Can we republish that tweet?

From former SPLC Director Frank Lomonte: Whenever a legal question like this arises, the starting point should always be: What legal right could we be accused of violating here? And if the answer is "none," then that's your answer. "Making me mad" is not a legal claim, so just the fact that a person would have preferred not to have his work republished is not by itself enough.

Here, the only two conceivable legal violations are "copyright" and "privacy." And these are both easily dispensed with.

A tweet is almost certainly not protected by copyright, because copyright requires both originality and creativity. A phrase like "the principal's policy sucks!" could not possibly be copyright-protected by Joe Student, because Joe will not be able to show he is the original creator of that phrase. So there is no copyright infringement in republishing it. (And don't fall into the myth that Twitter "owns" the tweet -- they don't have a copyright interest in Joe's words, either.)

Invasion of privacy applies only to things that are, wait for it, private. So voluntarily publishing your words on a publicly viewable platform waives any claim of invasion of privacy. You get into an interesting ethical issue if a student's tweets are privacy-protected and your reporter was able to view and copy those tweets only by virtue of being a friend of that speaker. While I still do not think there is any realistic risk of invasion of privacy since even publishing to several dozen people is still publishing and still constitutes a waiver of privacy, it is an ethical issue that your journalists should consider: If the speaker is tweeting only to 20 buddies, is it a breach of that friendship to turn around and publish those tweets in student media?

Again, this is about the legality of republishing tweets -- it's certainly legal -- and not about the ethical judgment of capturing any particular student's rant. That's a great news-judgment discussion for your students to have.