Editor's Note: Alan Weintraut, media adviser at Annandale High School in Annandale, Va., accepted the honor of "2006 National High School Teacher of the Year" at a national convention of more than 5,000 student journalists and teachers in Nashville last weekend. In his luncheon speech, he put his calling as a journalism teacher in the context of the media industry's troubles, explaining what he loves about teaching journalism and advising school media, including the print and online editions of the A-Blast school newspaper.
Media professionals interested in attracting and retaining young readers might find his remarks insightful. His passion for his work may please newsroom managers who hire, knowing that teachers like Weintraut are molding future pros with the skills and journalistic values that the industry needs.The Dow Jones Newspaper Fund sponsors the award and will bring Weintraut as its guest to the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention in Washington, D.C., in March. Alan Weintraut's "Teacher of the Year" acceptance speech, edited for length, is as follows.-- Wendy Wallace
Industry Shake Ups: How to Prepare Aspiring JournalistsI recently had a discussion with a producer from the Discovery Channel who came to my classroom to talk about the future of journalism. He asked me how I felt about the industry to which we are preparing our youth, especially since it has had a broad dose of bad news in the last five to 10 years.
Whether our students look to the Internet, print or broadcast or podcasts, there aren't many models for them to follow these days.Newspapers around the country are either being bought up by corporate interests, or they are on the auction block to the highest bidder. Layoffs in the corporate newsrooms today are common, and too often community newspapers reprint wire stories found in big cities far away. According to a recent
Pew poll, today, only 40 percent of American adults say they read the newspaper yesterday, down from 71% in 1965. And a recent
Carnegie study showed that teenagers barely read the newspaper at all.
Whether our students look to the Internet, print or broadcast or podcasts, there aren't many models for them to follow these days. The Jayson Blairs and Stephen Glasses and unconscious plagiarists in our profession have sullied a once proud and noble calling. The Cronkites, Murrows and Koppels have been replaced by the Coopers, Courics and other focus-group-tested beauties.
As the TV screens have gotten flatter and bigger, the talent has gotten thinner and smaller.
Questions and calls about censorship to the
Student Press Law Center have been on a steady incline, and in too many cases administrators feel our public relations function eclipses all other independent thought or creative expression students should possess.
This producer from the Discovery Channel had raised some important issues with me that day in my office.
As I went on one of my night runs through my neighborhood of tree-lined row houses in Washington, D.C., on the eve of election night, the Capitol looming behind me and following me like a full moon, I once again thought about my own place in this profession, the most challenging I have ever had.
I reflected on the answers I gave to issues raised by the Discovery Channel producer.
There are three reasons we journalism teachers choose to rise to the challenges of our day.
We are the vanguards for implementing new technology in our schools.First, we become stewards in our school communities. If you have been a media adviser for just a few years, and you have built a successful program of telling stories that matter the most to your readers, viewers and listeners, you know how identifiable and important your programs become to your school culture. We can measure that in yearbook sales, newspaper subscriptions and Internet story hits, but the best way for us is to listen for the sounds of silence. For 15 minutes every three weeks when the newspaper is published and hits the hallways, kids and adults stop to read about the news that is closest to where they live. At end-of-the-year yearbook signing parties and magazine distributions, kids exchange fond promises of forever-lasting friendships, and they linger for hours, earnestly scribbling words that we all periodically reflect upon years after we've left high school. In our adult years, yearbooks and magazines become the only journalism many of us have left from high school.
Advisers who have grown through their fledgling years become department chairs and liaisons to the PTSA. We are asked to serve on panels that select the next principal. We become a strong thread in the fiber of our communities.
Second, no one in our schools recognizes the transformative quality of media and its impact on youth as well as we do. We tap the constructive potential of media and increase media literacy. We recognize that the "new media" is the only media that matters to teenagers.
We can handle the tsunami of new technology that comes out every year. The advancements in just the last five years have revolutionized how we help students improve journalism and tell stories in their schools, and we have been first-hand participants in that process.The recent Carnegie report citing the youth abandonment of newspapers is not news to us. Clearly, teenagers do not rely on the morning paper on their doorstep or the nightly newscast for up-to-date information; in fact, they -- as well as we -- want their news on demand. We are the vanguards for implementing new technology in our schools.
I read the blogs,
JEA listserv postings and news stories like you do. I see the decline in newspaper readership, but it is highly doubtful that teenagers don't care about the news.
Close to home back in Washington, D.C., when Virginia Sen. George Allen called a Democratic volunteer of Indian descent a "macaca," students viewed and reviewed that
moment on
YouTube. It is still one of the most watched clips today. Many credit that media moment for Allen's loss for re-election to the Senate. And when Steve Irwin died in September, I first heard about it through a text message from a student.
