Social media has had such a profound effect on journalism that it's sometimes hard to remember how traditional news functioned before it. Reading this 2009 MediaShift article is a powerful reminder that Twitter wasn't always the source of breaking news. In fact, as author Julie Posetti wrote just eight years ago, "Some employers are either so afraid of the platform or so disdainful about its journalistic potential that they've tried to bar their reporters from even accessing Twitter in the workplace."

Not accessing Twitter in the newsroom? It's laughable now. Yet for some high school newsrooms, this is still the case. Overzealous school policies banning the use of various forms of social media and cell phones at school cripple student journalists who need to learn these tools in order to survive and thrive in our new media world. 

However, setting students loose with social media journalism without strong guidelines is just as problematic. Just as professional news producers such as NPR have developed thorough social media policies, advisers should work with their student edition board to develop a robust social media policy for their own publications.

A place to start when tackling this task is to look to professional models like NPR's. This recap of a 2014 panel about the ethics of social media news is another good resource. For scholastic guidance, check out JEA's SPRC’s foundation materials or this 2012 Social Media Toolbox masters project — though a bit dated, it still contains some great lessons and ideas. For help convincing administration of the value of social media in the newsroom, Quill & Scroll's Principal's Guide to Scholastic Journalism has a strong rationale and additional resources.

As you develop your guidelines, however, it's important to consider both sides of social media journalism: not only how to use it as a tool to share information or report a breaking story, but also how to use it as a reporter seeking information — the importance of verification so not to spread misinformation. For this second part of the equation, the Columbia Journalism Review's "Best Practices for Social Media Verification" and the Online News Association's Social Newsgathering Ethics Code are good places to start.

Our student journalists deserve to use the same tools as the professionals, but they also need the same caliber of ethics and responsible practices to guide them. These guidelines must be specific, yet flexible, as social media platforms are constantly evolving. With guidance for how to post to social media as a journalist and how to use it as a reporting tool, students will be uniquely poised to take new media journalism to places we can't yet even imagine.

One of the most important roles of a free press in a journalistic society is to act as a watchdog, to keep an eye on those in power and to ensure that power is not being misused. Although this role is more prominent among professionals, student journalists willing to put in the necessary time and research can be powerful watchdogs for their communities.

In his Poynter article "Watchdog Culture: Why You Need it, How You Can Build it," Butch Ward describes a 2005 conference for media professionals and public service journalism organizations about the importance of creating a watchdog culture in newsrooms. 

"From the outset," Ward writes, "the group emphasized that newspapers must pursue watchdog journalism in order to carry out their responsibility for public service. There also was broad consensus that the pressure on newsrooms to achieve the highest standards of accuracy and fairness has never been higher."

Journalists in 2005 were faced with the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Patriot Act and concerns about the Bush administration. It's understandable why major news producers would have felt the need for a focus on watchdog journalism at that time. Journalists in 2017 are facing a very different set of concerns, but the need for a free press to hold the powerful accountable remains critical. This goes beyond overseeing politicians and the White House.​ "Watchdog journalism is at the heart of a newspaper's commitment to public service," Ward writes. Take a look at the Associated Press Media Editors dynamic list of watchdog reporting, and you'll see stories ranging from disproportionally high rates of punishment for students of color in Illinois to the effects of food waste in Arizona.

This type of reporting is difficult even for professionals, but for students, it can feel impossible. Being a watchdog means doing extensive research and reporting over a long period of time — meticulous fact-checking and verifying every piece of information — and students don't have as much time or as many resources as professional journalists. They also may fear censorship from school officials if they bring unsavory information to light. Although most students are legally protected from this kind of censorship, there can be a wide gap between legal rights and school practices. 

Despite these obstacles, however, student journalists can and should take on the role of watchdogs in their school communities. As reported in Teen Vogue, a growing watchdog in its own right, "The Townsend Harris High School's student newspaper, The Classic, has been actively covering the controversy surrounding the school's interim principal, Rosemarie Jahoda, and has broken a series of stories exposing the principal's alleged inappropriate conduct at closed-door meetings, mistreatment of LGBT students while a math teacher at Stuyvesant High School, and workday 'furniture shopping' for her office, even though she hasn't yet been hired as the permanent principal."

These student journalists, with guidance from adviser Brian Sweeney, have made a tangible difference in their community, and their stories have been picked up by national newspapers such as the New York Post and the New York Daily News. How have they done this? Time, hard work and fact-checking. They've weathered accusations of "fake news"  by carefully verifying and researching every fact. 

Reading reporter Kate Dwyer's account of their process shows how professional the amateurs can be.

Granted, most schools are not facing major corruption scandals that warrant national coverage of student reporting. But that doesn't mean the watchdog role is irrelevant — far from it.

