Reacting to student suicide

Something I learned over many years was to pause when my emotions were involved, particularly regarding the almost overwhelming urge to do SOMETHING, anything, to try to make myself and others feel better in tough times. After that "breath," I sometimes went ahead. Other times, I found myself looking for more options (beyond my initial thoughts).

The question we confront when a young person takes her own life is: "What does 'coverage' look like in the case of a young person tragically gone from our life?"

Of course the death of a student needs to be covered. She was part of the community. She lived a life, however brief. Some experts recommend a straight obituary that acknowledges the death using just the most basic facts. Some experts suggest going beyond the basic facts of the death, and emphasizing the life of the deceased.

Most experts do NOT recommend getting into cause of death in the case of suicides, for a variety of reasons. I don't know any professional papers, for instance, that mention suicide as a cause of death, particularly for young people.

I assume (and I wish I were wrong about this) that a significant percentage of young people at least contemplate suicide from time to time. If your staff agrees with that assumption, one approach with some validity is to take some time and really dig into suicide among youth as an issue. This might involve extensive interviewing of local medical and psychiatric experts, not to mention law enforcement and professional journalists. There are ethics questions here, and not just about how to cover a suicide. There are questions about the ethics of suicide itself. Perhaps we need to reach out to college campuses and to professors who have spent a lifetime thinking about ethics.

Running an in-depth investigation that gets into all sorts of angles concerning teen depression and more would certainly be appropriate. I just recommend the cushion of a month or two of time to make the reporting less a reaction to a specific event (after all, it's too late for our student) and more of a clearly conceived action to shine a light on an important issue. As I often would remind my own students: How will running x story HELP our readers?

Please know you are not alone in trying to find some way to make a difference in the area of youth suicide. It's a national problem. I recommend that all staffs read and view the excellent material produced last spring on suicide prevention by our friends at "The Call," from Kirkwood HS, in Missouri. Their adviser is Mitch Eden, the 2016 Dow Jones Journalism Teacher of the Year, and one of the nation's premiere educators.

I am sorry for the loss of any young person, and sorry for the family, which is deep in grief. In over 40 years of working in education, I find myself still puzzled about how to make high schools better, how to teach, and how to create communities. One thing I DO know is that students need SOMEONE to care for them, and sometimes family is not enough.

I saw a statistic claiming that nearly 40 percent of American high school students say there is no one who cares about them in their schools. If students feel that way, then no number of official programs or class lessons or pep assemblies can make the difference.

We need to love each other, particularly in the toughest times. If we, as journalists, begin from that position, we can bend the future in positive ways.

Teaching ethics? Start here.

The American Society of Newspaper Editors have an ethics project that brings together a wide range of samples from across the country. Click on http://asne.org/key_initiatives/ethics/ethics_codes.aspx and suddenly your students have a variety of resources to research.

Provoking thought... our daily responsibility

My buddy Mark Newton passed on this link today, which is related to the Tucson shootings but focuses on one of the very bedrock principles of free expression. The writer's argument defending free speech, while challenging those who exercise free speech to stand by what they express, is an essential part of journalism education. We need to push our students to carefully consider their views before they publish, and then to stand strongly behind their considered views.

In class, we might discuss the difference between a rapidly constructed tweet and a reasoned blog entry. One is the equivalent of an off-the-cuff comment in the lunchroom, while the other is one of the treasured outcomes of true education. Which of those forms of expression are we more likely to stand behind when confronted with opposition? We need to share these sorts of opinion pieces with our students, not to pressure them to believe some point of view in particular, but to get them to value good writing and how it can be achieved. It is important, of course, to find balance in these examples, so you might add in this link to the discussion, which comments on the Tucson shootings and Sarah Palin but from a different direction.

The key question is always: "How did the writer use language to make her point?"

Is there a place for humor and satire in the high school press?

This post was prompted by a discussion on the JEA listserv. An adviser asked about an editor's plans to publish an "April Fool" edition. Most of the respondents gave this idea a strong and quick thumbs down. But it seems to me that there is more to talk about here.

The conventional reasons given for avoiding publishing humor and satire grow out of fear (of readers not "getting" the references/jokes, of juvenile/vulgar humor, of losing standing in the community, etc.). There's something in me that resists that fearfulness.


The fact that high school students rarely can pull off humor or satire may actually be a factor in encouraging them to explore these forms of writing. After all, most of our students didn't find basic news writing to be all that easy until they had practiced extensively. We certainly should encourage our students to analyze how humor and satire work -- after all, our students are avid consumers of satiric programs like "The Daily Show," and one of our jobs is to help students become more savvy consumers of media.

I regularly see individual high school columnists pull off humor and satire in papers across the country. I also see many terrific editorial cartoons in high school media that lampoon the powerful. The key is that those successful forays into potentially risky territory are focused, well-developed, and skillful. They also tend to reside in opinion sections, where readers (and administrators) often grant greater leeway.

And that leads me to point out that "April Fool" editions tend to get overextended, trying to force humor into situations where it just doesn't work. Humor and satire can add to a publication's voice, but such techniques need to be appropriate and organic, not forced into a one-time enterprise.

So... I agree with most of my colleagues that April Fool editions are not worth the effort. But an editorial cartoonist or regular columnist who has the skill, sophistication and courage to point out the silliness or boneheadedness that we all know occasionally occurs in our communities... well, that is something we should be able to support.

Everyone's embarrassed... so what can student editors learn from this?

The fiasco over the firing of Shirley Sherrod at the U.S. Department of Agriculture could become part of our units on press law and ethics. It's a classic example of information taken out of context, compounded by a failure to take the time to investigate and discover what happened prior to two minutes of video and after. With a new school year about to begin, the inevitable rumors, half truths and outright fabrications of an excited student body (not to mention the teachers!) will begin again.

Whether our students are working on newspaper or online, we need to remind them of the need to thoroughly investigate "the news" before rushing to post or publish. We may or may not want to get into what the whole mess has to do with race in America, but everyone can agree that we need to get into how the media can distort the truth.

We need to remind our students that, as Carl Bernstein once defined it: "Journalism is the best attainable version of the truth." Sadly, the professional media, the White House, the blogsphere... pretty much everyone did not provide readers with the best attainable version of the truth in the case of Shirley Sherrod.

We can do better.