With local news outlets rapidly disappearing, high school and college journalists are going beyond their campuses to help fill the void, according to an EdSource article.
But student publications are contending with shrinking budgets, censorship pressures and the challenges of covering underreported communities – similar to the struggles of professional news organizations.
In 2021,Steve O’Donoghue, a journalism teacher and scholastic journalism advocate, launched the SacSchoolBeat because he was frustrated by the lack of student journalism in the Sacramento (CA) area.
The Sacramento School Beat is an online newsroom featuring writers from Sacramento County high schools. O’Donoghue says that the goal is to train students to become education reporters for their schools and districts to address the lack of professional education reporters and inadequate coverage of schools and education in the region.
As more students signed up to join the Sacramento School Beat, O’Donoghue recruited professional journalists as volunteers to edit their newspaper and advise students. This helped the outlet reach more students who otherwise wouldn’t have known journalism was an option.
O’Donoghue wishes journalism was part of more schools’ course offerings to make access to journalism convenient for all students.
Three other examples of student reporting:
- Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel at the Student Press Law Center, says the SPLC helps student journalists deal with increasing amounts of anonymous stories and constantly reviews its strategies and support for students.
“Our primary service is our free legal hotline, and certainly, we’ve seen calls coming into that hotline go up significantly,” Hiestand says. “They’ve got 30% more calls than this same time last year — a significant jump in people reaching out for help.”
- At UC Davis’s The California Aggie, the student government oversees the hiring process, and funding is incorporated into the block fee that the student government collects and reallocates to various departments throughout the university.
This eases the hiring process for The Aggie editorial staff, says Vince Basada, the paper’s news editor, but it also creates a conflict with the student government.
“Our job is to push at them. To find cracks in their narratives. Find the holes in their stories. However, we are technically part of their system.
“I wrote a story in August or September that revealed that there was a big hiring scandal,” Basada says. “One of the unit directors here had improperly hired and improperly managed funds. The president of the association said ‘If this gets out, we could get sued. Make sure this does not leave this room.’ I was in the room and he didn’t realize that.”
After The Aggie published the story, Basada says “student government officials called my boss, saying I should get fired. At the end of the day, my job in an interview is to push for answers, and their job is to make a good image of the association. And sometimes those things just don’t align.”
Basada would prefer student fees to cover The Aggie’s budget over the student government. “I would like not to be financially bound to the association. It’s more important that we have our complete independence and not just our editorial independence.”
- Adalia Luo, editor-in-chief of The UC San Diego Guardian, was studying abroad in Berlin when she learned that the university would no longer financially support the print edition of the student newspaper.
“We’re the only regular print publication on UCSD’s campus, and we’re the only print news publication,” Luo says. “There’s a lot to say about print. It’s more ethical. It’s more accountable. And it’s more accessible.”
The Guardian staff debated proposing a fee referendum — a measure that would the paper to receive a portion of student tuition fees for an additional $3.50 per quarter. But the referendum faced multiple challenges.
First, it needed to be approved by the Associated Students, the Graduate and Professional Student Association and the Student Affairs Administrators before being put on the ballot.
Second, it required not only a majority vote from the student body but also a minimum of 20% of the student population to participate in the vote.
After two weeks of presenting to the student government, emailing Student Affairs, distributing flyers around campus and urging fellow students to vote, the fee referendum passed in April.
Luo says there is still insufficient funding to create an environment to cultivate journalism. The Guardian has a staff of nearly 250 and can’t accept all applicants.
“There isn’t an academic journalism program at UCSD,” Luo says. “If somebody wants to do journalism, they can go to The Guardian, and that’s kind of pretty much the only option for a print newspaper.”
Still, Luo says that the referendum allows The Guardian staff to fulfill their fundamental concern — that journalism stays alive at UC San Diego.
EdSource
