Ethics in Journalism-To publish...or not to publish.

 It's been a good past couple weeks in my journalism room. My students are finally starting to communicate with each other, and not be so up tight! The room is composed of mainly freshman, and you could have heard pin drop the first three months of class. It's great to see some personality, and the students come out of their shells. Anyways, today's post is about an ethical dilemma I was asked about earlier this week by my CT.

High School newspapers are constantly skating on thin ice. They must be consistent, accurate, balanced, and fair when writing any sort of news story. When the story has to do with death, substance abuse, or school groups, they must be even more careful. Generally, when a controversial story is written, it's reviewed by both editors two to three times. Than it's reviewed by the adviser of the paper-the CT. If it's still iffy, the CT will contact the principal to discuss the topic and let the principal read through the story. "The Messenger" has reached that point, and my CT asked me to read the column and give her opinion if the staff should publish or trash the article.

To make a long story short, the article is over normal, catty, high school drama. About three year ago, a group called CGT was formed. This group would dress up for sports game, holds fundraisers for wrist bands, and was generally a spirit club on steroids. It had become a huge deal, even to the point where KSN had given a story on the amazing participation and support this group had given all sorts of clubs/activities at East. This year it took a turn for the worse. The six original members of CGT decided to start an initiation process to get into the group. They also kicked many members out due to popularity issues. This is based on things such as clothing, a family's money, the car they drove, etc. So the paper decided to tackle the issue head on, and write about this group of six students and their wrongful ways. I read the article, and what I was most impressed with was how the article didnt' necessarily attack the six students, but reflected more on the good old days of the club. The article maintained the consistency, accuracy, balance, and fairness that's stressed on a daily basis by the CT. She looked at me and said "I'm aware that I have the best group of writers in the city, and we are truly lucky". That right there makes me truly excited for the Spring semester, and getting to work with such a talented staff.

The staff ended up taking a vote, and decided that they will run the article. Will there be legal action? No. Will there be possible backlash? Absolutely. However, this staff seems like a closely knit team, and I believe they will respond in the right manner to the backlash they may face. It should be pretty interesting. The article comes out next Wednesday, and that day my CT will be absent. I'm prepared to stand ground for this staff, and feel like I could even support why this article ended up being published. This should make for a VERY interesting second week of November!

*-If anyone of you English teachers are interested in knowing more about the 1st amendment, libel, sources, and other ethical issues, I've attached a link you should check out. I've also attached my school's online periodical. Check it out as well.

The First Amendment Handbook
http://www.rcfp.org/handbook/

East High School Messenger
http://ehsmessenger.com/




Spencer O'Daniel
The Journalism Killa

ManHAPPENIN, Flexing their Creative Muscles, and BASEBALL

I was fortunate enough to be a fellow advisor and attend the state journalism conference in Manhattan with the Wichita public schools. It felt great to be dress niced, and treated like a member of the faculty. Right when I arrived, I was quickly introduced to the Secretary of the JEA (Journalism Educator's Association) from Chase County High School. I also met the Treasurer as well. Both are veteran journalism teachers, and along withy my CT, highly respected and known throughout the state as yearbook and newspaper advisors.

I attended many sessions that were interesting, but what I gained most was an "eye" for a creative, eye grabbing newspaper layout. The Messenger, East High's publication, is a hybrid newspaper-magazine publication that is very effective in getting students to read it's publication. It does this with more of a magazine style feel-larger pages, more infographics, ad pages, and sometimes even a color cover. There is a reason why The Messenger has won several awards at this conference. This hybrid design is obviously the way of the future for newspapers in the high school system. How many of you as college students actually pick the paper up (whether it be the Eagle, New York Times, etc) sit down, and read the articles? I bet very few if NONE do this. This is the same issue with high schoolers. With reading and writing skills being so poor, you absolutely HAVE to engage them visually to even have a chance at them reading an article/articles.  This is the most influential information that I learned while at the conference in Manhattan.

Lesson went well. The first couple days were just showing the kids HOW to use Adobe InDesign-the program used to create their newspaper. One thing I noticed about how my CT wanted me to present this lesson was a lack of involvement for the students. The first two class periods were spent going over slideshows, and going over the essential parts of an infographic. An infographic is a visual aid to help tell a story. An example would be "How many students want extended lunch" followed by a creative graphic using a cheeseburger and fries to illustrate "yes" and "no" responses. My CT was adament about sticking to the slideshow, and just pounding into their heads the key components of an infographic. How could we have involved the students in the initial instruction, when they are completely uneducated on this new item they are learning?  The next couple of days, the students finally got to start sketching, drawing headlines, and getting their hands dirty. I am surprised with how patient they were for 100 + minutes straight of instruction on how to do it. It was pretty neat to see that when we actually TURNED them loose to work, they jumped to their computers without hesitation and got to work. I'm almost finished with my unit, and I'm getting to see my kids flex their creative muscles. All is well in Mr. O'Daniel Journalism World!

