In late September, news broke that Kurt Volker, the United States’ special envoy for Ukraine, had resigned amid the impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump. The story was a story in itself: It was broken by a university student newspaper, just one of several major scoops and examples of fascinating media work done by young people in 2019.
“Every local news story that's ever written is like one step away from being a big, national one,” Andrew Howard, the 20-year-old managing editor of Arizona State University’s State Press, which broke the story, told Teen Vogue. “It's just whether the big, national people see it or care about it at the end of the day.” The paper was not going after a significant scoop, Howard noted; they were working to find a local tie to national news that involved Volker, who worked at the school. Howard joked that while the story has garnered the most attention for the paper, it’s likely not the favorite of anyone in the newsroom. “We were just doing what we do every single day,” he said.
The year 2019 was consequential for journalism, but less discussed are the young people who have been flexing their journalistic prowess, breaking stories and covering news in ways they felt the mainstream media was not. Students launched community newspapers in places that lacked them; amid layoffs in newsrooms around the country, student papers became community staples, closing a local-news gap. Student journalists battled censorship and won, broke news about their high school’s use of prison labor, and pioneered their own media outlets, including Instagram accounts devoted to distilling the news in easy-to-read ways. Student journalism advocates are also gearing up to protect student press freedom with New Voices, a nonpartisan movement that has 11 state bills being introduced to protect the rights of student reporters, sometimes against policies imposed by their own universities and communities that seek to silence them (according to the Student Press Law Center, currently there are only 14 states with laws protecting the First Amendment rights of student journalists). They aren’t just keeping up with “traditional” news coverage; young reporters are often defining it.
“Just because the word student is in front of the description does not mean that we aren’t real reporters doing real work,” Madison Hahamy, 19, told Teen Vogue. Hahamy was a senior reporter for Since Parkland, a project in which student journalists told the stories of the hundreds of American kids killed by gun violence since the 2018 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. For her, the decision to take on this reporting felt personal. Because of her privilege, she said, she knew her own death would be covered differently compared with peers who lived only 20 minutes away. “I would be memorialized, mourned, high-profile leaders would condemn the shooting,” Hahamy explained. She had seen coverage of school shootings that sometimes contained inaccurate information or spoke of investigations left open, Hahamy said. “For me, this project was so important because they deserved better.”
Student journalists often see their work as a call to action. They’ve grown up with social media, and their fluency with these platforms means they understand how they should and shouldn’t shape discourse. They’ve watched “fake news” become a kitchen-table term. It’s their vantage point, often lower to the ground floor on the issues that impact them, that gives them a unique perspective on where journalism goes from here.
“I think it's young people's jobs right now to figure out the solution,” Arizona State’s Howard said of the future of media and journalism. He explained that it’s important for young people to keep their generation involved in media, so they have increased media literacy as adults. Olivia Doyle, the 17-year-old co-editor of the PLD Lamplighter in Lexington, Kentucky, said she feels it is her responsibility to uphold ethical reporting standards and help peers value the free press. “My fear is that news will continue to be suppressed, and with it, the voice of the people,” Doyle told Teen Vogue. “‘Fake news’ has become a catchphrase for news someone simply doesn’t like — true or not.” Earlier in the year, Doyle and her co-editor said that they were turned away from an education roundtable hosted by former Kentucky governor Matt Bevin and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, an incident they wrote about in an editorial for the Lamplighter.
Sraavya Sambara, 17, editor in chief of Dougherty Valley High School’s paper, The Wildcat Tribune, told Teen Vogue that she hopes the next decade of journalism speaks to “a patient public that's more receptive to complex issues.” “There shouldn't be opinions in the news to the point where it's distorting the facts,” Sambara said. “And what you're gaining is just somebody else's opinion rather than the actual facts and the ability to make your own opinion.”
Sambara’s paper is an example of how many roles student journalists play: Besides reporting, they’re sometimes responsible for securing additional funding and managing social media accounts. Sambara launched a program at the local middle school to generate more funding for her high school’s paper, and engage younger students to get involved earlier. “I think that student journalism is what's keeping local news alive,” she said, and added that there aren’t many major local outlets in the Northern California region where she lives.
Ensuring that school districts provide sufficient funding for journalism in schools and, as a result, for broadening the spectrum of voices readers hear from, is a priority going forward, according to young journalists. “We need more conversations about the lives of poor and rural people," said Quintez Brown, a 19-year-old contributor to the Louisville Courier Journal. "We need more conversations about the lives of prisoners and the formerly incarcerated. We need more conversations about trafficked Black women and murdered trans Black women.” This requires diverse and inclusive leaders, he noted, which requires being intentional about hiring those people in the first place. “No excuses. No loopholes. Do it,” he said.
For some young journalists at traditional school papers, ensuring that diverse voices are heard and recognizing young readers as a valuable audience means moving beyond reporting. “There’s absolutely no reason there shouldn’t be tons of news outlets for young people, in the same way older generations have The New York Times and the Washington Post and CNN,” Olivia Seltzer, 15, told Teen Vogue. Seltzer is the founder of theCramm, a newsletter offering a daily look at breaking stories from around the world, written to engage young people. But theCramm should not be alone in being by young people, for young people, Seltzer said; in the future, she hopes “there are actually more spaces for young people in journalism and the news.”
Diversity, ethical reporting, and attention to their communities — including schools, neighborhoods, and online communities — are priorities for student reporters and crucial for the future of journalism. Their focus on representation stands to make journalism more accessible to young people and more accountable on the issues that matter to them. As Howard put it: “What can contribute to a better news environment or, like, a better media landscape, is people seeing themselves in the media.”
Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: These Massachusetts Student Journalists Exposed Their High School’s Use of Prison Labor
