Now here’s a great idea. In New York City, a public-private partnership is spending $3 million to boost journalism in the city’s high schools. The program, called Journalism for All, aims to quadruple the number of Black and Latino students who are studying journalism, according to Claire Fahy of The New York Times (gift link).
High school newspapers, whether in print or digital, have been on the wane in New York and across the country in recent years, although the Student Press Law Center told the Times that the extent of the decline has not been reliably tracked.
Among other things, Journalism for All will help launch student publications by providing them with $15,000 in seed money. In addition, four students from each of the schools that are being served will be able to take part in summer internships at local news organizations.
Fahy reports that California, Illinois and Texas are also providing assistance to high school journalism programs. As I wrote this summer for CommonWealth Beacon, efforts are being made to revive a special commission to study the local news crisis in Massachusetts after the first attempt disappeared down a black hole.
Nurturing high school journalism programs and publications in Massachusetts ought to be something that gets serious consideration.
Listening to Vermont voters
It’s back to the future in Vermont, where the state’s public media operation is covering the election campaign by listening to voters and focusing on the issues they say are important rather than dwelling on the horse race and polls.
Boston Globe media reporter Aidan Ryan writes that journalists for Vermont Public, comprising television, radio and digital, “have spent the year speaking to more than 600 residents at diners, gas stations, and concerts about state and local politics across all 14 Vermont counties.”
It’s an effort known as the Citizens Agenda, but it’s hardly a new idea. Originally known as public journalism or civic journalism, the notion of shaping political coverage around the concerns of actual people was briefly popular in the 1990s. Among other things, the Globe itself engaged in a public journalism effort in covering the 1996 New Hampshire primary.
New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen is advising Vermont Public on implementing the Citizens Agenda; Rosen was also a leader of the public journalism movement in the 1990s, even writing a book about it called “What Are Journalists For?”
It was a good idea then, and it’s a good idea today.
Hacked emails, then and now
One of the odder developments in the 2024 campaign is that three news organizations — The Washington Post, The New York Times and Politico — have reportedly received hacked emails from the Donald Trump campaign but have chosen not to publish anything from them, as Will Sommer and Elahe Izadi reported (gift link) in August for the Post.
Obviously this is quite a departure from 2016, when the news media eagerly passed along emails from Democrats associated with Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Then as now, the leaks come from a foreign adversary — Russia eight years ago, Iran today. Then as now, the actual content of the emails may be of little interest.
I suppose we shouldn’t complain if news executives learned a lesson from 2016, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the media helped Trump on both occasions.
Then, last week, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein shared one of the hacked documents on his Substack newsletter — a Trump campaign dossier on all the embarrassing things that JD Vance had said about Trump over the years.
Klippenstein tried to share his newsletter item on Twitter and got blocked and banned. I posted a workaround and got locked out of my account until I deleted the offending post. Meta has been blocking anyone’s attempts to post a link as well, though they haven’t caught up with my Threads post yet.
In any event, you can download the dossier from Klippenstein’s newsletter. I haven’t read it, but I have paged through the table of contents, and it looks highly entertaining though not especially new. (“Vance Wrote That He ‘Loathed’ Trump’s ‘Obvious Personal Character Flaws,’” p. 76).
I assume Tim Walz is boning up ahead of Tuesday’s vice presidential debate.
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The Vance Dossier was interesting to me because I had not yet seen such a document. With knee-slappers like “Vance once implied that Trump is prone to lying” it says something about the people compiling it, who might not be so well positioned to predict how Vance will be discussed by the media and public at large. For example, it has half a page on religion, missing all of the things currently being discussed, including Vance’s adult conversion to Catholicism and his ties to Christian nationalism. It appears they focused only on things they thought could be negative, and got 217 pages.