Missing Voices: Part 1 — Tale of Two School Newspapers
“Journalism should be in all schools. Privileged schools have a journalism program. That way students are able to explore and see if they like that field.”
New York City is the media capital of the world, but not for its youth. Just one in four public high schools has a student newspaper these days. And there are big disparities in access by race and class.
In this system of haves and have nots Townsend Harris High School in Queens is definitely among the haves. Its student newspaper, The Classic, has received national recognition for hard-hitting reporting in recent years.
Kate Estevez, Elliot Heath and Janna Habibulla (left to right) serve as editors-in-chief for The Classic, the Townsend Harris High School student newspaper.
Ramata Diop (right) is a reporter for The Pacer, the Pace High School student newspaper. Courtesy David Rohlfing
Meanwhile, at Pace High School in Manhattan, dedicated students and a veteran English teacher are defying the odds by building The Pacer from scratch.
The Missing Voices series was reported by Wesley Almanzar, Jadelyn Camey, Fredlove Deshommes, Edward Mui and Jayden Williams. Editing and production support from Sabrina DuQuesnay, Mira Gordon, Abē Levine and Taylor McGraw. Scoring and sound mixing from Peter Leonard. Music from Blue Dot Sessions. Made possible with support from the Education Writers Association and the Pinkerton Foundation.
Transcript:
Jayden: Hey guys it’s Jayden Williams here. I’m a Miseducation student reporter, and I’m currently walking over to Pace High School with…
Jayden: Pace High School on the Lower East Side of Manhattan is, in many ways, an average New York City public high school. It’s not running away with any academic honors, it’s not falling behind. It’s, well, it’s on pace.
Jayden: I’m here visiting Pace with two of our producers: Sabrina and Taylor.
Jayden: Um, you know, we’re about to walk into the school, very excited…
Jayden: We’ve come to check out the student journalism program. The journalism advisor, David Rohlfing, meets us in the lobby.
Mr. Rohlfing: Welcome everyone, I’m Mr. Rohlfing, David.
Jayden: I’m Jayden.
Mr. Rohlfing: Hi, Jayden.
Jayden: He’s a veteran English teacher and looks the part. Button down shirt, khakis, glasses, wispy hair. He walks us toward the elevator.
Mr. Rohlfing: Used to be an old gothic building. It’s the end of a street. Round buildings are weird, to work in. You’ll see.
Jayden: Like most New York City high schools, Pace shares a building with other schools.
Mr. Rohlfing: So, yeah, this is Pace floor, fourth floor.
Jayden: It’s a small school, tight knit. About 600 students. Almost all of them are students of color. Predominantly Black or Hispanic and some Asian students, but very few White students. This is typical of public schools in New York City.
Jayden: Journalism is the last period of the day in this classroom that Mr. Rohlfing shares with another teacher. Students filter in and take their seats. I count 23, mostly girls.
Jayden: Class begins.
Mr. Rohlfing: I will tell you in advance that when we started the website, there were zero students in journalism.
Jayden: Mr. Rohlfing is at the front of the classroom, introducing today’s lesson on typography. Projected on the screen, the front page of the school news site: The Pacer. Students in the class write articles for it. Now, he says, it’s time for them to choose a new design.
Mr. Rohlfing: The goal is that in a couple weeks we're going to redesign this. You will have a say in what this looks like to make our student run newspaper, in fact, run by all of you.
Jayden: Browsing through The Pacer you’ll find stories about the girls basketball playoff run and how inflation is driving up the price of pizza slices in the neighborhood. Lots of variety.
Mr. Rohlfing: So I had been lobbying my administration to start a school newspaper for a few years.
Jayden: Mr. Rohlfing said he was inspired by a student a few years back who said she wished the school had one.
Mr. Rohlfing: Basically after the pandemic in 2021, I had created a website with students’ narratives, for the senior English class that I was teaching, and they saw that. And after that, they're like, Let's do a school newspaper.
