HS Journalism News

Follow along beginning Nov. 19, 2011, as I begin to share 26 ideas over the course of 26 days to help you recruit students into your journalism program. Use these ideas in your school. Share these ideas with those in a school near you. Use the comments below to add other ways we can get more students involved in our programs.

Experts said students' resistance to change could be depriving them of learning opportunities that can better prepare them for college.

"It puts them at a serious disadvantage," said Mr. Goodman. "Online media is so common and so prevalent in the outside world that without that as part of the scholastic journalism program you are not teaching them what they need to know."

Looking to start a WordPress site or looking to redesign the one you currently have? Chris Snider, an instructor of practice in multimedia journalism at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, has compiled more than 25 different news themes you might want to take a look at on his blog. Combine his post with one we gave you a year ago showcasing some of the best premium news and magazine themes and you should have quite a few good options to get you started.

John Corry had given this reclusive, friendless woman a life and a childhood. He had played a role, I am sure, in making my students more aware that behind every derelict, bag lady and panhandler is a story that humanizes them. They were children once. This humanization of the downtrodden and troubled, in our own town or across the world, is something The Times does every day. Information is its basic stock in trade, of course, but Times readers also know that, day after day, it also educates the heart. And I think doing that was more valuable to my students than anything else they learned from The Times or from me.

The lesson plans below - drawn from materials prepared by the Newseum and the First Amendment Center - will draw young people into an exploration of how their freedoms began and how they operate in today's world. Students will discuss just how far individual rights extend, examining rights in the school environment and public places. The lessons may be used in history and government, civics, language arts and journalism, art and debate classes

Reddit is an Internet firehose, a repository of the good, the bad, the silly and the shocking.

Online journalists should make it a habit to look at Reddit from time to time. Not only can it be a great way to promote work, but there always seems to be a good story waiting there. Sometimes it's prominent, and sometimes it's in an obscure corner of the site. The fact that the site's slogan is "the front page of the Internet" is telling.

While Reddit still has a niche audience, the stories that are popular on Reddit probably have some potential to be popular elsewhere. If the story fits your site, you should consider writing something similar.

Scholastic journalism is probably the most effective project-based curriculum in high school. It trains students for the job market and makes them into productive citizens of the Internet world. Journalism may be having problems in the for-profit world, but has an important new role in the scholastic world.

Imagine a group of high school students who can work independently, do intelligent research and collaborate effectively in person as well as on the Internet.

Students who are enrolled in journalism programs around the nation usually do fit that description - notably at Palo Alto High School in California, where more than 500 students out of a student body of 1,800 are electing to take journalism this fall.

Gaby Dunn missed telling stories. She couldn't find a job in journalism after she graduated from Emerson College in 2009, and she didn't have many freelance opportunities.

"I bet there are 100 stories I could write, but I don't have a place to write them," she remembers telling her dad last September. "My dad was like, 'Well, why don't you write down all the ideas?'"

So Dunn got out a piece a paper and compiled a list of 100 people she had always wanted to interview.

A horror makeup artist. A hardcore skateboarder. A one-hit wonder. A rocket scientist. A teen mom. Someone who was left at the altar.

Dunn posted the list on Facebook and created a "100 Interviews" Tumblr blog with an ambitious goal in mind: Over the course of a year, she wanted to find, interview and write about each person on the list.

Fair use guidelines for students newspapers and yearbooks

Student journalists can take some practical steps to make their work if not censor-proof then at least censor-resistant:

The ending of your story may say to the reader, "I decided to stop writing here." But if you have the readers' needs in mind, you want your ending to be more than that. If your story is short, you want your ending to "stick the landing," the way a great gymnast completes a vault.

In this week's writing chat, I talked about all of this and offer related tips. You can replay this chat at any time.

If your story is long, your ending should serve as a reward to your reader for following you to that destination.

Think about it: A news peg is a focusing tool. So is a budget item. Or a headline. Or a lead. Or a nut graph. Or a theme statement. All are designed to help the writer share with the reader the heart of the story, the answer to the question: Why is this worth reading? Dozens of problems cascade down the front of an unfocused story.

In this week's writing chat, we talked about the central act of the writing process: Finding a focus.

You can replay the chat here …

audio chat

WASHINGTON - Public high schools are not liable for the content of student-run newspapers, a Washington state court judge ruled Friday, rejecting a Seattle landlord's libel lawsuit.

The ruling is the first to explicitly establish liability protection at the high school level, said Mike Hiestand, consulting attorney for the Student Press Law Center.

"High school media very rarely gets sued," he said. "And in no case has there ever been a situation that a school district has been held liable for something their student media wrote."

Hiestand said school districts commonly fear being held accountable for content published by student media and tend to censor in order to protect themselves from legal liability.

However, Hiestand said Friday's ruling is a clear sign to school districts that allowing students to make editorial decisions can actually insulate the

Under what circumstances can administrators or police legally search high school students' lockers or their belongings? When do a school's attire restrictions infringe on students' freedom of speech?

Nearly 200 high school students across five Boston schools and another in Cambridge are tackling such complicated issues of constitutional law as it applies to high schoolers through an innovative course launched this year.

USA Today and the First Amendment Center have teamed up to create the Great First Amendment Quiz, an interactive exploration of our most fundamental freedoms.

School officials may not discipline students for speech or writing - even lewd or offensive satire or parody - that is created outside the school environment, a divided federal appeals court ruled Monday

How do we make schools more relevant to students? Teach them the skills they need in the real world, with tools they use every day. That's exactly what Esther Wojcicki, a teacher of English and journalism at Palo Alto High School in Palo Alto, Calif., is attempting to do with the recent launch of the website 21STcenturyli

Great example of narrative writing with slideshow on a somewhat mundane topic - asking someone to go to the prom. Stories are everywhere if you take the time to see them.