Students have unique insight into problems at schools that may go unnoticed by even the most well-intentioned teachers and administrators. They are the ones most likely to see when a policy or practice isn't working or hear about hidden problems like a culture of hazing within a sports program or drugs coming onto campus. 

The role of a watchdog student journalist is to seek out these problems, investigate them meticulously, verify facts completely and then bring them into the light where adults with power in the community can do something about them. 

When reporting with integrity and tenacity, these student journalists have the power to fulfill Ward's call to the professionals in 2005: to hold "the powerful accountable to the rest of us...serving the public interest in ways that truly interest the public."

Journalism isn't sexy anymore. That's the concern I hear from many when contemplating the future of this crucial profession. Veteran reporter and editor Bob Collins wrote about this problem in a 2012 News Cut piece for Minnesota Public Radio.

​Collins remembered a time when aspiring young journalists flooded NPR World Headquarters, eager to explore a career in news, and he contrasted this to reporter Trisha Marczak's experience going to a high school career fair and finding not a single student interested in her work. 

"I at least expected to meet one eager, young student with their eyes set on changing the world through their pen (that’s how I felt at that age)," Marczak writes. "Don’t these students watch movies? You have to admit; reporters are a movie character favorite. They may not always be small town editors, but you get the idea. Throughout the day, when explaining to students what I do, exactly, I also began to ask whether any of their schools had student-run newspapers. Not one."

And this, I believe, is the problem. How do students get interested in careers? Exposure. When I started the journalism program at my school. it had been years since we'd had more than a club, and I had a hard time drumming up interest for a class. That first year, 18 students were enrolled in my intro to journalism class, and almost none of them had signed up for it. It was a fluke of the schedule that I got as many as I did, and they were not particularly excited to be there.

Now, almost five years later, I have more students interested than can take the class, and that has little to do with me. What makes a teenager use all caps and three exclamation marks about an interview with the mayor (or "NOT NECESSARILY THE MAYOR PROBABLY SOMEONE FROM HIS OFFICE BUT STILL") about local election voter turnout, a topic more likely to induce snores than enthusiasm? Engagement. 

If we want young people to understand the importance of journalism, news literacy is a critical part of the equation. If we want them to get really excited about journalism, though, we need to let them experience it. Only then will the professionals see more eager young journalists flooding their halls and dreaming of changing the world through their pens.

"Are some of the newsroom's most prized values contributing to journalism's continuing decline in credibility?” Tim Porter poses this question in his 2005 essay “New values for a new age of journalism.” He outlines “old” values (including competition, speed and individualism) and argues these concepts must be replaced with new values  (such as context, discipline and collaboration) more reflective of the information age.

Written before the advent of the iPhone and social media, Porter’s essay now seems oddly prescient. It was hard to get the “scoop” on breaking news in 2005, but it’s nearly impossible in 2017 when anyone can Snap, Tweet or FacebookLive an event as it happens.

​As I discussed in my previous post, what brings value to good journalism — whether professional or scholastic — is context, depth and verification. This also provides a starting point for a discussion of “fake news.” The term gained prominence during the 2016 presidential campaign to describe the completely untrue stories that circulated on social media platforms and that some claimed greatly affected the outcome of the election (though a study conducted by researchers at Stanford and NYU suggests that this was not the case).

However, in the wake of Trump’s election and his avowed war with the media, this term has, Washington Post reporter Callum Borchers wrote on Feb. 9, “lost all meaning.” In this opinion piece, Borchers asserts that "conservatives — led by President Trump — have hijacked the term and sought to redefine it as, basically, any reporting they don't like. At the extreme end of absurdity, Trump actually asserted on Monday that 'any negative polls are fake news.’” 

So should we stop even trying to talk about fake news with our students? No. But we do need to talk about it with more nuance.

In a recent essay for First Draft News, Claire Wardle writes, "By now we’ve all agreed the term 'fake news' is unhelpful, but without an alternative, we’re left awkwardly using air quotes whenever we utter the phrase. The reason we’re struggling with a replacement is because this is about more than news, it’s about the entire information ecosystem. And the term fake doesn’t begin to describe the complexity of the different types of misinformation (the inadvertent sharing of false information) and disinformation (the deliberate creation and sharing of information known to be false)."

We must consider "the different types of content being created or shared, the motivations of those who created it and the ways that content is being disseminated,” she writes, in order to "understand the current information ecosystem”:

Her essay is complex and worth a careful read, so I’m not going to try to summarize it all here, but it left me thinking about how her analysis connects to Porter’s essay about journalism needing new values.

Let me be clear — I am in no way equating mistakes made by reputable journalists and then corrected as the kind of disinformation spread through fabricated articles. However, I do think that those older journalistic values of competition and individualism contribute to accidental misinformation that can have real world consequences.