Jayden: The Pacer is clearly well run. They publish multiple articles a week. But there’s nothing particularly remarkable about The Pacer, until you consider that most public high schools in New York City, especially schools with populations like Pace, don’t have a student newspaper at all.
Jayden: Most public school students growing up in the media capital of the world graduate without ever having had a single journalism lesson.
Jayden: We think that’s a problem. A big problem.
Edward: From the Miseducation Podcast, this is Missing Voices, a new, four-part series on the journalism gap in New York City public schools, and why it should concern us all. I’m your host Edward Mui.
Jayden: I’m Jayden Williams.
Fredlove: I’m Fredlove Deshommes.
Jadelyn: I’m Jadelyn Camey.
Wesley: And I’m Wesley Almanzar.
Edward: We’re high schoolers from…
Jadelyn: Queens
Fredlove: Brooklyn
Wesley: The Bronx
Edward: And don’t forget about Staten Island.
Edward: With close to a million students, the New York City public school system is by far the nation’s largest. And it’s highly segregated by race and class. There are serious disparities between schools in all sorts of areas: the number of experienced teachers, facilities, and in electives – like journalism.
Geanne Belton: It's interesting because when you look at, like, the very top schools, they all have newspapers and you look at the very bottom and almost none of them do.
Edward: This is Geanne Belton. She’s a journalism professor at Baruch College in Manhattan, and the director of the New York City High School Journalism Program. Last year, she published the results of a survey of all New York City public high schools — asking which ones have student newspapers and which ones don’t.
Geanne: And so it really is a haves and have nots story. And it's a story of lost opportunities for those students because being on a newspaper, it's a terrific opportunity for students.
Edward: Quick note here — throughout this series you’ll hear us, and others, use the term “newspaper” broadly. Very few high schools actually print a paper anymore. Often, when we say “newspaper,” we’re referring to an online news site.
Edward: Professor Belton found that only about one in four public high schools has a student newspaper, or news site.
Edward: Of the 100 schools with the lowest student poverty rates, 62 had a newspaper.
Edward: Of the 100 schools with the highest student poverty rates, only seven had one.
Geanne: I was surprised, myself, by how stark the contrasts were that we found in terms of some of the demographic differences, poverty differences.
Edward: Our team at The Bell has also been looking into these journalism disparities through a student-led research project that began in 2021.
Hajar: Our project was essentially trying to understand what opportunities are available to students in New York City regarding journalism.
Edward: This is Hajar Bouchour, a high school senior from Brooklyn. She was part of a small group of student researchers looking into big questions:
Hajar: What obstacles do students face when they want to become journalists? And how does not having access to journalism impact whether you want to pursue it later on?
Edward: Hajar and her team scoured Department of Education data-bases, and school websites, quickly discovering the same racial and class disparities in journalism that Professor Belton’s study revealed.
Edward: They collected detailed survey data from 75 students at different schools across the city and conducted more than 20, one-on-one interviews.
Hajar: It validated that journalism was actually really underestimated a lot within the school system. So by seeing how many students were sort of dis-motivated from not having a lot of opportunities and also feeling that journalism was not meant for the younger kids, it was sort of meant as like a college thing and they weren't finding a lot of opportunities themselves.
Edward: Hajar said that some of the students struggled even to define what journalism is. Others, though, had goals of pursuing it as a career.
Hajar: I actually remember one of the interviewees was talking about how it's his dream to be a BBC reporter and how, like, he didn't see a lot of his people being portrayed a lot in it. And people like that get dis-motivated. So people who might have had a dream and saw that it wasn't going to make them successful might have hit it, and just stuff like that is a domino effect.
Edward: Domino effects can work both ways. A closed door, one discouraging experience can really knock you down: “That’s the end of that.” But an open door at the right time has a way of unlocking the next one, and the one after — like dominos.
