Internet access and safety
Today’s student journalists must learn to navigate and produce online media. The choice is clear — provide an educational environment in which students learn to use the Internet with adult facilitation, or leave students to educate themselves with no such guidance. Because the First Amendment protects Internet freedoms in much the same way it protects print media, it is essential for administrators to understand the boundaries of the law.

Understanding filters
The Children’s Internet Protection Act mandates filters in public schools, although many administrators are unaware CIPA also allows for their removal in certain situations. Use in journalism programs should be one of those exceptions because filters often block relevant research material and prohibit students from learning online responsibility.

Key questions student journalists address in determining coverage

When students determine content, they evaluate how the issue or coverage affects those in their communities. Journalists ask themselves what readers need to know and how best to tell the story. Student editors examine the issue collaboratively, considering angles for coverage while also thinking about what readers already know.

“Student media are designated public forums, and free from censorship and advance approval of content. Because content and funding are unrelated, and because the role of adviser does not include advance review of content, student media are free to develop editorial policies and news coverage with the understanding that students and student organizations speak only for themselves. Administrators, faculty, staff or other agents shall not consider the student media’s content when making decisions regarding the media’s funding or faculty adviser.”

                                   — Society of Professional Journalists’ Campus Media Statement


Laws indicate what journalists must do while ethics indicate what they should do.

Rooted in ethics, responsible and free journalism adheres to applicable laws and operates using professional standards to enhance student media’s reach and impact.

Journalism, truly the cornerstone of democracy, starts at the scholastic media level, where students learn the legal and ethical implications of free media that make the United States unique among nations.

The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects free speech and press freedom of all Americans, including students in school. Although the U.S. Supreme Court has made clear these rights are not unlimited, it has also affirmed neither “students [nor] teachers shed their Constitutional rights to freedom of expression at the schoolhouse gate.”

In fact, free expression has long been regarded as the foundation of U.S. democracy. Thomas Jefferson perhaps said it best: “Our liberty depends on freedom of the press and that cannot be limited without being lost.”

The first direct experience most Americans have with press freedom, and the censorship that limits it, begins when they are in school working on student media. That’s why journalism educators, judges and First Amendment advocates have urged schools to support and foster student free expression because it is key to persuading young people “that our Constitution is a living reality, not [just] parchment preserved under glass.”

Selecting the best candidate to advise a student media program involves a range of considerations. Finding journalism teachers with the necessary background and training helps to ensure students will have the best knowledge and skills to produce quality products. Those products are created for an outside audience rather than just teacher assessment within the classroom.

Teachers with the knowledge who know how to create excellent publications help students be responsible staff members — ones operating with accuracy, truth and integrity