that 26 percent of the 544 high schools surveyed had no student newspaper. Of those schools without newspapers, 40 percent had lost them within the past five years. And 76 percent of schools without newspapers were urban or rural schools, those most likely to have high concentrations of poor students and students of color.
Chelsea and the other students on The Southerner’s staff have witnessed the divide firsthand. At Grady High School, only the students in the communications magnet program, which is 34 percent African American, can be on the newspaper’s staff. Students in the rest of the student body, which is 68 percent African American, have no newspaper of their own. The administrators of the magnet program are working to address this imbalance —they’ve recently launched a school-wide magazine, and Winter has allowed the occasional nonmagnet student to serve on staff — but for now, the disparity remains.
On the first day of the convention, teachers gathered in a small conference room for Outreach Academy, a workshop free to a select group of journalism advisers from high schools with high concentrations of minority students. “I think you’ll see this weekend that this conference won’t reflect your classroom,” said Steve O’Donoghue, a former high school journalism adviser who has written about journalism education. “If you’re a wealthy suburban school, sure, you’ll go to Chicago. If not, you’re maybe not coming here.” He was right; only a handful of the advisers at the Outreach Academy had brought a group of students with them, and only one had brought students from outside the Chicago area.
In a presentation entitled “How to Survive Scholastic Journalism,” O’Donoghue invoked the image of the adviser who, because his staff is so self-sufficient, can put his feet up on his desk and enjoy a cup of coffee while copy flow hums harmoniously around him. But as the conference wore on, it seemed that the dream of the idle adviser was far, far away. One teacher wondered how he could possibly get his group of middle school students to run their own newsroom when they were still learning how to use word processing software. Others bounced around ideas of how to offset the costs of printing. These got pretty creative: one adviser had worked out a deal with Taco Bell that allowed her students to sell tacos during lunch and keep some of the profits. Most Outreach Academy advisers, it seemed, were constantly moving — scrounging for funding, thinking one step ahead of administrators, and working hard as hell to keep their students engaged and their programs afloat.
Although students in the communications program at Grady are required to take journalism, at the vast majority of high schools, if journalism is offered as a class at all, it’s considered an elective. This can make it especially unattractive to kids in states where particular policies require students to load up on “basics” (English, math, history, and science, usually). If journalism teachers in California, for example, want their courses to fulfill admission requirements in the University of California system, they must go through a lengthy and opaque application process, and few students who are counting on in-state tuition discounts have the luxury of taking a class that doesn’t count toward admission. Since 1998, when this policy went into effect, the number of students enrolled in journalism classes in California has decreased by 14 percent. At schools where journalism is an elective or an extracurricular activity, one of the most difficult tasks of the journalism adviser is to identify students with potential — and make journalism attractive to them.
Noreen Connolly, a tiny woman with red curls and lots of energy, is the faculty adviser of The Benedict News, the student newspaper of St. Benedict’s Prep, a small parochial boys’ school in Newark, New Jersey, that draws an ethnically diverse student body. On their own, most of Connolly’s students’ families would not have been able to afford a trip to the Chicago convention, but with financial help from the school’s private donors, she was able to bring ten students. Among them was Wadner Brizeus, a seventeen-year-old senior and a rising star at The Benedict News. Last year, Connolly recruited Wadner to join the school newspaper after she heard him recite an interior monologue he had written based on a collage by the artist Romare Bearden. The collage, called “Tomorrow I May Be Far Away,” shows a sharecropper with train tracks in the background, and Wadner imagined the man contemplating what his new life in the North might be like. “When I heard him read it, I thought, I’ve got to get this kid on the paper,” said Connolly.
For most of his high school career, Wadner has focused on science. His sister told him that with his aptitude for chemistry, he could easily go into pharmacy someday and make a good living. “I never really considered journalism before,” said Wadner. He still thinks he might study pharmacy, but in the past year, he has spent a lot of time reporting stories.
I met Wadner on the second day of the convention. The lobby was mobbed, so I sat on the floor by the concierge’s desk with him and a classmate to talk. Wadner told me that he felt “a little out of place” among the mostly white kids from the suburbs. The son of Haitian immigrants, Wadner grew up working-class in Brooklyn and outside Newark. Earlier in the day, Wadner had seen, in a student paper from another high school, an editorial about the rapper Kanye West’s post-Katrina “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” comment. The editorial had defended Bush. “Where I’m from,” Wadner said, “almost everyone thinks George Bush did a bad job. But where they’re from, it’s more like ‘George Bush did all he could and Kanye should just shut up.’” He was more bemused than offended by this point of view, and said he and his St. Benedict’s friends were glad to be meeting people with surprising tastes and opinions. Reflecting on last year’s convention, one of Wadner’s classmates told me, “I learned that you can be from a totally boring place — like Kansas — and still find something to write about.”
