laws and ethics.
As a school newspaper, it’s essential to know the policies and rules surrounding our program. Though high schools in Missouri aren’t yet protected by the Cronkite New Voices Act — though it has been debated several times and is on the legislative agenda for 2024 — through our local district protections, the Pathfinder has free reign over everything we publish.
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We always encourage our journalists to utilize their voices to advocate for student press freedom as well as the general advocacy of civilian journalists’ safety and rights of freedom, a precedent especially set by our 2021-2022 Editors-in-Chief.
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The way that we protect our freedoms as a student newspaper is through our Editorial Policy. Every year, the Pathfinder updates the Editorial Policy that lives under the ‘About Us’ tab on our website. This policy was first written by our past Editors-in-Chief and we’ve worked to update it as circumstances shift. Some of our most important policies rest in these guidelines.
For example, we have a wonderful adviser, but according to our Editorial Policy, she can only coach us on topics and articles that are published in our newspaper, not formally decide for us. As stated in the policy below, our school officials — which include our grade-level, school, or district administration — do not review our work prior to publishing nor can they stop us from publishing our work.
This year, the Pathfinder was recommended to apply for the First Amendment Press Freedom Award, an award given out by the Journalism Education Association. As Awards Coordinator, I worked - and am still working - with my adviser to complete the necessary materials and showcase how Parkway West actively supports the First Amendment as a student journalism program.
Due to the clause that states that any legal and/or financial liability is assumed by the student staff members, it’s exceptionally vital that we arm ourselves with the proper tools to manage a school newspaper.
To combat misinformation, we have three sets of editors to review any content that’s published on the Pathfinder. We check sources, hyperlinks, and conduct our own background research on the given topic if necessary to ensure that the information we publish is correct. We brush up our editors' skills with practice story tests, giving them copyright/legal/ethical mistakes within the story to fix, then talk to them about anything they missed.
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We also maintain regular contact with the Student Press Law Center. Whenever we have questions on the legality of certain elements in stories, we send an email over to SPLC so they can analyze the situation and give their thoughts on it. As student journalists, we want to make sure that we provide and disseminate just, accurate writing. SPLC is just another tool in our arsenal to ensure fair reporting.
As a student newspaper aiming to connect to the audience, we keep many lines of communication open to our readers, giving them spaces to comment their thoughts — and if we make a mistake. Though the vast majority of our stories go through three editors, it’s not impossible for a line or two to slip through the cracks. Our editors tend to be very thorough in their work and corrections are not often needed, but as humans, we are not perfect. In our editorial policy, we also address potential errors in our work and the correct steps that should be taken to fix it.
As a former A&E/Opinions section editor, my sections were the most likely to have legal issues if left unchecked. Within the past few years, copyright claims and the ensuing charges have become very expensive, and it’s important to make sure that the Pathfinder’s content doesn’t fall on the wrong side of the law — or morality.
To that point, I ensured that any photos that didn’t belong to the Pathfinder staff were first, correctly used under fair use and second, correctly attributed. For example, fair use allows us to use promotional pictures for A&E reviews under the commentary clause, but only as much of a photo that is needed. We stick to promotional content and materials rather than screenshots since said-materials were specifically made to promote content. I also limited the amount of Creative Commons images that we used in order to reduce any chance of improperly attributing credits.
In addition, we are strict with the way our staff writers source people. It’s easy for a staff writer to want to use the people around them for interviews, but if we only stick to our staff and journalism adviser, then we’re doing our audience a disservice by providing the opinion of only a small subset of our West population.
Instead, we’ve placed a ban on interviewing fellow staff writers unless absolutely necessary, and students may only be interviewed a few times a year before their voice is “retired” — meaning that staff writers will have to look elsewhere for student interviews.
In my junior year, I created a presentation for our staff about ethical interviewing in order to teach our younger CJ students how to interview correctly. In this presentation, I went over how to pick and choose sources and gave tips on how to create ethical questions and how to create great conversations with sources.
a trip down memory lane.
When discussing legality and ethicality, one incident stands out to me in particular. Last year, the other two Editors-in-Chief and myself (all of us being section editors at the time) wrote a review on our annual pageant Mr. Longhorn titled “A night like no other.” This was not a news piece nor a Features piece, but a bit-by-bit review on the acts and the pageant itself. However, after our article was published, two students that were heavily involved with the event were upset with what we wrote about the script and our critique about the consistent misuse of African-American Vernacular English. They sent us an email listing out their concerns, and we had to consider both the legality and ethicality of keeping the piece up on the website. We set up a meeting with our principal, who assured us that he would not force us to take the article down or change the article — that would be completely up to us, since it was a review and not a News or Features and it was not derogatory toward any students in particular.
After the legality of the situation was handled, we then had to consider ethics. Should we take down a piece to satisfy two affected people? Should we keep the story up as an example of journalistic integrity? When was it ethical to keep an article up? We had many factors to consider. The students were upset because they felt as if the article was inadvertently calling them racist, but we thought that — with the increasing mainstream presence of AAVE — it was important to call out the misuse of AAVE that confused many of the crowd members (in an after-show, informal poll that we took).
Our information was not inaccurate and our paragraph wasn’t abusive or blaming any specific person; however, we had hurt two students in the process. In the end, we decided to keep, but slightly revise, the section on the misuse of AAVE and remove the students’ names from the article. Though we had concerns from these two students, our article was ethically justifiable to continue to live on our site.
The decision we made is the one that we made, meaning that I cannot change it at this point. I do not know whether I would be happier with our original section if we decided to keep it today; to this day, I am still unsure whether we did the correct thing. However, I do know that at the time, we did not have a Takedown Policy. In fact, this debate is currently reflected in the form of a pending Takedown Policy that we are currently working on implementing into our Editorial Policy. If a situation like this one comes to pass again in the future, there will already be guidelines around what should happen.
news literacy.
Outside of journalism, each English II student — whether they’re in on-level or Honors — are given lessons about misinformation and news literacy, so sooner or later, every staff writer will be exposed to the differences between news and propaganda, advertisements, and opinions.
I’ve always encouraged both our writers and our editors to check hyperlinks and the reasoning behind research before putting hyperlinks in a story. There are many articles that have an enticing headline but do not accurately portray the topic that is in the headline in the body of the story, so I always urge our editors to be aware of hyperlinks in stories.
In addition, my story “They can’t be trusted” explores misinformation and ways to diversify the content that you read so that misinformation is less likely. Whenever the topic of misinformation comes up, I point to the story but I also warn that it’s an Opinions story — so there are two lessons in there for our staff - the lesson of learning about ways to diversify sources but also being aware that it's an Opinions article, so take it with a grain of salt.
In regards to News and Features, we have a specific policy that outlines exactly what will be in these stories. In News and Features, there is little to no bias in the story; if there’s any bias shown, it is only in the quotes by the story’s sources. Our editors have been trained well to spot the insertion of a writer’s opinion within transitions for News and Features stories so that our News and Features can be as accurate and unbiased as possible.