CHICAGO—When there wasn’t enough money in the Steinmetz College Prep high-school budget to cover the cost of printing a student newspaper, its journalism adviser made a desperate plea to one of the Chicago public school’s most successful former students for help.
Hugh Hefner, Playboy Enterprises founder, agreed to pay for five years of printing costs for the Steinmetz Star, which, through the end of next school year, will allow students taking a journalism class at the Belmont Cragin school to create thick, full-color, monthly publications.
“Newspapers in school, all the way back to grammar school on the Northwest Side, and then the Steinmetz Star, they were major influences in school for me,” Hefner said. “I think that…papers, in particular, inspire students in that direction. Certainly it was true in my case.”
Without their own millionaire benefactor in a sailor cap, however, many high school journalism programs across the country are struggling to stay afloat. In an era of tight school budgets, high-stakes testing and changing news consumption habits, the once time-honored tradition of offering students the chance to be newspaper reporters has joined the list of school activities becoming obsolete for today’s students. Newspapers are forced to scale back, move online to save printing costs—and often eventually dry up. “I have seen a lot of papers in the state that have gone away,” said Stan Zoller, east region director for the Journalism Education Association, which hosts contests and offers teaching resources for high-school newspaper advisers. “They see it as an elective only, and it’s expendable.”
Shutdown
SOME journalism advisers and school administrators argue that students’ waning interest in reporting on school affairs is a troubling trend at a time when social media allows students to publish their own thoughts and ideas more easily than ever.
“Journalism is a way to get out a really important message,” said Tom Davis, superintendent of Heritage School District near Champaign, where low enrollment in journalism courses prompted the layoff of the teacher who oversees the newspaper.
“But maybe they feel like with blogs and Facebook and Twitter, they’re already media people.”
In 1991 nearly 100 percent of Chicago public high schools surveyed in a study by Roosevelt University’s College of Communication had newspapers. By 2006 the number had dropped to 60 percent, according to Linda Jones, associate professor of journalism at Roosevelt.
More recent data and studies tracking similar trends in suburban Chicago and across Illinois are not available, but some journalism advisers and school administrators say it’s clear high-school newspapers and organized journalism programs have continued to shut down, especially as educators are expected to prepare students for standardized tests that are tied to school funding.
And there’s a marked difference today in the way students view student papers and lend their time to publishing them, they say.
Buzz
AT Morgan Park High School, English teacher Keith Majeske used to have to hide stacks of newspapers in the school’s main office so students wouldn’t grab them before they were ready for distribution. Today, stacks go untouched for days—unless it’s an issue with prom pictures or Valentine’s Day personal ads.
“There isn’t that kind of buzz that there once was, especially among the underclassmen,” Majeske said. “It’s scary because they don’t know what’s going on beyond their own front door.”
Similarly, in Bartlett, language arts teacher Jill Flanagan noticed a distinct drop in enrollment in her journalism classes in 2008, two years after Facebook became available to anyone over the age of 13 with an e-mail address. This school year, her newspaper class was canceled due to low enrollment, and it won’t be offered next year.
As a last-ditch effort to keep the newspaper alive, Flanagan recruited hard for her after-school journalism club, personally reaching out to 60 students who were good at writing, as recommended by fellow teachers and students.
By Vikki Ortiz Healy | Chicago Tribune/TNS
Image credits: TNS