While home for October Break I picked up a copy of my high school's newspaper The Spoke, which I worked on for all four years of my high school career. Much of what we have discussed so far in this class has led me to examine my time as a member of the Spoke staff in a different light.
During my first year on The Spoke the paper operated much like any high school publication, primarily featuring stories about what was happening in the school community. But after an investigative report about a gambling ring within my school was published in the winter of my sophomore year, the focus of the paper quickly shifted from reflecting everyday life in the halls of Conestoga High School to prominently featuring stories on broad, controversial topics. Over the next two years, The Spoke covered everything from the lives of LGBTQ students at Conestoga to an increase in teenage pregnancy at the school to a controversy over the criminal activity of school employees.
After browsing through my copy of the October 2011 issue of The Spoke it seems like not much as changed, with the lead story of this issue focusing on the struggles of teenagers dealing with depression. After seeing that the focus of The Spoke has remained unchanged in my time away from Conestoga, and having now taken the first half of this class, I began to wonder about the reasoning behind the shift in The Spoke's lead stories.
After spending a good portion of class time discussing Deciding What's News, I began to think about the process behind news selection in smaller news organizations, particularly those of high schools, colleges and small communities. It would seem to me that these media outlets select their stories based on the overall composition of their population; they know the essential values and ideals of their community and select their news around that. I don't think it's unreasonable to say that the main audience for The Spoke is the students and families of Conestoga High School, so perhaps that's why I find it odd that this paper has chosen to use itself as a forum for debating heavy issues rather than informing the community about occurrences within the school. High school newspapers typically focus on stories about the spring musical and the championship soccer team that will inform readers about what is happening within their own community, rather than trying to localize topics that affect a larger population.
I also found the excerpt from The Death and Life of American Journalism to be an interesting read in tandem with the questions that I'm asking, because The Spoke's shift towards more investigative stories and in-depth reports seems to be teaching students about a method of journalism that is rapidly becoming more difficult to produce. McChesney and Nichols note in their chapter The Crisis in Journalism that "investigative journalism was first on the endangered species list [because] it cost a great deal and required patience and experienced journalists to be done properly" (24). As print journalism continues to evolve for a 21st-century audience, the need for deeply comprehensive journalistic studies is lessening. So I'm confused as to why The Spoke has chosen to favor this type of reporting over others, when its primary goals should be to (1) inform the community about news from within the high school and (2) educate students about the operations of current news media organizations.
Works Cited
McChesney, Robert W. and Nichols, John. "The Crisis in Journalism". The Death and Life of American Journalism. New York: Nation Books, 2010.
No comments:
Post a Comment