Law, Ethics and News Literacy
LAWS AROUND STUDENT JOURNALISM
In the Journalism I class that I took as a freshman, we learned about several landmark events and court cases that defined journalism and student journalism. The importance of knowing the details and application of each of these as a journalist cannot be overstated. I've committed the details of each (as well as how they apply to us) to memory, along with laws in our specific state and policies for our specific school district.
The First Amendment
This is one of the earliest examples, and probably the most frequently quoted by student journalists. "Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press..." sounds really nice, and is the basis for free media in the United States. However, the vagueness of this amendment, and developments in the modern age (especially since governments may either find loopholes or blatantly ignore it) make it difficult to operate as a journalist without understanding any more than this.
Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969)
"It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” I'm crocheting sweaters for everyone on staff with that quote on it. This court case affirmed students' rights to free expression on campus, and is one of the most frequently applied to student journalists. However, it also resulted in the "Tinker test," which states that student activities may be restricted if they "materially or substantially interfere" with school activity. The vagueness of this test leaves open the opportunity for the justification of a lot of censorship.
New York Times Co. V. United States (1971)
In this court case, the federal government attempted to exercise prior restraint to prevent the New York Times and Washington Post from publishing documents with classified information about U.S. actions in Vietnam. The Supreme Court ruled that this kind of censorship was unconstitutional. This does not apply directly to schools, but it does give us a standard to strive for. In an ideal world, student journalists would be subject to the same laws and court rulings allowing for free press as professional journalists, and for those on my staff who look to work as a professional journalist after high school (or those of us who already publish our work in other publications), this case applies.
Hazelwood School District V. Kuhlmeier (1988)
In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that a student newspaper could not report on a topic that would cause significant disruption to the school environment. Obviously, this is very unconstitutional and is extremely detrimental to the work of young reporters, as we are subject to all sorts of restrictions because of it, but it is the basis for most of the local policies and practices involving student journalism, so it is important to know this case well.
Seminole County Public Schools board policy 5722
One of the ways in which the Hazelwood V. Kuhlmeier decision has been implemented is through local school board policies. Adopted in October 2018, policy 5722 lays out guidelines for student-produced media and states that "as nonpublic forums, the style and content of the student publications and productions can be regulated for legitimate pedagogical, school-related reasons. School officials shall routinely and systematically review and, if necessary, restrict the style and/or content of all school-sponsored student publications and productions prior to publication/performance in a reasonable manner that is neutral as to the viewpoint of the speaker." It also allows administrators to "to engage in prior review and restraint of school-sponsored publications." In simpler terms, anything that we write can be censored by school officials if they believe it may cause disruption to classroom operations.
CENSORSHIP
As outlined above, SCPS policy 5722 gives school officials the ability to restrict school-sponsored student media. In my time on staff, we have only faced a direct case of censorship once.
During the first semester of my senior year, I wrote a feature story about the experiences of transgender students. It detailed their lives and struggles they faced in a school environment.
Right before I planned on publishing the article, I emailed the school principal to make sure that I was allowed to refer to students in the way that I did, since our school district has enacted several laws restricting how students can be referred to. A few minutes later, my teacher got a call from the principal. He said that we could not publish the article at all, because the topic was too controversial. I asked him if we could set up a meeting, and he agreed.
At the meeting, the principal explained that, since state statutes define gender and Florida laws prohibit teachers from referring to students by pronouns other than those that correspond to their assigned sex at birth, the article could be extremely problematic if published on a school-sponsored website. While I understood his concerns, I feel that it is extremely important for a student publication to chronicle the lives of all students.
I agreed to send the principal my rough draft, although we agreed during the meeting that I would need to cut out a section on how the students had realized their identities. When I sent him the draft, he still had several concerns, so we set up another meeting, this time with my advisor as well.
At the second meeting, the principal told me that he had consulted the legal department as well as officials at other schools, and had determined that the article was too risky to publish on our site. He did advise me that as a private citizen, I could seek out other avenues to get the website published, and when I asked if we could write an editorial about the issue, he said that it wouldn't be a problem.
I spent the next few months contacting as many independent papers as possible. While I was in this process, my aunt reached out to me upon seeing the editorial that I wrote and published about the censorship of the article. She recommended that I try a local paper where she lived (New Jersey).