Students want to be connected to the news that impacts their lives, but sometimes they need our help to be steered away from Sudoku and similar distractions.
We can handle the tsunami of new technology that comes out every year. The advancements in just the last five years have revolutionized how we help students improve journalism and tell stories in their schools, and we have been first-hand participants in that process.
We help (students) derive meaning from their media-saturated world. They chronicle their lives with music, movies and photos of every achievement, and sometimes they want to put it up on the Web for immediate feedback, to re-resonate meaning.
Somewhere we all have a box of photos from high school or our youth that number no greater than 100 pictures, and that might reflect our entire life from infancy to 18 or 21.
When we take students to conventions today, and they have 300 pictures -- just from the one trip -- and they are up on Flickr, Webshots or sometimes on their own self-created Web pages. I guarantee you there will be students at this convention today who will post photos and blogs before they ever get home.
Though technology has changed rapidly in recent years, one thing has stayed the same with teenagers that is on our side: They are still delightfully narcissistic. It's still all about them. Like the person yelling from the mountaintop to see if their voice is heard, they want that media validation, or at least the resonance of their own echo. They stake their claim on their
MySpace,
Facebook,
Friendster and YouTube to give themselves their own personal proclamation of identity.
Our publications become magnets that draw students to a world where their geekiness has value, and sometimes it can be the students' first opportunity to discover who they are. We are also inclusive of the broader world, and our nerd herds have kids from all faiths, all walks of life and all nationalities.And we are there to navigate through the complexity of their connectivity. Although we are not early adopters, and many of us cannot write HTML code, we have iPods, we provide wireless access and take-home laptops and Blackboard user groups to help them stay connected with each other. We provide them with the electronic umbilicals to the news world.
Third, we create converging communities that change the world.
By partnering with local professional media who come into the classroom, enlisting the support of the
Radio and Television News Directors Foundation and the
American Society of Newspaper Editors, we find new audiences and new technologically based ways to circumvent censorship and use it to our advantage.
All 50 states have standardized tests that are barriers to graduation. We reward kids for a sameness or oneness in thought. We want everyone to bubble in the right answer, and we reward convergence in thought. In journalism, we converge our media so we teach kids how to produce stories for the Web, print, radio and broadcast, but we always inspire for divergent paths of thinking in editorials, commentary and coverage decisions.
Our publications become magnets that draw students to a world where their geekiness has value, and sometimes it can be the students' first opportunity to discover who they are. We are also inclusive of the broader world, and our nerd herds have kids from all faiths, all walks of life and all nationalities. Unlike other electives, publications staffs need all types of kids to be successful. Non-Caucasian students are coming into the fold more, and that one elusive minority demographic can be seen in greater numbers on yearbook staffs: guys.
We are the coaches who see our students through all four seasons, and often all four years of their high school lives. We, in turn, begin to mark our careers by the editors and students who touch our lives. Like you, I have many former students who are now journalists at prominent media organizations. However, I am most proud of the fact that in the last five years, I have not gone a month without having lunch or dinner or attending a social function of a former editor.
In summary, to answer the concerns of the Discovery Channel producer, I told him that we aren't trying to make every student into a journalist. But we keep kids engaged in the civic process, we bring them to real-world learning experiences, and they make publications and products that will stay with them forever.
In short, we change students' lives.
I know, because 20 years ago, I was in that nerd herd, and I found a way to develop my talents. I was a newspaper geek in my formative years in the mid ’80s in Davenport, Iowa, under the tutelage of Steven Lyle at West High School, and then Dick Johns at the University of Iowa.
I forgot to tell you, the Discovery Channel producer came to my office that day not because he was doing a piece on scholastic journalism. He came looking for a job. Approaching his mid-40s, he was looking for a soul-satisfying job, and I said, welcome to our world.
Considering all of the resources available to us and the potential for impact on the lives of young people, there has never been a better time to be a media adviser.
Our history and our future will be what we make it.
I hope you all make it a great year.
Good afternoon, and good luck.
While earning his bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Iowa, Alan Weintraut served as communications director for Project Renewal, an inner-city children's advocacy group in Davenport, Iowa. After working in communications with a Washington, D.C. labor union, Weintraut started a journalism and film program at Annandale High School in Northern Virginia. Since 1994, he has advised The A-Blast student newspaper and the Signal video yearbook. Weintraut's students follow the convergence journalism model, creating web pages, podcasts, newspapers, streaming video and multimedia DVDs in a fully loaded publications lab.
