Missing Voices: Part 2 — The Quest to Revive High School Journalism
“All New York City schools should have a student newspaper. That’s our goal.”
The Miseducation team explores the archived school newspaper collection at the Center for Brooklyn History in Brooklyn Heights. Photo by Abē Levine
Seemingly every New York City high school used to have a student newspaper. That’s what we learned on our trip earlier this year to the Center for Brooklyn History’s archived high school newspaper collection. Today, few NYC high schools have student publications of any kind.
What happened? Where did all the school newspapers go? To find some answers, we sat down with Keith Hefner, founder of Youth Communication, a nonprofit that has been publishing high school students’ stories for more than 40 years.
Then, we meet the adult and students behind Press Pass NYC, an organization dedicated to bringing student newspapers back. It’s an ambitious mission. What will it take for them to succeed?
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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.
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Transcript:
Edward: Hey listeners! Before we get into Part Two of our new series, Missing Voices, we wanna be upfront with you. When it comes to equity in journalism opportunities, we are not neutral.
Fredlove: We think journalism — and diversity in journalism — is important, not just for students like us, but for our society as a whole.
Jayden: That’s why, earlier this school year, our team at The Bell helped launch the NYC Youth Journalism Coalition, a group of partners across the city working to expand journalism opportunities to students who typically don’t get them.
Wesley: Naturally, some of those partners – who are leading voices in the city’s youth journalism scene – have been sources for this series.
Jadelyn: Because of our proximity to the topic we’re covering, we want you to know that we’ve taken strides to ensure that our reporting is thorough and fair. We have questioned our assumptions, sought out diverse viewpoints, and followed the story where it has led us — all hallmarks of rigorous journalism.
Edward: With that, we hope you enjoy the rest of the series.
Esther: It's more than I ever expected. Um, yeah, it's just, it's otherworldly. It's beautiful.
Edward: It’s January, and I’m with the Miseducation team on a visit to the Center for Brooklyn History in Brooklyn Heights. It’s part of the Brooklyn Public Library.
Edward: We’re surrounded by towering bookcases and ornate woodwork. The room is lit by dozens of lamps. I’m waiting for a butler to appear, with a selection of fine cheeses and grapes. Instead, a librarian shows up.
Kevina: Welcome, everyone. I'm so happy to have you all here…
Edward: That’s Kevina Tidwell.
Kevina: I'm a special collections and outreach librarian here.
Edward: The Center for Brooklyn History houses the largest collection of historical documents and artifacts from Brooklyn.
Kevina: Cannonballs from the Revolutionary War, giant bolts from the Brooklyn Bridge, the home plate from the Dodgers, yes.
Edward: And lots of other cool stuff. But we’re on a specific mission. Kevina is here to guide us through a collection of archived high school newspapers.
Kevina: Some highlights is that in various school newspapers, we have things about the chess master, Bobby Fischer, Janet Yellen, the Treasury secretary, was a high school student and was an editor at a paper. And then there are articles about Bernie Sanders, the senator from when he was a track and field star. He was very fast.
Edward: Oh, I gotta see that.
Edward: The collection contains nearly a thousand newspaper editions, ranging from 1853 to 1994. But most are from the late 50s and early 60s. A lot of the school names are familiar: Clara Barton, James Madison, Brooklyn Tech, Erasmus.
Edward: The collection is digitized. Normally, you can’t just walk in, and flip through the newspapers. But Kevina and her colleague Liza made an exception for us. We’re allowed to touch them, carefully.
Liza: So many newspapers are made of wood pulp, which gets really acidic. And it's, you're seeing it's happening over here. So this newspaper is too fragile to actually pick up right now.
Edward: Liza and Kevina have set out six white boxes – the kind you see in CSI but with newspapers instead of case files.
Fredlove: 1899. Ohhhhh.
Ashley: Oh, that's old, old, old.
Fredlove: Woah! I'm surprised.
Sabrina: This is 1899!
Fredlove: This paper hasn't turned into dust.
Sabrina: Yeah!
Fredlove: Ohh pictures.
Ashley: Old people. That’s cool. It’s so cool seeing people, how they used to look back then.
Fredlove: And they’re very White, no Black people.
Ashley: They look rich.
Fredove: They do.
Ashley: I mean this, like, they still write about this now. When they, um, write about their teams, school teams, and they see how they won or lost.
Sabrina: Yeah. So that hasn't really changed.
