Tag: Fall 2010

Ride-alongs with police officers can be effective in giving reporter's an insider's view of the police department and its operations, but there are ethical and legal considerations student journalists should be aware of before embarking on one.

Although it has been three years since Ocean County College settled a First Amendment lawsuit brought by three student journalists, former staff members claim most of the settlement terms were never met.

Journalists are trained to value and defend freedom of speech for everyone, even those with extreme views whose opinions may offend listeners. But when speakers use the student media to mock or criticize minority groups, student journalists have faced backlash from their campuses that can put college financial support at risk.

College journalists are accustomed to facing angry letters, nasty e-mails and dirty looks from the campus officials they cover. But lately, some have been faced with a much more intimidating response to their newsgathering: disciplinary charges before student conduct boards.

With duct taped mouths and signs sporting slogans such as ''No Newspaper, No Voice,'' students at Fremont High School protested the school's decision to cancel the journalism class for the 2010-2011 school year.

Budget problems are hitting college newspapers hard, and the motives behind them are sometimes ambiguous, with money woes used as a smokescreen for penalizing editorial content.

With the increasing move toward online journalism, high schools across the country are struggling to find a balance between teaching journalism for the Web while also responding to parents' safety concerns.

When four students sued the Puyallup School District in 2008 claiming the JagWire student newspaper violated their privacy, no one really expected anything good to come out of the lawsuit for student journalists.

University foundations control hundreds of billions of dollars in donor assets Harvard's investment portfolio alone is valued at well over $25 billion. At public colleges, foundations often resist complying with the same disclosure laws that apply to their affiliated universities, claiming to be nonprofit corporations and not government agencies. But there are ways to peek behind the curtain of secrecy and inform the public about how these monied and influential institutions operate.

We hope that, when you take a look through the revamped splc.org site, you'll agree that the redesign -- the first overhaul of the site in more than nine years -- makes the website a more appealing place to linger and a more useful place to learn.