P.S-I'm going to interview with the East High Varsity Baseball coach soon for the freshman coach position. I spoke with my CT about it NOT wanting to conflict with my student teaching in the Spring, because that's obviously the most important thing to me. She openly encouraged me to get involved, and said it was a wonderful idea! Question for you fellow teachers-Would it be wise to try to coach baseball while student teaching? Thanks!

Going the Extra Mile

Hola everyone!
It's Labor Day everyone! I'm betting that most of you like myself were lazy ALL weekend and have decided to use today as your day for doing homework and what not. Great weather all weekend, it's easy to be productive on a day like today when I charged my batteries all weekend and just relaxed.

The past week in Journalism, the kids started writing leads. This is the first step to a successful news story. It combines the who, what, when, where, why and how and tries to make sense of it, grab the readers attention and most importantly KEEP that attention. Out of the twelve kids in the class, I believe only maybe 3 were doing this in their work effectively. I many times had to step in and re-word things for the kiddos, but many were responsive and understood why the change was needed. I really like this intro class because they are flexible; if something isn't how it should be, they listen to how to fix it. Most imporantly, they want to know WHY they should fix it. This is learning in a journalism room at it's finest. The WHY in journalism is always to me is the easiest question but sometimes most difficult to explain. The reason WHY we do things a certain way is to make our paper/articles/columns EFFECTIVE and grab the readers attention. How we do this is dependent on variables. These variables range from your target audience, what page the article is on, and so on and so forth. For those of you that haven't ran into the "WHY we do things a certain way" with your kids yet, be prepared for this!

I labeled this article the extra mile because I have decided to go to the Kansas Journalism Convention this month on September 27th. I believe it's important to show that extra innitiave any way you possibly can right now. By showing this extra effort, it may set you apart from others in the hiring process, and getting in great standing with your CT, which can lead to positive comments to administration. We have all heard success stories of student teachers who go above and beyond at their placement, and the next year find themselves as new faculty at the school they were at. My question for my readers is, What else can you do to go that extra mile as a student teacher?

Spencer

Veteran Wisdom or Youth Curiosity?

First full week at school was interesting. Monday, My CT pulled me aside to discuss a male student in the class. Student F (his name starts with F) is a Latino, 15 year old junior who obviously was put into this class to fill his schedule. This student had been tardy 3 out of 4 days, and occasionally would snooze for 1-2 5 to 10 minute sessions of the class. This is very typical in journalism classes, because most are female dominated. She showed me on her computer that Student F scored poorly on his english state assessments (specifically writing and reading). She said many students that scored this poorly on these assessments don't make it in the class, and she was considering emailing an administrator about his removal from the class. I quickly said "No, I think we should give him more of a chance). In one of the first classes, one of the assignments was for students to look at a news article and give the five w's (who what when where why) and "h" (how) in each story. When glancing at each students work, I was very impressed with the higher level questions Student F had used on this assignment. This little tadbit gave me hope for the student, and is what prompted me to tell my CT to hold off for now. It's obvious this student is lacking motivation, but I have found out he is very much into sports, and likes California teams (Lakers, Angels, etc). Finding a way to relate his love for sports to the idea of the lesson is obviously key with this student. In today's class, I made sure to spend a little extra time asking him answers, and getting him to use that higher level thinking that I believe he has. I am very humbled my CT considered my opinion in keeping Student F in the class. Her veteran wisdom and experience led her to believe that this student might not make it. My youthful curiousity led me to believe to give this kid more of a chance. This was a great first step in developing our student teacher-ct relationship. This Monday, I will be teaching my second lesson, and have been given leeway for some of my own creativity in my lesson. Wish me luck! Have a good weekend everybody!

Spencer

First couple days in my newspaper 1 class

Today I was fortunate enough to teach my first lesson in my classroom. My teacher came down with a headache, and I showed up to a substitute  in her spot. My class size is about twelve people, so it was a pretty laid back day. I called roll, gave the directions for their assignment for the day (she gave computer work for the 50 minute time period) and then proceeded to the library to get password resets for five kids in my class. It felt good to run into my first problem and find a way to get it fixed, considering it was a problem last week and my CT wasn't sure how to get it fixed then. The class worked very well on their headline assignment, and with five minutes left I had them log off their computers. Last week, the class practised interview questions (the five W's and H) and got to know a little bit more about Mr. O'Daniel. I thought it would be a good idea to return the favor, and gain some more insight into the type of people there were in this classroom.I then went around the room and had each student tell me something about themselves that they thought was neat/cool/etc. I learned that many of my students enjoy sports (I like that) and one even loves Buffalo Wild Wings...just like me! When I first showed up to class, I was definitely nervous about having to already teach my first lesson. It went very smooth. I really like my school's schedule because it's the only high school in Wichita that is not on block schedule, so they meet with all classes (8 classes total). I believe this is a great aid in learning to not only pace in a block hour (90 minutes) but working with what you have in 50 minutes. Great start to the year!