Advisers and activism

I know some professional journalists who do not register with a political party, thus avoiding an obvious label. I know some professional journalists who do not vote, which seems extreme. I know some professional journalists who wouldn't dream of EVER marching or joining in any particular cause for fear that their objectivity will be compromised.

I also know professionals who join a political party, vote, and participate in community causes. Reasonable people can disagree.

Since I do not believe there can be any sort of rigid "objectivity," I personally think those outward displays are simply for display. But at least they grow from a sense of belonging to the journalism "guild," and supporting some professional standards.

Advisers wear a variety of "hats" of course, but "professional journalist" is not one of them (well, I suppose some advisers are moonlighting as journalists...).

Advisers are, in some sort of descending order:

1. Human beings. 
2. Members of a family. 
3. Citizens, and members of a larger community. 
4. Educators. 
5. Advisers. 

We run into problems when advisers begin thinking they are members of the journalism profession (and I know that position will bother some people).

Teachers/advisers can march, protest, speak out. What good is the First Amendment if people cannot do these things? What happens to an education devoid of passion, or emotions, or sympathy?

I also think it is fine that students, parents, etc., are aware that an adviser/teacher/administrator has marched, voted, read widely, traveled, and generally experienced life (it seems a bit creepy for teachers to pretend teachers have no preferences, no particular morals, no point of view -- though I would also be in favor of not making a show of political views). I refer you to Matthew, and Jesus reminding the Pharisees of the difference between their public displays and true belief.

I am generally in favor of school policies that prohibit teachers from displaying materials from ONE political party in their classroom or that prohibit political harangues. The power differentials are too great between teacher and student for those things to be acceptable.

The murky area lies in how much the adviser influences the final coverage in the student media. As I say: "If an adviser really wants to write or photograph or design, go do that. But you can't take advantage of your power to practice journalism in the STUDENT press."

I resist the "journalism ghetto," and reject the idea that advisers should surrender certain rights, and that media education must be divorced from the rest of the curriculum. It does a disservice to our students for us to pretend to have no views or insights into politics or the law or the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. It is also a disservice to take advantage of our special relationship with young people to "do their thinking for them."

Advisers (teachers) can find a balance between being full members of society and demagoguery. They do that every day, or they leave the profession.

I know advisers who do not allow editors to also be student government leaders. It sounds so noble until I think of the opportunities lost, and of how often editors really ARE leaders in the school. Are we not capable of helping students see varying roles, varying situations? Young people CAN get things mixed up, but rules banning journalism and government leadership IN SCHOOL mistakenly mix the professional world with the academic/social world.

Contests: How to enter and why they are important

My approach to such contests in advising 30 yearbooks was to simply think of contests as one more thing to schedule. It took me some time to figure this out, but eventually, I kept a folder in which I would save copies of what I considered my students' best work as the year progressed. When March or April came along I did not have to browse through the entire book's PDFs (and I did the same with newspaper), but already had sifted through much of the material. 

It takes very little time these days to log on to contest sites and upload PDFs and enter a few other pieces of information. The time-consuming part is having to switch gears and sort through student work, all while trying to wrap up the book or prepare that final unit or get a daughter to her soccer practice.

I learned later that what I was doing was essentially conducting a formative assessment (rather than the traditional summative assessment after publication that yearbooks usually entail). If I found that I was not seeing much quality arising out of the first deadline or so, that helped me focus my teaching on helping students "up their game" a bit. This probably sounds quite elementary to you, and it does to me as I write it. But I valued the excitement and pride of being able to share awards with students at the end of the year so much that I never regretted those few hours spent along the way collecting good work. Most years I even gave my own informal awards for best writing in Deadline 2, or best spread from Deadline 3. Those in-class ceremonies were a good excuse for cake.

For much of my advising career, we had to literally cut up books to enter in contests. At one point I was ordering 6 extra books that would eventually be cut apart with Xacto knives and attached to paper entry forms. So much for the "good ol' days." PDFs are so much easier.

Some advisers believe strongly in students having the responsibility for all contests, but I never had students choose entries. I did it based on my experience, trying to consider our work from a stranger's perspective. I have been a judge for a very long time and I know what judges tend to look for and reward. This is one reason I urge advisers to consider judging and never to think they "just don't have the experience." Judging can be an adviser's most important professional practice.

I provided plenty of "go out of my way to praise" support for students who needed it, usually in long conversations, but  I never entered a student's work to make that student feel good. I never told a student I had entered her in a contest. I only announced winners, so I never had to spend much time commiserating with students about why they did NOT win. I got to spend my time on celebrating. I was always clear with students that awards are a bonus, and often wildly inconsistent from judge to judge. 

