A contentious local election revealed an information gap.High school reporters stepped up to fill it

[swag]

https://www.poynter.org/locally/2020/a-contentious-local-election-revealed-an-information-gap-high-school-reporters-stepped-up-to-fill-it/

After an ex-journalist moved back to his hometown and found that the local paper had closed, he created his own, staffing it mostly with teenagers.

By: Angela Fu
December 14, 2020

. . . Pamela Stuart, a city councilor who was not up for reelection that cycle, watched as people spread lies about candidates on social media. She also saw Yang posting — not to lie, but to correct the record and guide conversation. After finding out that Yang was a former journalist and worked in communications, she reached out to him with the idea of starting a local paper.

“It just became so apparent to me that there’s a void of information,” Stuart said. “I just realized that — good, bad or indifferent for me personally — we need fair and free and objective coverage of what’s going on in our community to hold everyone accountable.”

Yang was well-aware of the problems many local papers faced. For the past two decades, the nation had been hemorrhaging newspapers as print advertising revenue dried up. If he was going to start his own, he couldn’t rely on the traditional for-profit model dependent on advertising dollars.

Instead, Yang decided to use a nonprofit, “community service” model. Everyone on the paper would volunteer their time to keep their community better informed. Though the editors would be adults, Yang turned to local high school journalism programs to find his reporters.

The Sammamish Independent published its first set of articles in June. Since then, its staff of teenagers has tackled the same big threads as their adult counterparts at national papers — the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, the elections — but with a local twist. They’ve also launched a podcast, the Indy On Air, to accompany their written reporting.

. . . more

[dawg day]

1. That's pretty cool--

The kids will get great experience, and probably also help the veteran journalists learn new media and tech.

[niyad]

2. This is so encouraging.

[greatauntoftriplets]

3. Cogratulations to them!

Back in the olden days when I worked on my high school newspaper, there was way too much censorship.

[Squinch]

4. That's actually a fabulous model to break people of the Fox habit. If their child or grandchild is

delivering news, they will listen to it even if it doesn't echo what's in their information silo.

[SharonAnn]

5. It also teaches the students to search out the real information. Good training for real life!

I learned a great deal from my one year on a student newspaper but this would be much more educational.