I asked if she could put me in contact with them, and after a brief editing process, the story was published! However, I still wanted to get it posted more locally.
I reached out to Oviedo Community News, a local newspaper that many members of our community read, and asked if they would be interested in running the story. This process has been much more complicated. Since many Hagerty parents read their website, the leadership of OCN wanted to ensure that they wouldn't face any issues with parents trying to get it taken down. After about three months of correspondence, I signed a contract as an independent writer so that I would both be covered by their liability insurance and not be associated with the school. On March 5, my story finally went up in Oviedo.
POLICIES
Editorials
For every print issue, we publish an anonymous staff editorial on a topic of interest. I lead discussions as we prepare for the issue, and ask people to share any concerns that we have about our school, and then, after we determine a staff stance that most people agree on, one of the three main editors writes the editorial. It is extremely important to me that these editorials come from the entire staff, so during our discussions, I ask for input from anyone who is quiet or hesitant, and also let them know that they can give their opinions to any of us one-on-one. I also mediate the discussions to steer them away from any topic that might divide our writers too much—people can still write about those, of course, but they're not the best for an editorial meant to speak on behalf of the whole staff. So far, I have written two (on how the media covers school shootings and on censorship), Isabella has written one (on how schools treat mental health issues), and Holly has written (but not yet published) one (on changing food regulations). These are published anonymously, with the byline "BluePrint Staff," but we include our editorial policy both in print and on our website. In simple language, it states that the opinions both in the editorial and in other opinion stories only belong to the writer.
Nickname policy
While I was working through issues with censorship of a story on transgender students, I contacted the Student Press Law Center, and was advised to, among other things, directly state our policy for using students' preferred names if it was not already listed on our site. Using suggestions from the SPLC, I wrote up a policy that aligns as closely as possible with our school board's policies on the issue, and added it to the "About Us" section of our website. It reads as follows:
"It is the policy of The BluePrint that reporters will ask the name of each person interviewed, profiled or depicted. The BluePrint will use the name by which a person so identifies, provided that, if they are a minor, a parent or guardian has filled out the name deviation form allowing them to be addressed by that name."
SOURCES AND QUOTES
Every member of our staff is expected to use primary sources in their story. No exceptions. For news, sports and feature stories, we require a minimum of two interviews with people directly involved in the event or topic, and for opinion stories, writers must cite bills, laws, personal experiences, YouTube videos or social media posts. Even for reviews, we require that the writer includes evidence directly from the music album, movie, show, book or restaurant they are writing about (and of course, they need to have actually watched/experienced the entire thing).
For this opinion story that I wrote about our school's use of Microsoft and Canvas (or eCampus, as our district calls it), I was struggling for a while with how to provide sources. Most of my opinion stemmed from personal experiences (I mean, just try to open the portal--you can't!) and research I'd done on alternatives to our Learning Management System. I ended up reaching out to our school district's director of information services, and cited his experiences with the implementation of this system.
Sometimes, sources need to be anonymous for their privacy or safety. In the above example, I noticed on Ethan's rough draft that he quoted (and originally cited by name) a student who uses VPNs to bypass restrictions on media. While VPNs are technically legal, the legality of what the student was doing was questionable, and I didn't want this story to cause her to face any issues. I left a comment explaining our system for anonymous sources, and we marked her as "Name changed for privacy." Here's the final story.
This was an interesting case, because as Grace was interviewing people for a story on teenage drivers, all of the people she spoke to asked to be kept anonymous. In some cases, this made sense, because they were talking about times when they had made illegal moves while driving or damaged other people's cars/property, but having nothing but anonymous sources for a story on a relatively tame topic could make us look less reliable as a paper. I left a comment explaining this (and laying out the format that our staff uses for pseudonyms), and she found sources who were willing to be cited by name to speak about the general state of teen driving.
AVOIDING BIAS
In the staff's stories
I often remind writers in comments to avoid editorializing their news and feature stories. In one example, Ethan and Kwan had written a story about how the school board had begun to encourage teachers to use AI in their classrooms, but they were getting a little bit too excited about the implementation. Given that it is still a controversial technology, I encouraged them to reword some of their writing to stress that district officials (not the writers) held the belief that AI in classrooms would be helpful. In another case, Holly and Ben were writing a story about the cheerleading team, but editorialized the team's chances for success. While we do hype up our sports teams sometimes, it went a little too far, so I suggested that they change their phrasing to instead stress that the program has done well in the past.