Ashley: No. That hasn’t really changed.
Sabrina: 1969. Oh look, Ocean Hill Brownsville.
Abē: Looks like an active, sort of time, of questioning the established order.
Edward: I can just picture all you Baby Boomers out there laughing at this scene of Gen Z ooh-ing and ahh-ing at the sight of print newspapers. Ha-ha, we get it. But here’s the thing. While print newspapers might be out of style at most high schools today, the opportunity for students to have our voices heard, the chance for us to write about the issues that matter to us, that is still relevant today. My fellow reporter Fredlove had this to say afterwards.
Fredlove: And I feel like something that I was thinking of is like, we need to figure out a way to make journalism now, reflect now. So a way to try to reach out to people. If people are only, like, getting journalism or getting news through social media, we need to figure out a way to transfer factual journalism that we're trying to get out to people through social media without losing the quality of the work.
Edward: The big takeaway from our trip to the Center for Brooklyn History is that seemingly every high school used to have a student newspaper. Today, few do.
Edward: In Episode One, we visited Pace High School and Townsend Harris High School, two schools that do have student newspapers. They’re doing really dope work. But, it's rare. What happened to all the newspapers?
Edward: On today’s episode, we’re going to answer that question — and we’re going to look at an effort to reverse the trend, to bring school newspapers back.
Edward: You’re listening to the Miseducation Podcast. This is Missing Voices, our four-part series on the youth journalism gap in New York City and why it should concern us all. I’m your host Edward Mui.
Edward: Today: Part Two – The Quest to Revive High School Journalism.
Edward: Before we dive in, I wanna bring in my fellow reporters Wesley and Fredlove for a segment I’m calling “So What?”
Wesley: We know some of you out there are thinking: high school journalism…what’s the big deal?
Fredlove: Who thinks that?
Wesley: Oh, hey Fredlove.
Fredlove: Hey Wes.
Wesley: So, Fredlove, obviously you and I understand why student journalism matters. But what do you say to people who think, “school newspapers – so what?”
Fredlove: I mean we already heard in Part One about two high schools, Townsend Harris and Pace that are doing impactful journalism. Reporters for The Classic exposed a story about a teacher who had groomed a female student and got him removed from the building. And while The Pacer is newer, their creative use of multimedia — sports game highlights, fit checks — it’s building a sense of community in the school.
Fredlove: Bottom line: Journalism gives students a real say in the school, and a chance to highlight issues that might otherwise go unquestioned.
Wesley: Mmmm. No doubt. You know, I actually read a study that showed that in communities where newspapers have shut down, local corruption increased.
Fredlove: That doesn’t surprise me at all. Journalists help hold people in power accountable. And that’s true in schools, too. We actually spoke to someone who’s given the importance of youth journalism a lot of thought.
Keith: I'm Keith Hefner, and I was the executive director of Youth Communication, which is a youth media program in New York City.
Fredlove: Youth Communication has been publishing student stories in New York City for more than 40 years. Keith was the founder. But before he did this work professionally…
Keith: I was the editor of my high school newspaper. I published an underground newspaper when I was in high school.
Fredlove: And Keith shared this story from his high school days that speaks to what we’re talking about. This was the late 1960s.
Keith: At that time, believe it or not, there was a feeling, among who, but, there was a feeling that Black people, Black men could not be quarterbacks on football teams because that was the brains of the offense, right?
Fredlove: Keith is White. He grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Keith: And they were not allowing the Black quarterback who was the best player at my high school to be the quarterback. But it was kind of secret. I mean, but the students knew it. The players knew it. And they told the school newspaper, and the school newspaper did a story about it and there was a small riot in the school. And that guy became the quarterback. And so it was a perfect example of how adults either didn't know or were suppressing a social change. And young people knew it. And by having a voice, we actually made the change in the school.
Fredlove: Keith wasn’t part of the school newspaper at the time, but when he saw the difference that student journalism could make, he joined. And he never looked back.
Wesley: Wow, that’s a great story. And it makes me sad to know that there are so many high schools around the city today, (cough) mine included, that don’t have that platform to speak up, to make a change.
Wesley: Students, if you’re listening, and agreeing, hang tight. There’s an effort in New York City to bring student newspapers back. We’re going to let you hear directly from the folks leading that effort. But first — how did we get here? And where did all the newspapers go?
Wesley: Here’s my man Jayden.
