Law, Ethics and News Literacy
As a reporter, my job is to accurately portray the news. Period. As editor, I find story-worthy topics and localize the issue to how it impacts our Hagerty and greater Oviedo communities, so readers can understand how these problems directly affect them. In addition to reporting, I am also president of Quill and Scroll, so I understand the gravity of spreading of false information, as it can severely impact our credibility as a premiere high school newspaper. Making sure that my staff is producing accurate articles with credible information is my top priority.
Interviewing
Interviewing faculty, staff and students is important for articles to remain ethical and prevent bias when writing. ​I encourage everyone on staff to use the recording and audio-transcription app, Otter.ai, as it makes it easy for them to see who is saying each quote. Keeping a record of interviews enhances news literacy and legitimizes the quoted information used within the article. For every rough they submit, my staff has their complete interview questions, who they interviewed, and a full interview transcript, so we can ensure that the quotes are authentic to that specific article. I always email teachers the interview questions ahead of time and ask if they'd prefer a written or face-to-face interview depending on their availability. Mrs. Jarem for example, is an English teacher, so she prefers to type out the responses to my questions, and she gives me a lot of commentary and quotable material to use.
Story Examples
News literacy impacts how I’m able to decipher what is true and story-worthy, versus what discourse is unnecessary for our staff to cover. While Prager U and other politically driven think tanks are not typically article-worthy on their own, Prager U was especially worthy of covering, as Florida approved it as an educational vendor, something that if integrated into curriculum, would be detrimental to the education of Floridians. When I initially saw buzz about Prager U, I didn’t believe it to be that worthy of coverage; however, after doing more research and finding out it was an educational vendor completely changed my opinion.
I decided to make Issue 2 of this year’s paper the election issue, and I covered the election by comparing Florida and Hagerty voting results from an unbiased perspective. I’ve fought really hard this year to make sure that both sides are represented in our political articles (whether the article is news, feature or opinion), so we can have a variety of viewpoints published in our paper. When conducting interviews for this story, it was difficult to get seniors who wanted to comment on their thought process while voting; however, I was able to go in-depth with three students who had the same opinion as the greater Hagerty population (according to the polling).
Crediting Sources
I really enjoy linking the specific piece from the publication or company that my article is about. For example, in my Prager U story, I made sure to hyperlink the videos that I was talking about, to allow my readers the opportunity to watch the source material and draw their own conclusions, just as I did. I also was sure to link an article discussing the true history of the matters being discussed in the video, to show how PragerU videos featured information that was not factual. Another example of this is my article about the digital SAT, as I pulled specific information from the College Board press release regarding the shift, but I linked the full release for my readers as a resource.
Policy
Our about section on our website (click all images to enlarge) clearly displays all of our policies. Our disclosure policy clearly states that any opinion presented is our own, and is valid due to personal experiences, beliefs, and backgrounds. I've enjoyed that our staff has differences in opinion, as we are able to strengthen our publication because of that. While I may not fully agree or strongly connect with an opinion piece, that does not take away its validity.
Our privacy policy is able to protect our staffers and the reporting that we do. Since our staff is mainly comprised of minors, it is incredibly important that we have a policy that protects our safety.
Lastly is our editorial policy, which may seem overly redundant or need not be said, but it is important for us to acknowledge that all of the opinions published are not of the entire staff, with exception to our staff editorials, school officials, our advisor, and county. This is so we can protect the speech of our staff and administrators. The next part of our editorial policy discusses negative feedback. Last year, we received a lot of negative feedback on our articles about parent permission slips, the new nickname law, my PragerU story, and a story about the removal of a pride flag in a classroom.
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In Q3 of last year, one of our staffers anonymously published a new story about a pride flag being removed from a classroom. Of course, this story received hate from the same critics as every other story with a "woke" topic, with one comment even going as far to say that homosexuality is a mental illness. These critics didn't understand that our staffer's job was to accurately report on an incident, in this case a pride flag being removed, not share their own personal opinions on sexual orientation during the article. This was a comment that I removed from our Instagram, as well as the comment about propaganda from my PragerU story, as they went too far and were making unjust claims and spewing hate speech on our page.
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I typically keep most comments on our Instagram up because students like to voice their opinions; however, many of these comments were attacking the writer or subject matter. The comments on my PragerU story's Instagram post (click to enlarge center image), states that my article was "propaganda" and that I took things "out of context." While I understand that journalism can cause heated opinions, in this case, it was smarter to delete the comment rather than engage in a discussion with someone uninterested in the facts. I love a civil debate and learning from other perspectives, but when someone makes an unjust attack on my or my staff’s work, I have to step in and interfere.
For the past two years, I've attended a literacy week field trip at Carillon Elementary, in which I read books with students and answered any and all questions about high school and my passions. When I was in elementary school, I was constantly reading at the library, so this activity was something I really connected with. It is incredibly important to me to make sure that the younger generation is excited about literacy and reading and stays curious.