Just think about how the desire to break the story first has contributed to reputable news outlets identifying terrorism suspects who turned out to be innocent, such as Richard Jewell, Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Mark Hughes or Ryan Lanza. 

Everyone makes mistakes, even journalists who work so hard to tell the truth. Student journalists are bound to make many, and that is all right. We learn the most when we make mistakes. But steering our students towards Porter's new values may help them to avoid the temptation to publish before verifying or to go it alone in order to be the first to print rather than seeking feedback that might prevent them from making a mistake.

Credibility is the most precious currency for journalists, especially in our current political climate. Porter’s essay was written 12 years ago, but it has never been more relevant than it is right now.

My student newspaper staff has a dilemma: how can they get their peers to read the paper when so much of the information in our articles is already known?

They are coming up against a problem professional journalists have been struggling with for years. In the old days (I won’t call them good, as I think that’s always relative), news producers — whether newspaper, radio or broadcast — were the source of information. News consumers found out about terrorists attack and new government policies when they opened the morning paper or turned on the evening news. With the advent of the Internet and social media, however, those gatekeepers lost control. Now people have more information than they know what to do with. This flood of data creates a number of problems — especially in terms of helping people separate fact from fiction — but I want to focus today on the issue it creates in terms of engagement.

If news consumers have the facts about an event — or at least think they do — why should they care when the paper publishes a story about it? We hope they care because they trust traditional news sources to have a vetting process for their stories; unlike Tweets at 2 a.m., these stories have been fact-checked and include a variety of primary and expert sources to ensure truthfulness in a holistic sense. News literate consumers know the value of good journalism, we hope, and will therefore seek it out.

But beyond getting the facts right, good journalism has a larger responsibility to serve as sense-maker. "When most readers say they expect journalists to tell them what’s happening — whether that’s the latest outrages reported out of Kharkiv or city council in Kalamazoo — they mean connect the dots,” Ken Doctor writes. "No, they don’t want opinion — they want to know how the facts fit together to make an understandable whole."

This is what sets major news sources such as the New York Times apart from local news sources, Doctor argues. "It’s authority,” he writes. "You read the Times to understand. Sometimes it does a better job of that than others, but its great success in reader revenue shows us its audience gets that part of the value equation. Yes, readers can get the facts of the Gaza War free in so many places, but they can’t get a volume of rich, contextual stories from both sides of the conflict elsewhere every day."

In his essay "Journalism’s Moral Responsibility: Three Questions,” Bill Mitchell argues that journalism has a moral obligation to cover important stories and help readers understand their importance. He poses three crucial questions:

1. Do news organizations help citizens and communities, including political leaders, identify and respond to the most significant threats to well-being?
2. Do news organizations pursue a well-grounded definition of what constitutes substantive coverage?
3. Do news organizations take responsibility for how their work is pursued and how it is received?

The key, he argues, is to make important news salient. "In moral journalism, salient is more than important, interesting, or relevant. It's more than selling a story that no one would otherwise read, or dumping it on an ignorant world with the righteous justification that it ought to be read. For journalists, Salient is a moral term, not a marketing one,” he writes. "Our moral responsibility is to cover significant threats to well-being, substantively, in such a way that our coverage leaps out, protrudes, and is strikingly and conspicuously prominent. So that it sears the conscience of our fellow citizens."

He points to Laurel Leff’s research on the Times’ coverage of the Holocaust during 1939-1945. Leff found that the Times did cover the Holocaust, but that coverage tended to be on inside pages and was missing in editorial commentary and summaries of important news. In her report, Leff writes, “Despite the detailed, credible information that was available, the American public actually did not know about the Holocaust while it was happening because mainstream American newspapers never presented the story of the extermination of the Jews in a way that highlighted its importance.” In other words, Mitchell concludes, "the Times had the story. It just didn't make it salient."

Mitchell’s essay is aimed at national and global news sources and news events on a much larger scale than those typical at a high school, clearly, but I believe this raises important questions for the moral responsibilities of scholastic journalists. If they want their reporting to matter — if they want their peers to read more than the humor columns or restaurant reviews — they must make their reporting on important topics salient to their peers.

Here is my suggestion for reworking Mitchell’s three questions for a scholastic journalism staff:

1. Do you help members of the school community, including school and local leaders, identify and respond to the most significant problems affecting the community?
2. Do you pursue a well-grounded definition of what constitutes substantive coverage, going beyond the who, what and where to explore how and why?
3. Do you take responsibility for how your work is pursued and how it is received?

Although these questions are not a complete solution, they are a starting point for creating greater engagement without abandoning the most important stories.