The death of the high school newspaper

The Gateway hosted a journalism conference this weekend titled Target Audience, aimed at high school students interested in getting into the media industry.

In his year as Editor-in-Chief, Adam Rozenhart tried this five years ago. In total, they received twelve registrants. While organizing this year’s edition of the conference, I made sure to read his post-conference report several times, avoiding all of their mistakes—namely, charging admission, and hosting it the same week as many high school graduations.

In promoting it, teachers loved the idea. We got in touch with as many of our old teachers and contacts as we could, and most of them were happy to give us a hand or invite us to come in and pitch it ourselves. A fair number of students even seemed to get into it, so I was expecting a high turnout.

As of the morning of the conference this past Saturday, we had received a total of 15 registration forms. “Alright,” I thought.  “At least we did better than Adam’s year. We can work with this.”

By the end of the day, six students showed up, and four stuck around for the whole thing.

So where did we go wrong? Did we not talk to enough teachers and students? Should we have started promoting it earlier, or on a wider scale, with posters and advertising? What could we have done to bring in more than a dozen kids and teach them about the wonderful world of journalism?

The short answer to that question is “nothing.”

The truth is, the high school newspaper has gone the way of Freshman Frosh week and the A/V club: they’re relics of a high school culture that may have been commonplace at one point, but they’ve faded into relative obscurity as high school culture remains in constant flux.

Technology is entirely to blame, but the luddite’s approach isn’t the right way to look at the situation. High school newspapers happened, not because they had any actual news to report, but because, in the words of Dan Lazin, “it’s something to do.” They’re a medium for young writers to hone their talents and express themselves while getting a taste of critical thinking and reporting while they’re at it. I’m sure most kids involved in a high school paper don’t really care about the sociology behind their club, however; it’s just an extra-curricular activity that’s representative of the time when print was still the primary means of information dissemination.

Now that there’s Nexopia, Facebook, MySpace, LiveJournal, or whatever the fuck it is that’s “cool” these days with high school kids, there’s no real need for a printed newspaper. While they formerly had the luxury of the excuse that there’s nowhere else to spread the “news,” today, any kid can go into their school’s library and let their entire social network know about how the basketball team is going to zone finals this weekend. Anything that a newspaper has to say that would be important to an average high school student can already be found online.

So maybe it’s the rest of the newspaper industry that needs to take a cue from the death of the high school newspaper and use it as a call to evolve or die. These kids, after all, will become the writers and reporters in a future that will be even less friendly to printed media.