Two high school newspaper editors and a student newspaper adviser who fought censorship attempts by school officials will be honored at the fifth annual Courage in Student Journalism Awards at the National Scholastic Press Association/Journalism Education Association National Convention in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, Nov. 14.

This year's winners are Seth Zweifler and Henry Rome, editors of the student newspaper, The Spoke, at Conestoga High School in Pennsylvania; and Barb Thill, former adviser of the student newspaper at Illinois' Stevenson High School. The student winners will share a $1,000 prize and Thill will receive $1,000 to support student journalists at her school.

The Courage in Student Journalism Awards are presented each year to student journalists and school officials who have fought for student press. Rome's June 2009 story, "Obligation to Report," detailed how a janitor at the local middle school was able to remain on the school district payroll despite multiple run-ins with the law, including his arrest on bank robbery charges.

The article prompted the school administration to demand prior approval of all student newspaper content before publication. Zweifler and Rome fought the move. They sought support from Spoke alumni and publicity in the local media, and did research to counter the district's case for prior restraint. Eventually the demand for pre-publication review was dropped.

"These winners exemplify the sad fact of life that provocative, hard-hitting student journalism is often celebrated with retaliation," said Student Press Law Center Executive Director Frank LoMonte. "Exemplary journalistic work was met with a crackdown by administrators who believed that the best way to deal with unpleasant disclosures about their school systems was to stop the disclosures."

Thill is the former adviser of Illinois' Stevenson High School's student newspaper, the Statesman. Her students came under fire for a January 2009 package of articles documenting the prevalence of casual "hooking up" relations among teens, much of it alcohol-fueled.

The school's response was to impose mandatory prior review, robbing students of their autonomy to decide what would go into the paper. As a result Thill stepped down as journalism adviser.

"Thill is an example of the price some of the most talented journalism educators pay for their commitment to teaching quality reporting," said Mark Goodman, Knight Chair in Scholastic Journalism, Center for Scholastic Journalism at Kent State University's School of Journalism and Mass Communication. "All of the students who are missing her training are the ones who ultimately suffer."

The awards are presented by the Center for Scholastic Journalism, the Student Press Law Center and the National Scholastic Press Association.

Read more about how student newspaper advisers often face retaliation for controversial stories, and about a new California law that protects student newspaper advisers.

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One of the first things a student in a beginning journalism course learns about is Associated Press style, or AP style for short. AP style is simply a standardized way of writing everything from dates to street addresses to job titles.

AP style was developed and is maintained by The Associated Press, the world's oldest news service.

Learning AP style is certainly not the most exciting or glamorous aspect of a career in journalism, but getting a handle on it is absolutely necessary.

Why? Because AP style is the gold standard for print journalism. It's used by the vast majority of newspapers and news websites in the U.S. A reporter who never bothers to learn even the basics of AP style, who gets into the habit of submitting stories filled with AP style errors, is likely to find himself covering the sewage treatment board beat for a long, long time.

So get started here with the basics of AP Style, then test your knowledge with our AP Style quizzes.

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The Fox News-White House fracas raises issues aplenty about objectivity and fairness, especially at the cable networks. The Obama administration was clumsy in its attempt to single out Fox, but its larger point is well taken: Fox News (and MSNBC for that matter) are many things, but fair and balanced isn't one of them.

But there's another, more disturbing aspect to this: The tendency of more and more news consumers to tune in only the coverage and commentary they agree with.

This isn't theorizing on my part. A study done at Ohio State University found that people spent 36 percent more time reading articles that agreed with their point of view than they did reading text that challenged their opinions.

"We found that people generally chose media messages that reinforced their own preexisting views," said Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, co-author of the study. "In general, they don't want their views to be challenged by seriously considering other viewpoints."

The result? A decline in informed opinion formation, a more polarized and fragmented electorate, and reduced political tolerance, the researchers say.

In other words, right-wingers watch Fox, lefties choose MSNBC, and they're all living in an echo chamber that reinforces the views they already hold.

But it's the echo chamber that people seem to love. Fox News and opinion shows like "Glenn Beck" bring home ratings gold, while the newsier CNN's ratings are in the tank.

Jill Geisler, who teaches management and leadership skills at the Poynter Institute, a journalism training center, says the splintering of the once-monolithic news media has only aided this all-too human tendency.

"There was a time when we tended to hear multiple sides to a story in the mainstream media," she says. "The effort was there in traditional newsrooms to vet for bias and fairness."

Now, she says, "It's so easy to set up your RSS feed on your web browser to keep you in touch with a world that reminds you everyday that the opinions you have are right. All you hear everyday is that your opinions are right.

"People are more able than ever to expose themselves to things selectively, to choose to hear only what they believe already," she adds.

The only problem is, when all we hear are opinions that echo our own, real thinking stops, and a kind of intellectual autopilot takes over. We stop questioning our own assumptions and biases, and become ever-more entrenched in our own partisan positions. Real dialog between people of differing viewpoints is replaced by rancor and shouting that sheds lots of heat but little light.

Sounds like an episode of "The O'Reilly Factor."

Photo courtesy Getty Images

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Millions of Americans get their news from the cable networks CNN, MSNBC or Fox News. Yet two of those - Fox News and MSNBC - have gained notoriety not for their news coverage but for their prime-time opinion programming featuring such voluble hosts as Bill O'Reilly and Keith Olbermann.