Jayden: After Keith Hefner graduated high school, he kept publishing an underground student newspaper for several years. Then, he moved to New York City, where he wanted to keep working in youth journalism. In 1980, he founded Youth Communication, an after school program that published student stories – and still does. In 1991, he wrote a paper summarizing his ideas, his gripes, and his hopes related to youth journalism. It included some really interesting history.
Jayden: In the paper, of course, you talk about, you know, the golden age of journalism
Jayden: From post World War Two through the mid-60s.
Jayden: But I was just wondering, you know, what did these papers look like?
Keith: They were papers that described the life of the school, but usually from an elite perspective. So they didn't, um, like if you were at a school, like in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I grew up, that was probably 10% Black at that time. Did Black students, there, there was probably a very good school paper, but were Black students in that paper? There were, I would guess that until the mid-sixties, I bet almost all of the editors were men.
Jayden: So maybe not golden for everybody.
Keith: But one thing that that did was it gave the mostly White male reporters and editors a huge opportunity to learn those critical thinking skills, those writing skills, those leadership skills, and then to use the fact that they had learned them to get into really good colleges and stuff. So it was great for the kids who did it, but it was also like an amplifier of inequality in that way.
Jayden: Keith wrote in his paper that, according to his anecdotal sampling, a, quote, “huge number of working journalists” in that era got their start on high school newspapers. Primarily White men. But the demographics of the city schools started changing.
Keith: Between the fifties and the seventies, there was this massive White flight in New York City.
Jayden: By 1980, only about 1 in 4 public school students were White. Rapid immigration from Asian and Latin American countries had transformed the city’s makeup.
Jayden: Keith said that the mostly White educators of the time had strong feelings about the changing student body.
Keith: You know, I mean, I'm not going to repeat them, but I heard bad things from teachers and principals in those days about what they thought about their students. And, and to sum it up, well, they weren't really capable of producing a good newspaper or whatever it might be. I mean, there were really racist and sometimes sexist attitudes towards what young people could do. That was part of it. But the other part, spoken or unspoken, was that a lot of those principals and teachers, especially during that time of change, knew that they were, that there was something wrong and they were wanting to keep a lid on young people's expression of that because they knew, the young people knew. And so if you have a school newspaper, you've kind of taken the lid off, you know, if you give somebody a voice. And so they, there was almost a panic to not let young people have a voice because they were going to expose the whole system.
Jayden: From time to time, Keith would get requests to advise schools on how to create newspaper programs, but he said they rarely followed through.
Keith: The thing that bothers me about the decline in the high school press is that having worked with high school students in New York City for 40 years, they have so much to offer. They have so many insights. And all of that has been denied in the last 30 or 40 years when papers have not existed.
Jayden: In the early 2000s, with student newspapers already in short supply, something else happened.
Michael Bloomberg: There are now rewards for success in our schools and consequences for failure.
Jayden: The new mayor, Mike Bloomberg led a massive reorganization of the city’s high school system in an effort to improve low graduation rates.
Michael Bloomberg: If a school continuously fails its students, we will shut it down.
Jayden: He closed dozens of large, low-performing high schools and reopened new, small schools in their place. Sometimes four or five to a building.
TV Reporter: Now, making schools smaller, yet another plan to deliver better educations to urban school children
TV Reporter: In all, over an eight year period, New York City created 123 small, theme-based, open admission high schools from scratch
Jayden: The shakeup had pros and cons. One of the cons: these new small schools — which mainly enrolled low-income students and students of color — no longer had the capacity to support a full range of electives, like journalism. Schools had to choose a focus. They often put it right in the name of the school. School for Finance. School for Classics. School for Law.
TV Reporter: Law, science and engineering, sports management, and more
Jayden: Not many chose journalism.
Jayden: And this is the landscape we’re in today. Schools with the best journalism programs, they’re often the more privileged schools, which also tend to be larger. Like Stuyvesant. Beacon. And, of course, Townsend Harris. A newspaper is just another expectation in these schools. No different than a tennis team or theater program or art club.
Jayden: For schools like Pace — small, high-poverty, Black and Brown — in the rare case that they have a newspaper, it’s usually because they have a Mr. Rohlfing, a teacher who goes above and beyond to make it happen.
Jayden: But, come to think of it, most schools have a teacher like that — at least one or two. So, what if there was a way to train and support them to run a student newspaper program. Better yet, what if you could train the students, too?
