This link to a feature titled "First Amendment Pressures Mount for High School Journalism" is published on Poynteronline. I found the article particularly relevant to our class because of a discussion we had about censorship and the Index. It gives a good range of opinions and even pulls in some history on court cases that is interesting.
I have to admit the format of the article is somewhat annoying. All the links in the piece are distracting. Once again, I have difficulty reading articles online instead of print format and find myself getting side tracked quite easily. Nonetheless, the flow is fast paced and the topic is pertinent to one of our class discussions.
The lede of the article is quick and painless. I definitely think it could be improved... emphasizing the "showing" not "telling" trick we learned. Also, another downfall of the article is its organization. It felt like a list of quotes or citations from random people. There was not much of a transition from one quoted person to the next and their voices all ran together.
There is a lot of room for this piece to improve but, again, I like the topic.
http://www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=101&aid=123572
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
I thought the content of this article was interesting but it had erratic organization. I could definitely see a student newspaper advisor getting fired at my (public) high school for allowing students to print anything outside of material in favor of white, middle-class christian heterosexuals.
Yikes Kim, that's scary!
An interesting topic for this article, but I agree, the organization often threw me for a loop. Also, there was a clear slant to the article, so I think that affected the organization as well.
Very interesting article. It makes you think, huh? Should H.S. writers be censored in reporting the news? It's definitely debatable, but I'm going to have to side with the free press. (Especially since Gary Paulsen, the guy quoted in this story, is a very close friend of the family and I might be working at his First Amendment Center soon.) haha
I hope we bring this article up in class though.
This is an important subject, especially in the wake of our discussion about the Sex Files and its place in The Index. It's comforting to hear editors preach the importance of high school papers utilizing the First Amendment. Some even said they'd like to have their respective papers work directly with high school students in some sort of program. But that's certainly easier said than done.
One newspaper that has carried on a meaningful relationship with budding journalists is the Orlando Sentinel. Currently in its 4th year,the Orlando Sentinel High School Sports Reporting Institute teams high schoolers with professional journalists for four weeks, where they take on their own assignments and face their own deadlines -- all with the immediate feedback of their mentor. It's a great program, one I'm not sure many papers know about. But if editors say they want to get high schoolers involved, here's a great model.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/sports/highschool/orl-institute08a07apr08,0,6245841.story?coll=orl-sports-utility-hs
Post a Comment