Critics say these shows shed more heat than light, and contribute little to their viewers' understanding of important issues. But opinion and controversy sells: Ratings for these opinionated shows have shot through the roof.

So what are the ethical implications of putting opinion before facts? We tackle that question here.

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Does the White House, in its criticism of Fox News, make some valid points about news coverage in general?

As the AP's Ben Feller reports today, the administration (like many before it), has been openly critical of the news media and the way some stories are covered.

Senior White House aides, Feller writes, "still mock the front-page coverage given to whether Obama's back-to-school speech" was an attempt to indoctrinate schoolchildren.

And the president was "openly incredulous" over the wall-to-wall coverage of his "beer summit" with Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates and the Cambridge cop who arrested him.

Obama believes the media "prefer conflict over cooperation, encourage bad behavior and weaken the ability of leaders to help the nation," Feller writes.

Does the president have a point?

Jill Geisler, who teaches management and leadership skills at the Poynter Institute, a journalism training center, thinks so.

"Journalists are drawn to conflict, to the horse race," Geisler said in a phone interview. "It's easier for us to put two opposing soundbites on the air than to assign a reporter to do some research about complex issues."

Geisler, a former TV anchor in Milwaukee, says cable news in particular fills much of its airtime "with people who have conversations about the news." The problem is, "those conversations aren't sufficient to understand complex issues. Soundbites alone can't educate us."

More in-depth reporting would lead to a greater understanding of the issues, though such reporting "is expensive and frequently less entertaining" than talking heads, Geisler admits.

But even in an era of cost-cutting and downsizing at many news organizations, there are shining examples of such work. Geisler points to a recent story in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about a 39-year-old unemployed man who joined the army to get health insurance for his wife, who's suffering from ovarian cancer.

"A reporter had to take a lot of time to follow this man, to spend time with his family," Geisler says. "That costs more to do than having a booking producer hit his Rolodex and call up two experts to have a debate."

Photo of Jill Geisler courtesy The Poynter Institute

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So Fox News had been jabbing away at the Obama administration, and now the Obama administration has decided to hit back. White House communications director Anita Dunn has denounced Fox as political operation and not a real news organization, and vowed to push back hard when one of the network's commentators says something particularly nasty or untrue.

All of this has the blogosphere abuzz with questions: Should the White House single out a particular news organization this way? Are there any parallels here, as some have suggested, with Watergate, when the Nixon administration attacked the Washington Post? And is Fox News really a news organization?

To which I answer, no, no and yes - but...

Read more...

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Journalism's future is clearly online, so it's important for any aspiring journalist to learn the basics of writing for the web.

Fortunately, newswriting and web writing are similar in many ways, so if you've done news stories, learning to write for the web shouldn't be hard.

Here are some tips.

Reading from a computer screen is slower than reading from a paper. So if newspaper stories need to be short, online stories need to be even shorter. A general rule of thumb: Web content should have about half as many words as its printed equivalent.

So keep your sentences short and limit yourself to one main idea per paragraph. Short paragraphs - just a sentence or two each - look less imposing on a web page.

Read more...

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When Lisa Eckelbecker first signed up for Facebook she wasn't sure what to make of it. But as a reporter for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette newspaper, she soon started getting friend requests from readers and people she had interviewed for stories.

"I realized that I was facing a dilemma," she says. "I could use Facebook to communicate with and listen to my immediate family and close friends, or I could use it as a business tool to share my work, build contacts and listen to lots of different people."

After attending a seminar at Columbia University on how to use social networking tools, Eckelbecker chose the latter option.

"I have started posting my stories to my news feed, and it's been gratifying to see people occasionally comment on them," she says. "Recently, I asked my Massachusetts friends if they could help me find sources for a story on supermarket retailing. I struck out with that request, but I like the idea of using Facebook to find sources and will try that again."

Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites have gotten a reputation as places where users routinely post the most mundane details of their daily lives to their closest friends. "Carried out the garbage and now I'm heating up the leftovers" might be typical.

But Eckelbecker is one of a growing number of professional, citizen and student journalists who are using Facebook and similar sites to help them find sources for stories, then spread the word to readers once those stories are published online.

Read the full article...

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Are newspapers dead?

That's the raging debate in the news biz these days. Many say the ultimate demise of the daily paper is just a matter of time - and not much time at that. The future of journalism is clearly online, they say.

Hold on, says another group of folks. Newspapers have been with us for hundreds of years, and while all news may someday be online, papers have some life in 'em yet.

So who's right? I'll outline the arguments on both sides, then you can decide.

Read more...

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So you want to be a critic? Does a career of reviewing movies, music, books, TV shows or restaurants seem like Nirvana to you? Then you're a born critic. But writing great reviews is a real art, one that many have tried but only a few have mastered.

Too many beginning critics are eager to write but know painfully little about their chosen topic. If you want to write reviews that carry some authority, then you need to learn everything you can. Want to be the next Roger Ebert? Then take some college courses on the history of film, or read as many books as you can. The same goes for any topic.

Some people carry this idea too far. They believe that in order to be a truly good film critic you must have worked as a director, or that in order to review music you must have been a professional musician. Certainly that kind of experience wouldn't hurt, but it's more important that the critic be a well-informed layman.

Read more...

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