Jayden: After this short break, Jadelyn, with a reason for optimism.
Lara: My name is Lara Bergen and I'm the founder and director of Press Pass NYC, which is a nonprofit organization that helps public high schools in New York City start student newspapers.
Jadelyn: Lara Bergen started Press Pass NYC in the fall of 2021 in response to the gap she saw in student journalism.
Lara: Finally people are talk– you know, people really are talking about how in New York City, the media capital of the world, how most of our million students will not graduate with much media knowledge at all. Um, so hopefully we'll make some changes here.
Jadelyn: There are glass half empty people, glass half full people, and then there’s Lara, who looks at the glass and says, “We need a bigger one.”
Lara: Every school should have a newspaper, All 1,000 schools in New York City. That's our goal.
Jadelyn: Lara isn't a journalist by trade. She’s actually an accomplished children’s book author. But for a short time Lara taught English at The Global Learning Collaborative high school on the Upper West Side. It’s one of four small high schools located in the old Brandeis high school building.
Lara: So when my school was founded about ten years before I started, they made sure, it was a small school, they made sure they covered all the requirements for graduation, but they did not have a school newspaper as well as a lot of other electives that probably Brandeis High School had when it took up the whole campus.
Jadelyn: She was the new teacher in town, and the principal tested her with a tough assignment.
Lara: I had a spring semester class of students who had to recover a credit, and these could be 9th through 12th grade students who had failed in the fall and so were doubling up. This was an extra English semester for them in the spring.
Jadelyn: She needed to make writing appealing to her students. And that’s when an idea hit. She decided to create a school newspaper and have her students write articles for it. Before long…
Lara: These students were working harder, ultimately, than the students in my regular classes. And they were learning more because the work they were doing was so relevant. And they were just so proud of the work that they did and so invested.
Lara: After that experience, I did leave teaching, um, but it just stuck with me that, you know, if I could start a newspaper and have such a great time as an educator with no experience at all, um, and doing it with students who had no experience, maybe other schools could.
Jadelyn: Lara knew from her own story that a single teacher could provide the spark to create a school newspaper. She also knew that having journalism training would give more teachers the confidence to do it. So, in 2021, as she was getting Press Pass NYC off the ground, Lara teamed up with Professor Geanne Belton from Baruch College.
Geanne: We offer this course, um, that we call “Launching a High School Newspaper.”
Jadelyn: The course is for New York City teachers.
Geanne: We teach like, like real journalism basics, you know, what are the sections that should be in a high school newspaper, like news features, sports, opinion, arts. What are the major topics going to be that you expect that you’re going to be covering? What’s the name of the newspaper going to be? And having that is actually enough to get something up in terms of a newspaper that can be online and then can be populated with stories.
Jadelyn: Once teachers complete Professor Belton’s course, Press Pass provides ongoing coaching and even occasional financial supports for notebooks, or pizza.
Jadelyn: In its first year, Press Pass supported 13 schools that were trying to start newspapers.
Jadelyn: But there was one big challenge that Lara kept hearing from school after school.
Lara: The advisors got to be into it, but they need the students to be into it to keep them into it. And, because it's a student newspaper. It is all dependent ultimately on the students to put in that extra work, to do that extra learning in the beginning. No matter how interested they might be in writing, no matter how interested they might be in um, expressing their voice and opinion. They have to feel like they're getting something back from that, from all that they put in.
Jadelyn: She realized that it wasn’t enough to work with the advisors. She needed to help train the students, too. Here’s Fredlove.
Fredlove: Flashback to summer 2022. New York City. Fire hydrants spew water into the streets, the ice cream truck song plays on a perpetual loop, and the parks are crowded. But inside one office building in lower Manhattan, 17 teenagers have gathered for the first ever Press Pass NYC Student Editor Bootcamp. They’re from different high schools that are all trying to launch newspapers.
Fredlove: For five days in August, the students participate in workshops led by volunteer journalists on journalism basics: pitching story ideas, writing ledes, using AP Style.
Ashley: My name is Ashley Conde Lopez. I go to Academy for Young Writers, and I'm starting sophomore year on September, and I'm in the newspaper club
Fredlove: The summer bootcamp has been an eye-opening experience for Ashley.
Ashley: Like, there's stuff I didn't even know, like before writing an article. I thought you just write it and then they, like, they edit it and that's it. Like, and now like, you got to do like three drafts, like, there was even words I didn’t even know so like, yeah, that's like a huge learning.