Edward: All that to say: what’s really at stake here is way bigger than high school journalism programs. It’s about the doors that those programs open, and who they open them for.
PBS NewsHour: Newsrooms across the country have long been accused of failing to represent the communities they cover. And as racial concerns continue to rise to the surface across the country, who is telling those stories?
Edward: How do you wind up with a news industry that’s 80% White in a country that’s on its way to becoming majority people of color? We think we figured it out. Didn’t actually have to look too hard.
Edward: Today: two New York City public high schools that have journalism programs. One’s new — they’re sort of building it as they go. The other, well, you’ll see.
Edward: This is Part One: Tale of Two School Newspapers.
Edward: First up: Pace High School. Here’s Jayden again.
Jayden: After he finishes his lesson, I pull a few students to a corner of the room. We sit in a circle.
Jayden: Alright what’s up guys, what’s up? Ayyy. No, it's no pressure, guys…
Jayden: Meet Ally.
Ally: Giving yourself a voice to write an article also gives you the skills to talk to people. I feel like a major strength that a lot of students in this class have is that they're able to talk to people.
Jayden: Ally’s only in the 10th grade, but Mr. Rohlfing has already entrusted her with a big job.
Ally: In the class I’m editor in chief. I didn't know I had, like, AP style format skills. I didn't know that I could really push students to, like, write about what they want. I didn't know that I had any, um, skills at all.
Jayden: This is a theme we hear from The Pacer staff. They have lots of autonomy, sorta because they have to. The journalism program is just two years old. They’re building it together. Here’s Winifred, the photo editor, also in 10th grade.
Winifred: I'm working through social media. And so, like, when we started, we had like 42 followers. And now we have like 300 and something. And that's because I think you have to get students where they're interested in and then kind of trick them into knowing about what's going on. So I think that’s why…
Jayden: I gotta say, scrolling through the Pacer’s instagram page, the range of topics is impressive. They publish detailed sports game highlights…
Student journalist; Pacer Instagram video: Tell us about today’s game, are you proud of yourself?
Student athlete; Pacer Instagram video: It was good, it was a tough game…
Jayden: Fun features like where they post a baby photo of one of the teachers and students guess who it is.
Jayden: Article previews, and my favorite, monthly fit checks!
Audio from Pacer Instagram fit check:
Jayden: Short video clips of students posing in fresh outfits.
Jayden: Ramata Diop, who runs the Pacer fit checks, is one of the most passionate members of the newspaper. But it wasn’t always that way.
Ramata: So before joining journalism, I already had some preconceived notions about journalism, and I wasn't too, like, happy with it at first because I was like, maybe this is going to be like a really tough class with a lot of, like, writing to do. So I was like, ehhhhh.
Jayden: But as soon as she published her first article, she said she was hooked.
Ramata: My first article was about our Pace, like, therapist dog, which is no longer here, but like I wrote an article about the dog and I was like, you know what? This is fun. So I decided to do it this year again, and I hope I can do it my senior year as well.
Jayden: During our conversation, it occurred to me that Black, Asian, and Latino students in this room represent the missing voices in professional journalism. Pace High School is a short subway ride from The New York Times and ABC News headquarters. But for students who look like us, those places can feel out of reach. We talked about this.
Ramata: I don't really see like much Black women as like, journalists, or like, I don't know, Black men too, as journalists. So that also is like another reason as to why, like people of color don't really go into that field.
Jayden: Ramata’s right. Less than 4% of professional journalists are Black women. Stats like these can be discouraging. But for Ramata?
Ramata: I think it motivates me to want to do it because it’s just like, just because I don't see it, I would want to do it. And so, like, it might inspire like other kids in the future if I do end up, like, actually making it in that field to like, see me and like, want to be me, not be me, but like, but also like, want to follow the career that I'm into. Because it's like if you see people on TV that look like you and that like are in a field that you didn't even think was possible for you to do, it might encourage you and inspire you to want to do it.
