Some NYC Teens Have a New Hobby: The School Paper

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When Ally Dolores was in ninth grade at Pace High School, in Manhattan’s Chinatown, her English teacher dropped a print newspaper in her lap. She’d never opened one. 

“I was like, ‘Where did he get this from?’ I was so confused,” Dolores said. The teacher, David Rohlfing, had witnessed the school’s student newspaper, The Pacer, wither and die in the 2010s—but during the pandemic, after he was able to reanimate his disconnected students through a storytelling project, he had the idea to bring it back. He recruited Dolores, one of his best students. Four years later, Dolores, now a seventeen-year-old senior, is editor in chief. One of her ambitious recent stories detailed the experiences of Pace students who have endured attempted physical and sexual assaults in the blocks surrounding the high school. “I don’t believe adolescents should be in a community where they are targeted every day,” she said. “I wanted to put that out there for the Pace community.”

The piece generated buzz at the school after it was reposted on Instagram, and school administrators responded positively. Meanwhile, the Pacer newsroom of roughly fifteen students, who meet in a fourth-floor classroom during their eighth-period journalism elective, celebrated the article’s success. 

The Pacer is blazing a trail in New York City for a new initiative called Journalism for All, a partnership between a city nonprofit called the Youth Journalism Coalition, an audio journalism site called The Bell, and the City University of New York’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Journalism for All has raised $3 million to train teachers in thirty high schools around the city to lead journalism classes and start student newspapers this fall.

The coalition of advocates from the nonprofit world and academia is hoping the program will help jump-start the moribund state of high school journalism. From 2011 to 2021, the proportion of US public high schools with a print or online student newspaper dropped from 64 percent to 45, according to national survey data cited by Peter Bobkowski, the Knight Chair in Scholastic Journalism at Kent State University. The decline was most dramatic in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods and in rural areas, where high schools with student papers fell to just 27 percent.

Student papers are declining for the same reasons that professional journalism is shrinking: smaller budgets, and audiences more interested in TikTok content than traditional journalism. Teachers in the twenty-first-century classroom have to find ways to engage kids who’ve lived their entire lives on smartphones and prepare them for citizenship in a deeply divided nation. Journalism for All and similar efforts in other states are making a case that the fact-finding and teamwork of a teenage newsroom might be a solution.

“Young people are not just watching the world unfold. They’re searching for ways to respond,” said CJ Sánchez, the director of NYC Youth Journalism. School journalism remains a unique way for students to tell their own stories, even—or perhaps especially—in the age of TikTok.

Lunx Girgado, an English literacy teacher at ATLAS High School in Queens, signed up to receive training through Journalism for All. They believe their students, many of whom are refugees from the political upheaval in Venezuela, need an outlet to tell their own stories. The students learn essential critical thinking skills, too. “When they go through a journalism program, they begin to see the world in a different light,” Girgado said. “They begin to question the world.”

Rohlfing, at Pace, says that the paper is a way for his students to regain the communication and social skills they lost during a year of pandemic-era remote learning. “Journalism has really given them some structure,” Rohlfing said. For example: reporting forces them to learn to talk to people they don’t know. 

At first, Katelynn Seetaram, a seventeen-year-old Pace student, said, “I didn’t really take to it.” But she stuck around after winning an award for a sports story, and now she shares editor duties with Dolores. This year, The Pacer has covered the unexpected success of the girls’ and boys’ basketball teams, reviewed Taylor Swift’s latest album, offered criticism of cancel culture, and published a news story about flooding damage in the school gym.

“I feel like, being in journalism, I’ve developed into a more truthful version of myself,” Seetaram said. 

The push to produce journalism isn’t only coming from teachers; it’s also coming from the students themselves. 

Liza Greenberg grew up on the Upper West Side in a family that talked about and debated current events; she started a school paper when she was in fifth grade. Now she is a senior at the elite Bronx High School of Science, editor in chief of the school paper, and an advocate for the Youth Journalism Coalition. “All of this talk about young people spending time on social media, disconnected and not reading as much—the way to combat all of these things is to have students who are able to write about the things students care about,” Greenberg said.

Eighteen-year-old Fredlove Deshommes goes to the Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice, a charter school in Downtown Brooklyn that does not have a student paper. To get around this, she launched a podcast in 2022 with the help of a grant from The Bell. The podcast tells the story of a day at the school in 2021 when a senior was arrested for carrying a ghost gun and $30,000 in cash. Deshommes was motivated to do the story after numerous articles covering the incident were published in the New York Post and other papers that included harmful stereotypes about students of color. “A lot of times as kids you think that you can’t influence the community that you’re in,” Deshommes said, but she finds that student journalism can show otherwise.

This year, nonprofit newsrooms and colleges in California, Texas, and Illinois are launching programs to accelerate the comeback of student journalism. Journalism for All’s Sánchez said the hope is that the New York initiative will serve as a model that can be replicated in other US cities. To facilitate this, the program’s training materials and curriculum will be made available for free. 

Still, it’s unclear how far the impact can spread beyond the students themselves. None of the students I spoke to envisioned becoming a professional journalist, though most said they hoped to keep writing in college or to combine journalism with their future studies in science, tech, or medicine.

“I think I learned to be more empathetic,” Kate Iza, a seventeen-year-old at Pace, said. Iza is aiming for a professional career in science or technology, but she wants to keep doing journalism “as a hobby.” Why? “It keeps me grounded with ethics,” she explains. Also: “It’s just a fun way to get to know people.”

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