Tag: Spring 2010

College newsrooms, mirroring their professional counterparts, are adopting content sharing agreements at a growing rate. While exchanging articles, columns and photos offers students the opportunity to get their work and bylines in front of a new audience, the ultimate impact of content sharing for student journalism has yet to be seen.

Before you publish and share your content online, it is important to understand how your work can and cannot be used on the Internet, and the steps you can take to ensure that you are credited -- and maybe even paid -- for the work you produce.

Cases involving student journalists present some of the most challenging privilege issues that judges and legislators are facing today. The answers are not always obvious. Deciding what material is privileged means balancing two competing priorities: (1) to protect the ability of journalists to effectively and safely gather news, and (2) to make sure the right people (and only the right people) are caught and punished for crimes.

Money is a constant source of concern for college students and the cash handed over to the campus bookstore every month for stacks of textbooks doesn't help. Fourteen states have laws requiring disclosure of information regarding textbook purchasing — including the prices campus bookstores pay for course materials.

When they make you the editor of your college newspaper, one of the things they invariably forget to tell you is what to do when two truckloads of uniformed police officers show up asking to search your newsroom.

Thomas E. Rolnicki, a longtime friend of the Student Press Law Center and amentor to many of today's scholastic journalism leaders, passed away onDecember 20, 2009, at the age of 60.

After 12 solid months of prior review and administrative censorship chipping away at The Statesman, Stevenson High School's once-award winning student newspaper has become a shell of its former self.

NEOLA's one-size-fits-all restrictions can weaken high school media.

When the Lake Central, Ind., school board met to discuss a high school principal's removal of newspapers from the stands in response to an editorial mildly critical of the former football coach, the board heard a forceful argument in favor of student free-press rights from an unexpected source: Another school administrator.

It is important for student journalists to familiarize themselves with the essential investigative tool of open-records law. FOI laws provide student journalists with the opportunity to acquire interesting and useful information about public agencies' practices and policies.