Jayden: High school journalism programs are training grounds for the writers, reporters, producers, editors who, in so many ways, shape our society. And if journalism wants to look more like the society it serves, that work starts here.
Winifred: Journalism should be in schools
Jayden: Winifred again.
Winifred: Many, like privileged schools, they have a journalism program. That way students are able to explore and see if they like that field. And that’s why, I feel like if this school didn't have that, I probably wouldn't know I was, like, into photography that much.
Jayden: On the subject of privileged schools with journalism programs, that’s where we’re headed next. My colleague Jadelyn is taking us to Queens after this short break.
Jadelyn: Oh, yeah, we're here!
Uber GPS: You've arrived at your destination
Jadelyn: Townsend Harris High School
Jadelyn: In the land of haves and have nots, Townsend Harris High School in Queens is definitely among the haves.
Jadelyn: I get out of the car with my producer Sabrina and walk toward the five story school building. It takes up a whole block, definitely the center of attention in this residential section of Queens.
Jadelyn: Townsend Harris has one of the top high school newspaper programs in the city. And it’s no surprise. The school is an academic powerhouse. Every year, the city education department gives schools a holistic performance score. In 2019, the last year unaffected by COVID, out of 490 public high schools, Townsend Harris ranked number one. You have to go back to 2017 to find a single student who didn’t graduate on time.
Jadelyn: Oh, that's so cool. That's like a little lounge outside area.
Sabrina: Yeah, they must be cold too
Jadelyn: Walking in the building, it's like a freaking high school musical movie! The lobby is bright and welcoming. Students seem comfortable, almost like this is a second home for them.
Jadelyn: A speaker blasts Taylors Swift's hit, “Shake It Off” while a group of students practice a Filipino dance called “tinikling.”
Camila: So right now we're practicing for FON, which stands for Festival of Nations. This is just like a performance that every cultural group puts together to just show like the traditional dances of their culture.
Jadelyn: Upstairs, we find a room students call “The Clave.” Couches, rugs, and string lights give it a lounge feel. This is where students meet to work on the school newspaper, The Classic.
Jadelyn: Since 1984, The Classic has provided a platform for open student expression and hard-hitting journalism. Not only does The Classic regularly win the award for best high school newspaper in New York City, it’s won national awards, too. The Classic even has its own Wikipedia page. How many high school newspapers can say that?
Jadelyn: Today, its reputation is upheld by a team of dedicated student journalists, including Elliot Heath, one of three Editors in Chief.
Elliot: I, I love words.
Jadelyn: He wears his title with pride. Literally. He’s wearing a sweater with bold letters on the back that spell out “Editor in Chief.”
Elliot: I really like, like, the way words work, like, vocabulary and stuff like that, and just, like, studying them is really interesting.
Jadelyn: Elliot and ten other members of The Classic’s staff are sitting in a circle, laptops in hand. The vibes are casual. One is wearing red pajama bottoms and Crocs. Very Gen Z.
Jadelyn: We ask the students if “The Classic” were a famous athlete, who would it be?
Townsend Harris student journalist 1: This is very cliche, I guess. But Usain Bolt because we publish work quickly and efficiently.
Jadelyn: There are other votes…
Townsend Harris student journalist 2: I’d say we’re more Renaldo. We are very consistent, Renaldo is always consistent, you know, always performs his best. And he’s a natural born leader.
Jadelyn: But rather than relying on a single superstar, they work together as a team.
Janna: So the Classic is completely student run, which means every process, all of our publishing is done through us students.
Jadelyn: This is Janna. She’s another editor in chief.
