Resources

Just as professional newspapers need different voices to tell community stories, so do school media. Having publications that reflect, as accurately as possible, the full picture of the school and its community requires diverse student media participation. A diverse staff offers various viewpoints and is more likely to cover a broader range of topics.

Codes of Ethics for advisers as established by the Journalism Education Association.

Collaboration and Protocol is one vision of how administrators and student journalists can solve issues without censorship…..

In dealing with scholastic media, it is important to understand definitions of critical legal terminology. Defied here are prior review, prior restraint, closed forums, limited public forums, open public forums, forums by policy and forums by practice.

Awards and accolades – everyone wants them. Especially in this era of accountability, recognition of achievement offers a measure of effectiveness. Community members and boards relish the awards students earn. Parents and students value the experiences leading to honors, as well as the actual awards and what they signify to scholarship grantors, colleges and employers.

These questions can help you and your students decide if your school can qualify as a First Amendment Press Freedom Award recipient. That means you honor student rights to free and responsible expression.

Why choose open public form status for student media? Consider these options.

The Journalism Education Association has always believed students involved in print media should enjoy freedom of expression. As an extension of that, JEA also believes student use of the Internet should be free from prior review, restraint and other hindrances preventing free expression.

Student journalists make ethical decisions daily, whether in advertising, design, information gathering or reporting. It is essential and ongoing.

This list of scholastic journalism organizations can help with a variety of needs, including adviser training, student conventions and legal questions.

Online ethics guidelines for student media As student media staffs explore the possibilities of digital media for gathering information and telling stories, they encounter questions of ethics both new and familiar As a general rule, reporters should follow the same ethical principles online as they do in print. For example, identify yourself as a reporter. Don’t lurk in social media and take information without telling the author of that information who you are, verifying the source and confirming with someone else what you learned. These online ethics guidelines focus on situations student newspapers, yearbooks, literary magazines, news shows and other traditional storytelling forms haven’t experienced much, if at all.

Within these six core missions of scholastic journalism you will find how the three groups most impacted – students, advisers/teachers and administrators – can best carry them out.

Information that helps you, student media advisers and their students choose the best forum educationally and for informing your communities.

The Journalism Education Association, as the nation’s largest association of scholastic journalism educators and secondary school media advisers, denounces the practice of administrative prior review as serving no legitimate educational purpose. Prior review leads only to censorship by school officials or to self-censorship by students with no improvement in journalistic quality or learning. Better strategies exist that enhance student learning while protecting school safety and reducing school liability. School administrators provide leadership for just about every dimension of schools. They set the tone and are crucial in a meaningful educational process. Undeniably, administrators want their schools’ graduates to be well-educated and effective citizens. Often, school or district missions statements state this goal explicitly. JEA supports them in that effort. So, when the Journalism Education Association challenges the judgment of administrators who prior review student media, it does so believing better strategies more closely align with enhanced civic engagement, critical thinking and decision-making.

Designers, photographers and illustrators on student media staffs are first and foremost journalists. All of the ethics that apply to reporters and editors also apply to visual journalists. All journalists must aspire to seek the truth, report comprehensively, provide balance and honor original thought.

Yearbook staffs are responsible for creating an annual publication that becomes the permanent record of the school and the school population they serve. The publication they create will serve as a record/history book, memory book, business venture, classroom laboratory and public relations tool for the district. Because the functions of the publication are so far-reaching, and the publication itself is an historical document, ethical questions facing the yearbook staff are challenging and unique.