Romenesko points to a Long Island high school whose bosses have taken a hard look at their kids’ low test scores and decided the thing to do was crack down on the school newspaper.
If we want to get kids reading our papers, we ought to be going to every local high school and helping the kids set up local news blogs that’ll give ’em a real idea of what journalism is like. Most high school papers are a joke because the students have no freedom to tell the stories their peers would care to read. You know, about sex, drugs and gossip, the three pillars of high school life.
If they had an avenue to tell those kinds of stories they may well catch the news bug and pass it along to others of their generation.
The problem for newspapers isn’t that kids aren’t interested in reading; it’s that they aren’t interested in the news, because it has nothing to do with their lives until one of them comes to school armed and shoots up the place. Getting kids involved in news at at early age might be the secret. I realize papers have been doing “newspapapers in education” for decades without much effect, but all those efforts have boiled down to grownups foisting adult news on a young audience and expecting them to just lap it up. Blogs give us a way to reverse that setup and, in the bargain, give us a window into what our kids are thinking.