Janna: We publish every single night online, five days a week, and we also publish two to three print papers a year. Our hierarchy is consisted of staff, writers, copy editors, department editors, managing editors and editors and chief. And so every night when an article is written by a staff writer, it goes through this hierarchy and eventually goes to a managing editor who will read over the article and determine whether or not it should be published. And sometimes that might be, Oh, this article needs an extra quote and they will go back to that department editor, say the features editor, and say, Hey, can you tell your staff writer to grab another quote? So part of the Classic is a lot of inner communication between the students. We're always on Slack. Slack is our primary source of communication, and we are always on Slack every hour of the day.
Jadelyn: My head’s spinning just thinking about all the steps and all the people involved in publishing articles every. Single. Night. I counted all the editors listed on The Classic’s website: forty seven.
Jadelyn: In 2022, The Classic published more than 250 articles.
Elliot: Sometimes I like to refer to the classic as, like, the classic extended universe or like, the classic cinematic universe, you know
Jadelyn: Elliot again.
Elliot: We have so many different, like, branches and like people. So, we have the main publication, obviously, The Classic. Then, our sister publication, The Critic, which started this year, that focuses on media reviews, critique, stuff like that.
Jadelyn: Also part of The Classic’s extended universe: An instagram page that’s popping with content. Then there’s The Classic TV, a YouTube channel with more than 300 videos. Everything from volleyball game livestreams to mini docuseries.
The Classic video clip: Room 115 is the government and club office and 112 is the publication office. But one room has puzzled us above all, what exactly is the acid neutralizing room?
Jadelyn: Plus they have podcasts, including a new one this year called ADMITTED, where students who get into their dream colleges talk about their personal statements.
ADMITTED Host: Hi, guys. Welcome back to season three of the Classic’s ADMITTED series. In this episode, we will be speaking with Madeline Cannon about how a necklace got her into Princeton. Madeline, Congratulations and thank you so much for joining us today.
Jadelyn: The Classic covers everything. Last year, their most read article was a review of eleven Halal Carts around New York City. Adel’s Famous Halal Food near Rockefeller Center, came in first, with a score of 8.5 out of 10.
Jadelyn: They do harder hitting stories, too. In 2017, The Classic relentlessly covered student protests of then-principal Rosemarie Jahoda. Eventually, The New York Times and WNYC picked up the story.
WNYC Reporter: Students, along with many parents and teachers have raised concerns over what they call a “combative management style. The Classic streamed recent town halls about it, live on its Facebook page.
Townsend Harris student reporter: Hi we are the Townsend Harris Classic reporting here on…
Jadelyn: Parents and alumni cited The Classic’s reporting in their calls for Jahoda’s removal. She was replaced in 2017.
Jadelyn: In 2021, student reporters published the disturbing news that a former baseball coach who groomed and had sex with a female student, remained on staff. Their reporting led the Department of Education to finally remove him from the building.
Jadelyn: If you’re wondering how they can report on these sensitive topics without interference from administration — well, that goes way back. Here’s Elliot.
Elliot: Yes. 1984. So in addition to being the great George Orwell novel, really great, fantastic book, talk, I talk about that book all the time. Um, no, so, The Classic originated along with the reopening of our school in 1984 with that charter basically establishing, our rights to, to publish without the threat of administrative censorship.
Jadelyn: Most schools in New York and nationally don’t have this protection. The Supreme Court ruled in 1988 that administrators do have the right to censor student publications. At least 16 states have press freedom laws that protect students from censorship. New York isn’t one of them
Elliot: Every school should have like a charter like that and have like a newspaper of those types of freedoms because real problems could be happening
Jadelyn: While The Classic prides itself on being student-run, they do have adult support. Meet Brian Sweeney, the advisor for The Classic.
Mr. Sweeney: I was just hired to be an English teacher and they asked me when they hired me. And it was kind of like they asked, but also were like, if you want the job, do, do the newspaper. And I was like, all right.
Jadelyn: Mr. Sweeney has developed a steady roster of students with the knowledge and skills to run a high-quality news operation.
