I don’t want to say reality bites, which is the title of a really disappointing 1980s movie, and, actually, things are going pretty well in journalism class so far, almost one month into the school year and 10 days until we launch the online news site. I have 28 students, none of whom know what they are doing, which aligns pretty well with my own experience as a journalism adviser.

On the mythical eagerness scale of 1-10, they line up between the 4 and 8. I haven’t found the kid who lives and breathes journalism, who wants to come in at lunch and after school to work on a story or video. But I don’t have a bunch of slugs who just wanted an easy class either. They are mostly content to see me three times a week (block schedule) and take their directions.

Which is kind of a problem. I envisioned being able to give them a general idea of what journalism is, brainstorm some topics and off they would go like a pack of hunting dogs on the scent of a some prey. But they simply don’t know what to do. Their story ideas seem fine when they pitch them to the Editorial Review Board (the five section editors) but somehow become impossible when they start trying to track them down.

For example, one of my most promising students, a sophomore whose father is a journalist, wanted to do a story on how the economy was affecting the school. So she set out to our downtown area last Saturday and tried to interview merchants about how they were faring in the recession. Naturally, none of them wanted to talk about that, especially not to a high school reporter. She came back discouraged and lost. Naturally. We talked (whatever happened to the local angle relating to students? Not sure. She somehow lost the scent of that story and tried for something a lot bigger. I’ve got to admire the ambition, I guess.) We decided the story was too big and too difficult for her first story and found another story for her, on swine flu preparations.

I asked some students to come up with poll ideas today, possible questions they would want students to respond to. I guess I was thinking they might come back with a question on healthcare or even the cafeteria food. They came back with “Which Disney song is your favorite?” Um, okay.

Some students heard about the possibility that the school district is installing cameras in the halls to monitor vandalism, etc… Real news! Actual news! Their idea was to write an opinion piece on cameras and wait to see if they actually came, then do a news story. I had to explain that the idea of a news site is to actually break the news, to be the person who tells others something new, and later to write opinions about the news. The reporter who accepted the story looked like he might get sick over the fact that the principal might not want to talk about the cameras.

Today I had them write down their names, story slugs and what percent they had finished. They each should have two stories before next week’s launch. Each story should have at least three sources, two links and a photo or video. That’s 58 stories. I think two are ready. I’ll be lucky to get half by the launch date. And I think I care about that possibility a lot more than they do. Not sure how to change that. I don’t want to be too hard on them, or too intense, yet I don’t want to be embarrassed at our paucity of news on October 1st either. Most of the period my Editor in Chief–who should be sort of freaking out like me! –ran around with a cake he’d made, cajoling people into eating a slice. Did anything get done in 90 minutes today? I have no proof.

Creative Commons image “Bite Down” from Flickr by soartsyithurts

But that was also back when journalism was a one-way street and limited to the printed page. Back when “news” didn’t make a high school paper because every issue was at least a week old when it landed from the printer. Being a high school journalism teacher in the 2.0 world is quite a bit different than hoping 500 or so fragile tabloid copies get into the right hands, and I have had a lot of fun this summer developing from scratch an online news site that has the potential — if not the practicality — to reach around the globe.

I’m wondering if it’s possible to accurately convey to the 30 students who show up in Period 5 tomorrow just what power I’m turning over to them. The power of this broad, instant reach. The power to make their voices heard like those darn persistent Whos in “Horton Hears a Who.” We are here, we are here, we are here! Do they realize, really realize, what the protection of the First Amendment and state and federal law confers on them? That their online news site cannot be shut down, taken away, denied? That their public forum cannot be excised from the course schedule by a hostile party, unlike “Publick Occurrences,” the first American paper, which was forbidden, burned and its publisher jailed back in 1690? That their adviser cannot be fired or forced out of her position (not in California anyway).

Is it possible to really communicate the difference that exists from just 10 years ago for ordinary people to be heard? My students were born in 1992-94. They’ve never really known a world without email and Google and PayPal. They don’t remember a time without FaceBook or MySpace or YouTube. It’s so easy to communicate now. Instantly. At no cost. With friends, with enemies, with strangers. The gatekeepers are dead, dying or irrelevant. Mostly anyways. The kids have no idea.

I will start class tomorrow with a welcome and an attempt to give them perspective. The first newspaper, handwritten and hung on street corners, was decreed by Julius Caesar in 59 BC and titled “Acta Diurna.”  The last news organization was born one second ago. And one second from now. There will be no end to them, and that is enough to make any journalist’s heart beat faster. I would not trade living in this era in this place for any other time in history.

And to The Foothill Dragon Press: welcome to a great big exciting fast connected world–it’s a nice time to be born.

(Photo Credit: “Yesterday News,” Creative Commons Licensed by Zarko Drincic on Flickr.com)

One blog I’m following with much interest this week is at this one. It’s a blog being written by a group of 35 high school journalism teachers taking part in an ASNE fellowship in Arizona. I have it on my reader and am really enjoying the news coming out of the conference each day because I will be heading for a 12-day ASNE conference in Columbia, Missouri, in mid-July. The blog is giving me a great perspective on the kinds of training, lectures and activities to expect.

It is interesting to learn that some of the teachers are reluctant bloggers, while others seem quite comfortable. I think those with journalism backgrounds take to blogging more easily, which makes sense. They are used to producing “news” and sharing information.

When I was a reporter, I was given a weekly column (at age 23!) which I wrote for the next ten years. I could write about anything that interested me, and so it was basically blogging but in print. It was prestigious at the time because only a handful of journalists in the newsroom were selected to write a column, and I was certainly the youngest and also the only female.

Now, writing a column for the newspaper has less prestige because the internet has opened the door wide to everyone who wants to speak out. There’s still the matter of finding an audience, of course, and a newspaper helps provide that, but some of the most popular blogs (and profitable ones) are produced by independent writers who came up with a good idea and worked it well. Their publicity grew and they are now media companies in their own right.

The wonder of the internet is that you can write in a tiny niche space and sometimes find a sustainable audience that is unbounded by geography and time. Sometimes when I run across a great blog post, I spend hours going back through the years-old posts on the site before adding the address to my Google reader. You couldn’t do that with a great newspaper column 10 years ago. Blogs live forever.

[Photo credit: "Blogs" by dalequetepego on Flickr]

School’s been out now for two days, and after a year of what seriously feels like inventing the wheel, I feel a great need to reflect. It has been an amazingly creative time for me, but I have to admit, it’s been a big adjustment to a new school culture, with the co-workers, the kids, the administration, the policies and the routines that come with change. I’m exhausted, a little irritable during the transition to summer, but also deeply satisfied. 

I’m going to set a goal of blogging every day for a month, well, until July 12 when I leave for an ASNE Journalism Fellowship in Columbia, MO. The two weeks there are supposedly intense and will likely cut into my blogging time. 

Topics to come:

• Ning experiences (did I like it more than my kids?)
• Wiki (ditto)
• The online survey I had my students take at the end of the year (not sure I wanted to know all that)
• Sophomores (teaching them, understanding them?)
• World Lit (assignments that worked, those that didn’t, brainstorming for next year)
• Journalism (the class I’ll start in the fall, the book my kids published this year)
• Teaching (why unions need to be weakened but not destroyed in order to save our profession)
• International collaboration efforts (what I want to do next year)

Photo credit: “Blue Day Moon” by Jon Matthews

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