An opening question to consider: What is the role of high school journalists?
What is the role of journalists?
What is the difference?
Answer: There is none. And that is how you start building a tradition of success.

Based on that, here are some absolutes you must instill in your students…and in yourselves:
• Balance/Fairness/Wholeness – to reflect the "wholeness " of communities. Coverage needs to capture diverse voices and viewpoints; solutions and problems, the profoundly ordinary as well as the unusual, the good with the bad.
• Accuracy/Authenticity – to get the facts right but also to get the "right facts." Coverage needs to provide background, context and perspective and it must capture the tone, language, experiences and emotions of people.
• Leadership– to frame and illuminate important issues in the communities a newspaper serves. Coverage needs to stimulate discussion about public concerns and help people see possibilities for moving ahead.
• Accessibility – to connect the public with important community issues. Coverage needs to create give- and-take between the newspaper and its communities, and connect citizens to one another.
• Credibility – to consistently fulfill journalistic values over time and convey a deep understanding of the communities a newspaper serves.
• News judgment – to act as the regulator of the other journalistic values by selecting, shaping and bring definition to what is important, interesting and meaningful in a community.

(You could ask the students to do the Publications roles exercise at this point)

Once you have established roles/purposes and news values, you then have to put them into context using the principles of law and ethics:
• Areas of unprotected speech
• Relevant court cases
• Prior review and censorship
Using the above concepts, explore these principles in your coverage with your reporters (they are not correspondents, not writers):
• Explore major social issues
• Create an environment where all issues can be explored and discussed
• Negotiate and even compromise on the form of and approach to such content -- but do not compromise on censorship
• Suicide and drug and alcohol abuse might be approached indirectly through articles about boredom, depression, frustration, parental relations, success, expectations and mass media
• Educate yourselves on social issues and legal/ethical ways to report them
• Organize forums and assemblies; invite experts to talk to various groups and assemblies in the school community; include parents

The student press has the right and responsibility to explore sensitive and controversial issues.

What is sensitive and controversial?

It’s in the eye of the beholder.

Sensitivity is a matter of perspective, as is controversial. Teens openly talk of topics adults cring at daily.
Schools are no longer, if they ever were, halls of learning that are havens from sorrows and pressures of an imperfect world.

Nor should they be.

It is impossible and unwise to “protect” students from knowledge of society’s problems. A public forum reduces rumor, speculation and misinformation; it offers solid information, sources of aid and a basis for wise action; provides students an outlet for comment, opinion and debate; and introduces student thought to the rest of the community and allows for community response.

If one role of the student press is to serve the students, most issues must be addressed in some form. It might be helpful for administrators and advisers to start with one rule: Nothing is banned.

Ethics can be helpful in reporting sensitive or controversial issues. A staff working its way through a list of questions to make reasonable, ethical decisions can provoke many valuable comments, discussions and considerations helping in many situations.

Overall, then, scholastic journalism is reporting only students can do: professional, legal, ethical and dealing with angles only students can report, decide and analyze.

Example: Now, a high school publications graduate said, she realized her real lesson was being taught in every interview, each story, each “time we wanted to dig slightly below the plastic veneer adolescent life with which we were presented.”

That lesson was that journalism creates a real democracy, by enabling students reach as high as they want, as high as their imagination and willingness to have an impact, to make a difference, will carry them.

To have a real democracy, students must be given a chance to practice what they are taught in American history class, in English, in business, in sociology.

The first educational mission for all schools:
To develop responsible citizens, critical thinking and decision making……… this should also become your first educational mission in journalism