Mr. Sweeney: The leadership editors, we would call them, the managing editors and the editors in chief are the ones who deal with me the most. And if there's an issue that they can handle, I'm happy for them to handle the issue. By and large, I'm just kind of there to be a, almost like, last line of defense.
Jadelyn: I ask him why there aren’t more programs like The Classic around the city.
Mr. Sweeney: So, you know, I've had a lot of contact with other schools, and there's brilliant work being done everywhere. Francis Lewis right over here has a great program, like there's a lot of amazing work being done. Um, and then at the same time, you realize that New York City is the largest public school system in the country. And there's so much work that doesn't get done either because there isn't a program at the school, there's not support for the program at the school, or they don't have what we have, which is a system where kids are given the rights of the First Amendment to have a free press.
Jadelyn: Mr. Sweeney’s right. The type of administrative backing at Townsend Harris is rare. But there’s more to The Classic’s success. Here’s Janna again.
Janna: We also have trips. So we had a trip to Boston at the beginning of this year and that was our editor bonding trip. We just, kind of, toured Boston. We also visited Harvard because some of our past editors now go to Harvard. So they got to explain to us what now, like a future in journalism may look like. So that was really cool to get to see people that I used to work so closely with now pursue journalism. And so I got to connect more with the editors from last year but also got to share that new experience with the new editors and grow close as we became one big newspaper community
Jadelyn: Trips to visit alumni at Harvard... There’s an extraordinary concentration of privilege at Townsend Harris.
Jadelyn: Mr. Sweeney tells us The Classic raises five to seven thousand dollars a year through ads, donations, and fundraisers. Enough to cover printing costs and web hosting fees. But, it’s not just about the money.
Townsend Harris student journalist 1: we have a series where different professional journalists come to our school and talk to us about their careers. So that has also sparked a more of an interest in journalism for me because I get to hear those journalists’ personal experiences and what journalism has brought to their lives.
Jadelyn: The connections at Townsend Harris can’t just be replicated at other schools. Schools like Pace.
Jadelyn: And if you’re wondering how it is that Pace and Townsend Harris, with such different student populations and facilities and resources exist in the same public school system? Well, to understand that question, we recommend you listen to literally every other Miseducation episode. That’s kind of what we do here.
Jadelyn: For a summary, my colleague Wesley breaks it down.
Wesley: According to researchers who measure this sort of thing, New York City has the most segregated public school system in the country. You heard that right. The nation’s melting pot, a progressive beacon, the city where dreams are made…Nah, that’s just slick marketing. Look, I love this city, don’t get me wrong. But if you grew up in the Bronx like I did, you’d see that opportunities here aren’t distributed evenly.
Wesley: It’s a tale of two school systems. And there’s policies in place that make it that way. Let me give you one example: the high school admissions process.
Wesley: You see, some schools — schools like Townsend Harris — they get to pick the top 8th graders across the city for admission. The kids with 95 averages and stellar attendance. This process is known as “screening.” A quarter of the city’s roughly five hundred high schools are allowed to do it: to “screen” applicants.
Wesley: There’s a complicated algorithm involved, but at the end of the day, screened schools wind up with student bodies that are more affluent, more White, more Asian, and higher scoring than unscreened schools.
Wesley: This is certainly true of Townsend Harris. About 60% of the student body is Asian, and 20% is White. Meanwhile, Black and Hispanic students combined make up the remaining twenty percent of the student body — even though those groups account for two-thirds of all public school students.
Wesley: At Pace, an unscreened school, it’s sort of the opposite. About 80% of students are Black or Hispanic.
Wesley: At Townsend Harris, 2 out of 5 students come from low-income families.
Wesley: At Pace, it’s almost 4 out of 5.
Wesley: And, you see, the differences in who attends these schools leads to differences in opportunities.
Wesley: Townsend Harris has 31 sports teams, while Pace only has 8.
Wesley: 22 AP courses at Townsend Harris, but there’s only 7 at Pace.
