The Wrong and Write Approaches to Prep Newspapers

I have received some sympathetic responses to my piece on the death or moribund decline of the high school newspaper.

As I noted, it was my service on the Belmont High School Sentinel that led directly to my career in journalism.

But the high school newspaper today is a dying species.

I suggested one reason for this is administrative hostility: like oligarchies everywhere, school districts and school principals do not like a free press. Another reason is student apathy; most students don’t like to write.

That there are exceptions, as there always were, is obvious. I have received several copies of high school newspapers that seem bright, clean and newsy.

“I guess you could say those of us who started meeting deadlines in school just never got over the fun of it all,” writes Ginny Payette, whom I knew many years ago when I worked at the old downtown Daily News. Ginny wrote a Hollywood column for United Press.

Ginny herself came up from the Chaffey high school and junior college newspapers, and remembers some of her fellow staffers who also made it in the trade.

“I even think the J-gene is inherited,” she says. “Two teen-age granddaughters in Texas caught the bug in junior high and they’re not over it yet.”

Jim Marquez relates a case history that suggests one reason for the decline of school newspapers.

“Now, one of the reasons you suggest,” he says, “is the lack of writing interest among our youth; but I think (your remark that) ‘school administrators have always been uneasy about the student press’ pretty much hits the mark.”

Marquez recalls that he was working on his high school paper when a teacher threatened to sue the school district because, she claimed, asbestos in her classroom ceiling had given her a respiratory problem.

Marquez researched asbestos, interviewed the teacher and wrote a Page 1 story. It was cleared by his journalism teacher. The day it appeared he was called in by the principal and upbraided “for blaspheming the holy district.” The district threatened to withdraw the paper’s funding.

One result of his story, Marquez believes, was that the asbestos hazard was abated, at great expense to the district; local dailies picked up on the asbestos danger; and Marquez’s journalism teacher, “a woman with a great sense for journalism, was suddenly replaced by some flake.”

I had a similar experience, with a happier ending, when I was editor of the Renegade Rip at Bakersfield Junior College. I wrote an editorial thrashing the student body president for apathy. There wasn’t anything else I could accuse him of. Apathy was the general mood of the school.

Our commercial printer refused to print it. I took it to Grace Bird, our doughty dean. She said, “I wish you hadn’t showed it to me.” I said, “I didn’t,” and persuaded the printer, on the strength of her remark, to print it.

It resulted in nothing but a temporary lifting of apathy. I think that’s what the dean had in mind. Beneath the dead weight of the school district, she was a testy and combative woman.

Harry Cimring, whose literate comments are often quoted here, writes that he was editor of the Roosevelt High School Rough Rider, and that he too chose journalism as a career.

“It was still the time of the Great Depression and money was hard to come by. I therefore applied to USC for a scholarship.

“Coming as I did from the other side of the tracks, I was turned down by the scholarship screening committee. I wasn’t their concept of what a newspaperman should look like.”

Money being short, his family decided that it should be spent on an education in some profession, rather than on journalism (which isn’t really a profession) lest some editor, when he tried to get a job, decide that he didn’t look the part.

Alas, too many careers have been thwarted by those family pow-wows deciding what’s best for the lad or lass.

What seems odd to me is Cimring’s notion that he was denied a scholarship at USC because he was from the wrong side of the tracks, and didn’t look like a newspaperman.

I really can’t believe that was the reason. Most reporters I knew when I broke in looked as if they came from the wrong side of the tracks. In fact, I believe it helped. It used to be said of a famous New York journalist that he always looked “like an unmade bed.”

As for Cimring’s not getting a job for the same reason, I have never known a city editor who had the slightest sense of style. I remember once that the renowned Agness Underwood, city editor of the Herald-Express, told me one day to hop out to the Ambassador and interview soprano Kirsten Flagstad.

“Aggie!” I protested. “I can’t go like this!” I was wearing my Marine Corps green pants and a red lumberjack jacket.

“What’s wrong?” she said. “You look all right to me.”