Don’t Stop Presses on High School Newspapers

A story in the paper the other day reported that high school newspapers are an endangered species, mostly for lack of money.

Not surprisingly, this story followed by a few days one noting that daily newspapers themselves are in decline, mostly because of television and an increasingly illiterate public.

One way to speed the process of deterioration is to kill high school newspapers because they not only influence young people to go into journalism, but they help get their classmates into the habit of reading newspapers.

To me, the end of newspapers would be the end of democracy. As Thomas Jefferson said, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”

I am particularly protective of high school newspapers because I started my long and rewarding career on one. I was a reporter and then editor of the Belmont High School Sentinel, up on old Crown Hill. (Being editor of the Sentinel was to this day the highest position I have ever held in journalism.)

I read that high school newspapers are floundering not only because the schools have no money for them, but because few teachers care to teach journalism, or know how.

It is true that journalism teachers are hard to find. Anyone who is in journalism stays in journalism, since it is more fun and probably pays more than teaching. Most journalism teachers are English teachers with the bad luck to be stuck with a job none of their colleagues want.

Our journalism teacher at Belmont was a Miss Hubbard. (If she had a first name we never heard it.) She seemed quite old to us but was probably only about 40. She obviously knew nothing about newspaper work and didn’t pretend that she did.

It must have been a thankless job trying to teach journalism to a bunch of maverick kids who had recently seen the movie “The Front Page” and thought they knew how newspaper reporters ought to act.

I was especially shaped by that picture. Hildy Johnson, the hero, was a brash, fast-talking, unscrupulous police reporter whose job was more important to him than his fiancee. He was my role model. I wanted to be just like him, and I became just like him--all except unscrupulous.

We kept poor Miss Hubbard in a state of constant dismay. She used to fan her face and roll her eyes. She wore dresses down to her ankles, but so did all the girls in school. If a girl had shown up in a mid-thigh skirt like those in fashion today, she would have been sent home in disgrace.

The Sentinel was not a good paper, but it was ours. I remember once writing an editorial, full of juvenile satire, about how to disrupt the peace and quiet of the school library.

I had a loyalty to the Sentinel like that I had for each of the various newspapers I worked for later. The paper was, in fact, my conscience and my love.

Of course, we never wrote anything critical of the administration. I wouldn’t say we were censored, but it was understood that certain subjects were taboo. High school newspapers are more openly critical today, but evidently they are still subject to stern censorship.

According to a recent release by the Freedom Forum: “High school newspapers too often are house organs for school administrators, with student expression squelched and censored even on trivial issues, according to a comprehensive study of high school journalism. . . .”

Of course, one foolproof way to squelch protest in high school newspapers is to stop their publication, ostensibly for lack of money. School administrators would like to have school papers off their backs, just as Presidents would like to have the national press off their backs.

Obviously, a high school newspaper is no more exempt from libel laws than your daily newspaper. That is why high school journalism teachers should be trained in the law of the press and teach it to their students. Also, the teacher should be able to censor libelous stories just as a daily’s managing editor can.

The news in the Sentinel in my era was pretty tame. Campus life was tame. No shootings. No visible drugs. No pregnancies (that we ever heard of). There was very little racial tension, although Belmont was a melting pot, as it is today.

I hate to see high school newspapers die. They are the training ground for the Hildy Johnsons of the future. They can teach reporters to be not only brash, but also fair and responsible. If I had it to do over again, I’d write an editorial for the Sentinel along these lines:

“Why do our girls wear skirts to around their ankles? Don’t they have pretty legs? This is 1934, not 1894. Come on, girls. Loosen up! Let us see those knees!”

I’m afraid Miss Hubbard would have been in shock.