Fredlove: She’s been taking pages of notes in order to share what she’s learned with her newspaper club when the school year starts.
Ashley: And also, like, brings like a huge responsibility. Knowing that you're going to have to take all this information and bring it back to the school. Like that, they could start, like growing their, the, start growing the newspaper club.
Fredlove: For Ashley, this is a big deal. She’s wanted to be a journalist for a while. She just hasn’t had many opportunities.
Ashley: I was choosing journalism as my, like, career type base. And I thought, like, journalism was like, you know, you just write and that's it like about a topic that's going, but it's the whole opposite. But, like, I'm still interested in journalism. I still want to take journalism as my career or photojournalism. I want to take that as my career.
Fredlove: The bootcamp has been preparing her to lead her school’s new newspaper, which is exactly the kind of experience that could give her a leg up in pursuing journalism as a career.
Fredlove: That’s true for all of the students at the bootcamp. Meet Moro.
Moro: So my full name is Moromolaoluwa. M-o-r-o-m-o-l-a-o-l-u-w-a but people call me Moro for short, which is M-o-r-o because it's easier to pronounce.
Fredlove: Moro’s school also has a long name: the Institute for Health Professions at Cambria Heights, in Queens. Like Ashley, she’s also about to start her sophomore year.
Fredlove: She’s learned big lessons this week.
Moro: I just realized during this week the news comes from you. So I never, I never made, I never made that connection before that, so I’m like, ohhhh!
Fredlove: And small ones, too.
Moro: I also learned that when I have to, like, like you know, when you’re starting your quotations, you have to put your comma before the quotation mark, I didn’t know that before because in my country, when I would write, you put the comma after the quotations, so that's how I used to do it.
Fredlove: Moro moved to Queens three years ago from Nigeria. Starting in the fall, she’ll be writing for her school’s paper, the IHPCH Voices.
Moro: When you have a story, when you have an idea you should push for it. You have to make sure you pass that boundary. Like, it no matter what, like push for your story, cause if you don't fight for it, it’s not, it’s not, people are not going to hear it, and you know a lot of stories are swept under the carpet and you have to dig for it and you also like, have to learn to talk to people.
Fredlove: She just hopes her peers back at school are equally invested.
Moro: I want people to be interested. I don't want to have to force you to come to the club. I have to beg you to come. I want the people to want to love journalism and love what journalism is all about.
Fredlove: But there’s this one other thing hanging over Moro and the other Press Pass student editors when they go back to their schools. Something that students at schools like Townsend Harris don’t have to worry about. Moro says the newspaper needs to succeed so that her principal will see the value.
Moro: No principal wants to put money in something that is going to waste. So we need to prove ourselves that we are worth the investment or worth the fund. And that if he invests in us, it's not going to go to waste and it's, it’s going to be worth it basically.
Fredlove: “We need to prove that we are worth the investment.” It shouldn’t be that way. At schools with more resources, that thought never crosses students’ minds. Programs like school newspapers are just a given.
Fredlove: This is not just a New York City problem. A headline from San Francisco caught our attention recently: “Zero SF USD students attended national student journalism conference in San Francisco.” Nearly 3,000 students from all over the country flew in. None from the local public schools.
Fredlove: We spoke to the author of that article, Julia Gitis.
Julia: It's just really clear that the pipeline for professional journalists starts in high school.
Fredlove: Julia has been active in promoting youth voice as an essential part of local news.
Julia: If we're giving those skill building activities and building that confidence in groups that are predominantly privileged, White, well-funded schools, and we're not giving those skills to schools that are predominantly like harder to reach, under-resourced areas like we're doing ourselves as a society a disservice
Julia: It's not like you have to wait decades to see it. It’s 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?
Fredlove: In New York City, Press Pass is finding those missing voices — and helping students build platforms to feature them. Moro, Ashley and the other students in the summer boot camp are all in on helping their schools launch newspapers.
Fredlove: They left with new skills, fresh reporter’s notebooks, and lots of enthusiasm. But what happens when enthusiasm runs up against the realities of a segregated school system?
Fredlove: Will these new student editors be able to rally a group of peers to form a newspaper staff and actually publish stories? We find out…next time.
Edward: That was Fredlove Deshommes. You also heard reporting from Jayden Williams, Jadelyn Camey and Wesley Almanzar. I’m your host Edward Mui.