In my stories
During my second year on staff, I decided to cover a school board election. One of the seats had been won in the election, resulting in a new candidate being welcomed onto the board, while another had not been won by any individual, with two candidates advancing to a runoff in a later election. I reached out to all three candidates, but only two responded: Dr. Robin Dehlinger (the new board member) and Abby Sanchez (one of the two candidates who would participate in the runoff). I interviewed both, but I didn't want to come off as biased, especially because Sanchez would be competing against another candidate, Stephanie Arguello, and I couldn't show support for one over the other. I decided to approach the situation as transparently as possibly, writing that Arguello had not responded to our communications and outlining her platform from the information I found on her website. (See below what I wrote regarding Arguello.)
Earlier this year, I found out that a student who had graduated from Hagerty in 2025, Antonio Pizza, had announced his candidacy for a school board seat. Antonio was more well-known than just about any other student during his time on campus, so it would be strange not to cover something to relevant to current Hagerty students. I quickly began writing a story on the development. However, since this was a news story, I struggled with how to avoid coming off as biased in Antonio's favor. I couldn't do the same thing I had done for my previous school board story, since the current officeholder, Kristine Kraus, had not announced whether she was planning to run again, and it wouldn't make sense to publish a generic article about the election so early in the year.
Instead, I ended up focusing the story on the idea that someone so young could run for office, and what it meant to have a recent graduate of Hagerty get involved in politics. I did include information about Kraus, but not in the same way that I had for Arguello in my other story.
CHALLENGES
Comments
I routinely read and regulate comments on our news website and social media. We have the site set up so that someone must approve them before they appear, so I check this just about every day when I open the website so that people can express their thoughts as freely as possible. Usually we don't have any issues with this, since most of the comments we get are supportive and friendly, but occasionally some are questionable.
For instance, on a lighthearted feature video that Holly and I posted on YouTube, we got an extremely negative comment that intended to shame us for a joke that we made about Holly being a witch, and another calling us "infantile." While I don't mind people expressing their opinion, these people contributed nothing of relevance, and targeted us in a pretty rude manner instead of providing a legitimate contribution to anything we'd brought up or asked for commentary on.
In another case, we received a comment on an opinion story that a staff member had written about Charlie Kirk's death. The writer was conservative, and strongly in favor of Kirk's viewpoints, so we knew that this would get some criticism. However, the comment that we got was actually very well thought-out, and phrased in a kind and respectful manner, offering real insight into a complicated issue. I consulted both my advisor and the writer of the story, but ultimately decided to approve the comment.
Requests for changes
We do not typically change our take down our stories based on requests, as we believe that it puts our journalistic integrity at risk. However, sometimes students have legitimate concerns.
In the first semester of this year, Adriana, our features editor, wrote an opinion story about the adoption of African American Vernacular English into everyday slang, particularly by white suburban students. She used common names and mocked made-up students satirically. One of these made-up students was "Brayden from Chuluota" (Brayden being an extremely common name and Chuluota being an area where quite a few students at our school lived). Unfortunately, it turned out that there was actually a student at our school whose name was Brayden and who lived in Chuluota, and because he had gone to the same middle school as Adriana, the connection seemed uncanny at best.
Brayden sent both Adriana and the official Hagerty Journalism account aggressive and borderline threatening messages over Instagram, and I responded to him as politely as possible. I removed his name from the online version of the story, and let him know that I did so, but since the story had already been put in the printed issue, which had already been sent to print, there was little we could do about that. Since Brayden didn't respond to my Instagram message, I found his class that week, and spoke to him in person. Talking face-to-face turned out to be the best way to go, as he was far less angry than he had seemed online, and said that he understood that we couldn't remove the story from print.
LITERACY WEEK
Every year, our school's English department gets very excited about Literacy Week, so I was equally excited to contribute when I became editor-in-chief this year. Both regular literacy and news literacy are very important to me, but as the leader of a paper, I wanted to specifically focus on educating the student body about news literacy. I created an Instagram post explaining the concept of news literacy and giving students advice for judging the reliability of sources. Ethan, our news editor, had also recently written a story about declining literacy rates, so I shouted out his story in the caption I wrote for the post.