Wesley: Townsend Harris offers 5 foreign languages. But Pace only offers 1.
Wesley: Look, no matter how you slice it, it’s unequal education.
Jayden: Jayden here, back at Pace High School. After the students clear out and head home for the afternoon, my producer Taylor and I sit down with Mr. Rohlfing, advisor for The Pacer. We want to know how he feels about other journalism programs, like the one Townsend Harris has.
Taylor: So I'm just curious, as somebody who's worked in the system for a long time, like, thoughts about the, you know, maybe comparison to Townsend Harris and the dichotomy there, but also why that exists.
Mr. Rohlfing: Well, and I mean, this is where, you know, I did this ten years ago and I went to the city journalism gatherings. And I, the woman who ran, who basically created the foundation of Townsend Harris's journalism program was legendary, going back 20 years, you know, 30 years. And that tradition very much carries their success still. And that's where I say we're creating something out of nothing, really.
Taylor: You're getting a little emotional. Yeah.
Mr. Rohlfing: I’m getting a little emotional. Uh, it's a, it’s a real battle in our city, I think. If you really know about it, it's uh. Yeah.
Taylor: Yeah.
Mr. Rohlfing: It’s a kind of awful battle, actually. So that's the other part about it.
Jayden: We asked Mr. Rohlfing to explain what he meant.
Mr. Rohlfing: You know, it's like, they, students at Pace, they show up now, like, oh, I got into Pace. It's a great school. I'm going to school in Manhattan. But it's like, oh, it's not that screened school. And they carry that with them, of like, we're not them. And this is New York City, you know? Kids still come. They come to Pace, They choose Pace, and they do amazing things. Winnifred is creating the Instagram page. I don't have to tell her what to do. She's like, she's doing it and she owns it. She's like, she's making it happen.
Jayden: She doesn’t have like a teacher telling her like, oh yeah you have to, you have to get this deadline submitted by this date. It’s like actually driven by her passion.
Mr. Rohlfing: Yeah, yeah yeah yeah. So, yeah, getting back to your question too. That whole inequity in the system, it's very real. It's the ugly part of New York City that our politicians, so many school leaders have no courage to face and to deal with. It makes me angry. It makes me sad, obviously.
Jayden: That awful battle, the ugly part of New York City — that’s the backdrop for all of this. I want you to hold on to the emotion in Mr. Rohlfing’s voice. But also hold on to the excitement from his students — like Winifred and Ramata — who are undeterred. In fact, the challenge of it all, of building something from scratch, seems to motivate them. Like an underdog with a chip on its shoulder. The Little Engine that Could.
Jayden: Pretty soon, they’ll have a chance to prove themselves at a citywide high school journalism awards conference. We’ll be over there to cover it. And, I gotta say, I’m certainly not betting against them.
Edward: That was Jayden Williams. Over the next three episodes, we’re expanding our lens beyond these two schools to take a deep look at the city’s student journalism landscape, and what it means for a news industry that needs our voices.
Audio montage of clips from future episodes:
Steffen Nelson: I think the news is extremely important. It’s how you learn, one of the ways you learn how the world works. But when the world doesn't work in your favor, that might not be a big interest to you.
Lara Bergen: Every school should have a newspaper, all one thousand schools in New york city. That’s our goal.
Moro: When you have a story, when you have an idea, you should push for it. You have to push for your story.
Hasani Gittens: It’s ridiculous honestly, the lack of diversity in journalism. And especially when you filter it for Black people specifically
Julia Gitis: It’s not like you have to wait decades to see it. Like literally a few years later you'll be like where are the Black and Brown voices. Where are the underserved voices in local news
Shakana Jayson: I wanted them to have the opportunity that I didn’t. I wanted them to be able to experience the love that I have for journalism but not feel like there was a block
Geanne Belton: This is a moment I know a lot of you have been waiting for
Student: Oh my god!
Edward: That’s all coming your way soon, so stay tuned.
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