The student journalists at the Heights Herald anticipate some criticism as they report on politics affecting their school and community just outside of Minneapolis, especially during such a divisive and fraught election year.
That hasn’t stopped their reporting. “Knowing something is controversial and doing it anyway is something that can come with writing about politics,” said student journalist and high school junior Skylen Raleigh.
The staff at the Herald, the student newspaper for Columbia Heights High School, are covering their local school board race. They’ve published an article on the presidential debate and plan to follow the election. They’re devising social media posts about voting for 18-year-olds heading to the polls for the first time. Even though the community might not like that they’re covering these topics, the journalists say they feel it’s important that they do.
“When it comes from student voices like us, it lets others in our audience—of students and district members—know that politics is not just something that won’t affect them, that doesn’t affect them, that doesn’t matter,” said co-editor-in-chief Cassidy Wise, a senior. “It’s something that we care about, too, as students. We think it’s important for each other to know.”
Their age is an asset, co-editor-in-chief and senior Hiedi Lee added, allowing them to offer fresh perspectives to the conversation.
“While professionals cover broader topics, student journalists focus on issues that matter directly to students, reporting on events in our own schools and neighborhoods that impact friends, classmates, and families,” she said.
Researchers have found, where political clashes are playing out at the state and local levels, student journalists are grappling with controversial topics and political dialogue. It’s how they become informed participants in democracy, experts say.
It’s becoming harder for high school journalists to navigate that, however. School administrators across the country have censored student media that veered into politics or controversial topics—in some cases, even shutting down publications.
It’s part of a broader trend: Teachers are discouraged from having tough conversations in class, as 18 states have passed legislation or other policies prohibiting teachers from talking about “divisive concepts.” Many teachers said they didn’t plan to talk about the presidential election, partly due to fear of parent complaints. Students are likewise wary to weigh in due to the polarized climate—and how vitriolic disagreements can get.
Student journalists have been advocating for years in state legislatures for guaranteed press rights, but as conflicts continue to infect schools, press freedom advocates worry that an outspoken student press might become a rarity.
“There’s a real feeling of hopelessness that I hope does not continue,” said Leslie Klein, a professor of journalism at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “I worry that the good student journalism that we are seeing, and all the students out there pushing to cover issues that are meaningful and important to them and their peers, will become the outlier rather than the norm.”
Some student journalists are self-censoring, researchers find
The student press’s First Amendment freedom was eroded nearly 40 years ago with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier to grant school officials the right to restrict students’ writing if they could cite an educational justification for its censorship. The decision spurred a shift in student journalists’ ability to freely write about political or contentious issues, researchers say.
Slowly, over the course of decades, there’s become a culture of censorship against student journalism—both self-inflicted and from school administrators. Klein found that in Florida, after the passage of legislation prohibiting discussion of gender and sexuality in the classroom.
“Many of the advisers I spoke to felt like their students had just given up,” Klein said. “They were just sort of resigned, at least in Florida, that the political climate was such that they weren’t going to be able to talk about things that were important to them.”
Mike Hiestand, a lawyer at the Washington-based nonprofit Student Press Law Center, which advocates for student press freedom in state legislatures and through a free legal hotline, wonders if the reason his phone hasn’t been ringing off the hook in the lead-up to Election Day is because students are wary of taking strong political stances after heightened—and particularly harsh—criticism.
As students covered the Israel-Hamas war, they were met with outrage, he said. One student’s story—a basic and straightforward news article—resulted in people calling her future college, demanding her acceptance be rescinded, he said.
He has concerns that student journalists may be sitting out the election as a result.
“One of the new pieces of advice I have to provide to them and their teachers is you do need to talk about doing good journalism and doing the best work that you can, but you need to really be prepared for the criticism—sometimes pretty nasty—that’s going to come,” Hiestand said.
Student journalism is a vehicle for understanding, and engaging in, democracy
Just like talking about elections in class is vital for teaching good citizenship, an active student press teaches students about how to engage in politics and in civic life, and how to navigate difficult conversations, said Melanie Wilderman, a professor of journalism at the University of Oklahoma, who researched how often students there reported on controversial topics.
“If the schools or the teachers don’t teach that, or if they can’t teach it—like some of our schools and teachers are feeling that pressure in Oklahoma and in other states—then the students are really missing out on those critical discussions which are so important to their civic education and, in my opinion, democracy overall,” Wilderman said. “We need informed citizens to have a functioning democracy.”
Simon Mehring, a senior at Stoughton High School in Wisconsin and editor of the student newspaper The Norse Star, encourages his staff to pursue topics that they are interested in, or subjects they and their peers don’t know about. Often, that ends up being politics, he said. They’ve covered international wars, local education referendums, and the undecided voters in the upcoming election.
The student journalist may not be an expert in a subject when they start their reporting, but they are when they finish it—helping educate themselves and their peers, Simon said.
“Student journalism is seen as kind of just a hobby or a club, and it’s easy to brush off,” he said. “With all-time high disinformation and misinformation, with local journalism deserts across the nation, communities have to turn to their student journalists as sometimes the only newspaper in their community—the only voice in their community—and really trust them and engage with them.”
And certainly, student media are covering issues that students care deeply about, that the broader media landscape may not cover.
In Carmel, Ind., and Loudoun County, Va., researchers Andrene Castro, a professor in the department of educational leadership at Virginia Commonwealth University, and April Hewko, a graduate student there, found student journalists were pushing back on the broader conversations in local school board meetings on anti-equity policies, making the case for why diversity, equity, and inclusion policies were necessary. They tackled the topics with nuance, Castro said.
The student journalists’ interest went beyond those policies. They covered elections, Confederate monuments and symbols, and the scrutiny on educators.
Communities have to turn to their student journalists as sometimes the only newspaper in their community—the only voice in their community—and really trust them and engage with them.
“Youth are interpreting how these policies—whether at the national level, or at the local level—are really impacting their everyday lives, that many of the adults are not fully understanding, particularly adults outside of the school setting,” Castro said.
And though there was often tension between student journalists and adults in the places where Castro and Hewko conducted their research, the teenagers did have allies, the researchers found. Teachers, club advisers, and parent-teacher associations were supportive of youth voice in both places, Castro said, which is important for students’ political consciousness.
At Columbia Heights High in Minnesota, Brooklyn Murdo, a junior, wrote a news article last year about Florida’s legislation restricting classroom discussion on gender and sexuality. The Herald’s adviser Chris Polley was surprised to hear that she had originally intended it to be an opinion article—but Brooklyn had feared her opinions were too strong and the administration would censor her, which has happened to the publication in the past.
Lawmakers in at least 18 states have passed legislation that restores the press rights of student journalists, protecting them from censorship and shielding their advisers from retaliation. Minnesota is the latest, with Gov. Tim Walz signing such a law in May. If the law had been enacted last year, Brooklyn said she would have run her story as she’d wanted.
“I definitely would have had the freedom to say what I wanted to say,” she said.