Yearbook is such a thankless job, for the adviser and the students. The school community will never comprehend how much work even a mediocre book is. And a terrific book is just taken in stride. After all, your readers don't normally read other schools' yearbooks so they can't compare. All those award certificates can and should become part of the conversation you might have with your principal about your program and maybe about your teaching assignment. 

Critiques have the same purpose: to confirm the adviser and staff's feelings about the effectiveness of their work all year. As with athletic success, publication awards can add to a school's culture.

Dear parents... your child is invited to join our team

As with any elective course these days, the numbers won't stay up simply because student media advisers know that journalism classes are the best way to improve skills, build citizenship, incorporate technology and critical thinking, and so much more.

Sometimes we just wonder HOW other people can't see how terrific student media programs are!

When advisers get together with one another, at a conference or online, there can be a lot of angst over how difficult it is to convince students to choose a media course. We bemoan the lack of support we get from counselors or even fellow teachers. We despair about how to counter the rising tide of STEM classes and the pressure for kids to focus on them. We see traditional journalism struggling to find its way in the new century. 

We feel helpless, at the mercy of societal forces that seem to be set against us. What can we do?

My modest proposal: appeal to a population that cares more about the students than the educational institution, and that wields extraordinary influence over the academic lives of students. That population is parents (and guardians, of course). I know it is fashionable to think of parents as disconnected from their children, too busy to really communicate with their children, too focused on grade point and test scores to worry much about much else. 

Baloney. They want their kids to learn to deal with adversity, to learn to work well with others, to have fun yet make good decisions. They know their children are more than numbers, more than test scores and more than bodies being prepared for careers. 

So after identifying a group of promising freshmen or sophomores (or even some of the academic hotshots in your AP Lang course), how can we get those students to take the next step, and actually enroll in a journalism class?

As people in sales know, sometimes the most important part of the pitch is "the ask." 

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Kenerski,

Please consider encouraging your son (daughter) to enroll in our student media course in the coming school year. I am writing to you, specifically, because your son is a good thinker, a good writer and a good citizen. The evidence is in the recommendations I have received from other faculty and staff, and from my own observation.

But I assume that "good" is not enough, for your son or for you as parents.

You want your son to part of something real, something that demonstrates his talents and passion. You want your son to be part of a supportive team, with goals that rise about individual glory. You want your son to be challenged, but with the support he needs to have the best chance to succeed.

Our student media course provides what you want.

We offer genuine leadership opportunities. We offer authentic publishing experiences, where your son can test his ideas beyond a single classroom or beyond a single teacher. We offer a chance for your son to actually practice being a citizen of a free nation, going beyond theory.

I don't want to deluge you with statistics about the growing popularly of college journalism and mass communications classes. I assume you understand the importance of being a smart consumer of media, which now comes at us relentlessly and without much of a filter.

Yes, our media course will help prepare your son for dealing with an increasingly complex and challenging world. Few of our students will become journalists, but all will consume journalism, all will need to be clear and persuasive communicators, comfortable working in groups, adept at sorting through the blizzard of information we all encounter each day. Those are exactly the skills we develop in our media classes.

But you already know that.

And here's what I know: in this hurried, often chaotic world, there are voices that children will listen to: yours. Your influence, quite rightly, outweighs that of the school, of educators and legislators, and even of friends.

When you sit down with your son to choose next year's schedule, please consider how his working on a Pleasantville publication can benefit him. A word from you can make all the difference.

You want the best for your son. I do, as well.

Sincerely,

Jack

Everybody needs an editor - a continuing series

Jan. 30, 2013

In today’s "Denver Post," page 18A, we find this 72 point headline: Senate overwhelming OKs Kerry as secretary of state.

Oh dear.

The good news is that the adjective “overwhelming” is replaced by the correct adverb form, “overwhelmingly,” on the Post website, but we again find that those pesky adverbs cause writers and editors fits.

Here’s the lede to the story: The Senate voted overwhelmingly Tuesday to confirm Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., as the next secretary of state, filling a crucial national security spot in President Barack Obama’s second-term Cabinet.

The Post is one of the many newspapers that have done away with the traditional copy desk, which is a shame on many levels. Even had the headline writer used “overwhelmingly,” this still would not have been much of a headline.

Are we really reduced to simply copying and pasting the story lede into the headline space, tightening a few phrases and losing a few details?

Don’t most readers start with the headline and deck (this deck was “Only two senators from Texas and one from Oklahoma vote against him,” which is awkward in its own way – after all, there ARE only two senators from Texas, so we might have written “Both Texas senators and one from…” Sigh), and then begin the text?