Wadner, Connolly says, can be difficult. He’s shy; he doesn’t like to involve meddling adults in his life; he has a great capacity for brooding. On the second day of the convention, Wadner was mad at some of his friends because they had gone off to meet some girls without him. He barely spoke to them for a whole day. “In some ways, he’s a volatile kid,” says Connolly. “But he’s also great at seeing through the bullshit.” Right now, he’s working on a story about gun control in Newark, and as he wades through police spokespeople, community activists, and others, a bullshit detector might come in handy.
Connolly knows a person with journalism potential when she sees one; she’s been recruiting students since she transformed The Benedict News from a newsletter to a full-fledged newspaper in 1998. The first few years were the hardest. “I was so naïve,” says Connolly. “I didn’t know anything about desktop publishing going into it, and I thought somehow it would all just magically come together.”
Connolly was lucky in that the school provided some money to fund the paper and that she had colleagues who were, for the most part, supportive. But most advisers don’t make it. According to the Journalism Education Association, the typical adviser lasts about three years. “High school advisers tend to feel isolated,” says Diana Mitsu Klos, who heads ASNE’s high school journalism initiative. Those who throw up their hands after a year or two, she says, are the ones who are trying to do it all on their own — learn layout programs, lobby for funding, and the rest. And many do all this on top of their “real” jobs; well-meaning principals have a way of tapping young English teachers for the assignment of starting up a student paper, often for little or no additional money.
Klos is working on programs aimed at both recruiting and keeping dedicated teachers. Each summer, ASNE brings more than 150 high school teachers to college campuses across the country for an all-expenses-paid, two-week course in journalism education. Those teachers who participate also receive subscriptions to journalism magazines and memberships in scholastic journalism associations. The summer program — and the memberships that come with it — help give advisers a sense that they are part of a community, which is crucial in getting them through their first few years of advising.
One of the ideas that got the Outreach Academy participants most excited was news about programs that partner professional journalists with high school students. Some of these programs come in the form of summer workshops; others allow students to shadow journalists. But St. Benedict’s has taken advantage of one of the newest mentorship models. Last year, Connolly heard about an ASNE program that partners school newspapers with local dailies. The partnership program also came with a $5,000 grant from the Knight Foundation. Since Connolly’s application was accepted, Star-Ledger staff members have become a regular presence in her newsroom.
Partnership programs seem to work best when staff members work one-on-one with students, helping them hash out problems and find solutions. When Wadner was working on his gun control story, Connolly put him in touch with Barry Carter, a reporter at the Star-Ledger who had written about gun violence in Newark. Carter and Wadner exchanged ideas about the story over e-mail; Carter sent Wadner copies of the pieces he’d written and gave him contact information for a police officer and a local minister who had started an antigun coalition.
The downside of the partnership programs is that they require a spirit of volunteerism that many reporters are too busy to cultivate. But some believe that working with young journalists pays off. Jeff Cohen, editor-in-chief of the Houston Chronicle and chairman of the ASNE High School Journalism Committee, sees mentoring as a necessity in this business. “If you believe in your responsibility to identify and mentor your successors,” says Cohen, “these are investments in the future that have been shown to return big dividends.” At the Outreach Academy, advisers seemed glad — relieved even — that professional journalists are slowly realizing that they must assume some of the burden of educating the next generation. If there were a slogan for this year’s Outreach Academy — and for this age in journalism education in general, for that matter — it might be something like, “It Takes a Village to Raise a Journalist.”
On the second-to-last day of the convention, the National Scholastic Press Association announced the winners of the esteemed Pacemaker prize, considered by many the Pulitzer of scholastic journalism. The Southerner, along with some two-dozen other truly impressive papers, won a Pacemaker in the newspaper category. Connolly had entered The Benedict News in the contest, and a few students had participated in a writing contest at the convention. But they didn’t take home any prizes. The staff is disappointed, and so is Connolly. But she isn’t surprised. Unlike the Grady kids, her students have not spent the past few years steeped in journalism. Many didn’t even begin to read a daily newspaper until they started working on The Benedict News. She can’t help feeling that she and her students are confronting a different set of obstacles. So she tells her students to concentrate on their successes. Pacemaker losses aside, the group came back from the convention with new skills and ideas. And the latest issue earned a rare note of congratulations from St. Benedicts’s headmaster. I spoke to Connolly a few days after the convention, but she couldn’t talk long. “We’re crazy around here right now,” she said. “We’re scrambling to get the paper out.”
Kiera Butler is an assistant editor at CJR.
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