Do reader really need to take in the same information twice within a few seconds?

We need to challenge our student journalists to not only avoid glaring adverb errors, but to provide headlines that do not simply repeat what readers will find in the opening graf. Space on the page is too precious to waste.

What about: “Susan Rice a distant memory, Senate welcomes Kerry as secretary of state”

or “Senate united in confirming one of its own as nation’s top diplomat”?

I’m sure there are many more options. Providing students with a sample news story (sans headline) and asking them to write as many possible heads in various styles as they can in x minutes is not a bad exercise when you have some time to spare.

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.

Who owns the story?

There are a variety of ways to approach this question, but let me suggest this answer as a way to combine our interests as teachers as well as our interests as publishers/advisers:

A story belongs to the writer, for the most part. That is, although editors and advisers may read, respond to and suggest changes to a story, the actual rewriting/revising should be done by the writer. Could these revisions be accomplished more efficiently by an editor? Perhaps, but we all know that such efficiencies actually slow the learning for the writer. The best editors provide support, advice and attention, but avoid writing the stories themselves.

BUT... there does come a time when the ownership of a story shifts from the writer to the publication. At a certain point in the process (for instance, two days before the paper goes to press, or whatever seems workable) it seems counterproductive to simply let inferior material run, with the rationale that it will be very educational for the deficient reporter.

Our readers deserve better than that. They don't know or care about the total educational picture for a reporter. They want their news, and they want it right.

Occasionally I see a paper with a blank space, with a small explanatory bit of type saying that so-and-so failed to do her job. Sorry, but we can't bring you that story, or that photo. Ouch! It must feel pretty satisfying at a visceral level to publicly hang that kid out to dry, but I wonder if the paper itself isn't taking a worse hit.

And one more thought: The hardest thing you will ever do as an adviser is keep your hands off a story or design that you KNOW you could improve. After all, you are the journalism "coach," and if your team performs poorly, there certainly may be some reflection on you.

But coaches don't make tackles, or shoot 3-pointers during games. It's not a perfect analogy, but my point is that the paper belongs to the students, not the teachers, administration or general public. You can be as hands-on as you want during practice. You can map out a game plan. You can critique the game films. But when the ball is kicked off, you are stuck stewing on the sidelines, just like the football coach.

May your next issue have no dropped passes, no silly penalties and no lack of hustle!

Deadlines - a lost cause?

It happens every time I teach a workshop or a session at a journalism conference: kids asked questions that essentially boil down to “How can I get my staff to make deadlines?” The follow up question is usually, “And what horrible punishment can I visit upon them when they don’t?” Advisers ask the same questions.

There’s really only one answer that makes much sense: Editors need to have regular conversations with their reporters, coaching a little bit each time.

This is quite different from the traditional: “Look, I gave you the assignment two weeks ago. Today is the deadline and I want that story!”

People appreciate regular engagement in a topic, and the conversations should begin with the handing out of assignments. A two-minute conversation right away not only lets the assigning editor make her point clear, but gives the reporter a chance to ask questions.

By having more conversations each day or so (and they must be kept brief), the editor shows her interest in what the reporter is doing, and the reporter gets a chance to bounce cool quotes, interesting ideas and puzzling questions off someone else. It is during these conversations that stories can evolve. Think of how many story assignments begin with one set of assumptions and sources, but end up producing a piece of reporting no one saw coming. And those are often the stories of which we are proudest.

When this coaching method is suggested to editors, the common response is that they don’t have enough class time to get this done.

Here’s a rule to try with your editors: Class (or at least a designated portion of class) is for conversation. Do not sit in front of the computer, agonizing over your page layout (or your own writing). Once a person sits at the computer, there is only one conversation going on, and that is between human and machine. Others in the room are sent a clear message that they should stay away.

Editors should seek out reporters. Have meaningful conversations. Listen. Ask a few questions. Think like a reader. Help the reporter see strategies for telling the story. Pick up ideas for photos and sidebars. Discover early on that the assignment shouldn’t be presented as a piece of text, but as a cool infographic.

Oh yes, and since editors are also writers, shouldn’t they be having conversations with their own editors?

And when should editors be agonizing over page layouts? Perhaps editors just need to go with the idea that they will need to spend some time after school, during free hours or whenever to get that portion of the job done. The reporting and writing and sheer thinking must come first. Why agonize over creating a beautiful page design when you have a page devoid of information, of story telling, of passion?

Of course there must always be some sort of "drop dead deadline," otherwise all the great coaching, reporting and packaging work goes to waste. How can we be flexible, yet still get the paper out, get the pages sent to the printer?