At the beginning of high school, Pratika Katiyar, now 17, got involved with New Voices, a movement to protect student press freedom with state laws, after she heard about instances of censorship and saw self-censorship in her newsroom. As an editor for her high school’s newsmagazine, she was approached by a writer who didn’t feel comfortable writing about the school’s dress code for fear of retaliation, and learned of incidents described by student journalists in which principals, teachers, or administrators read pieces before publication and removed what they didn’t like.
“Across the nation, there aren't many laws in place to protect student journalists and their advisers publishing certain things, so the student journalists can undergo censorship,” Pratika tells Teen Vogue. At the start of this year, she testified in the Virginia House for a press freedom bill backed by New Voices and met with delegates and senators. “There’s been so many firsts this year,” she says. “I wrote an obituary for the first time.” The dogged, serious nature of this work stands in stark contrast to the explanation some state politicians gave for their hesitancy to pass the bill: that students are too young or immature to write about certain topics. “We may not always be looked at as the most mature people, or we may not always be cited, and we may not always get credit for it,” Pratika says, “but somewhere our work is still making a difference. It’s impacting someone somewhere, and I think that's what keeps me going.”
The year 2020 has been a reckoning for journalism in more ways than one: During this summer’s protests for racial justice, outlets across the country were forced into a long-overdue confrontation of racism within their newsrooms; this corresponded with multiple publications being held publicly accountable on issues such as sexism, racism, discrimination, abuse, toxic workplace culture, and sexual misconduct. As sustained protests swept the nation, students were on the front lines of coverage, and some were even detained or tear-gassed by police. Meanwhile, journalists who are students were hailed as “heroes” for continuing critical reporting work, often after being sent home from campus because of the pandemic. High school and college papers broke news and covered the COVID-19 impact on their communities. Yet the lines around press freedom and protections are murkier for students who cover these cataclysmic events. So a wave of students, like Pratika, is fighting for press freedom rights for high school and college journalists and their advisers.
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“When there's a possibility of censorship, prior review, or even self-censorship on staffs, it makes it less possible for other students and communities to hear as many perspectives as possible,” Neha Madhira, a student journalist currently reporting for The Texan at the University of Texas at Austin, tells Teen Vogue. She says she began doing First Amendment and press freedom work during her junior year of high school after a censorship incident in her own school, where they had to petition to reverse a ban the principal had put on certain stories. She also helped spearhead New Voices legislation at the Texas statehouse. Neha is now the recording secretary for the board of directors for the Student Press Law Center and helps students with bill language and getting in touch with representatives. Neha says that student journalists aren’t just the future, but the now of what’s happening, and that it’s vital to emphasize the importance of local reporting because not everyone has access to in-person meetings or updates on campus and beyond.
Says Lily Wobbe, 17, a student journalist who is part of the New Voices coalition in Kentucky, “The media is such a crucial part of democracy, and if us students learn how to contribute to this democracy while we’re still in school, we’ll be so much better equipped when we eventually fill the roles of professional journalists.” She continues, “There’s no reason we should be censored and prevented from covering things like gun control or racism or climate change, because these things impact our lives just as much as they impact adults’ lives.”
Often journalists who are students are experiencing the firsthand, real-time effects of what they’re covering, whether that’s a campus closure or holding leadership accountable for policies on campus. “When the George Floyd stuff was happening in late May and early June, that was really difficult for me as a student, particularly because I'm Black,” Marissa Martinez, 22, former editor in chief of the Daily Northwestern, tells Teen Vogue. “Having to kind of watch the country crumble around me as I'm finishing five finals and leading a newspaper…” It was a lot.
She mentions being proud of how the staff handled coverage of protests to abolish university police on Northwestern’s campus, another sensitive issue, that already had the country watching. “I think it's really interesting to see [that] larger outlets have to come back to our coverage,” she says, explaining that college publications are often seen as a stepping stone to the professional world, but are where bigger outlets come when they need a scoop. “We are reckoning with the consequences of being, of course, [a] literally hyperlocal paper for our campuses, and then for our city as well,” says Marissa. While national journalists can parachute in and out of a campus or city, student reporters have to personally deal with the consequences of not covering something accurately or angering community members with their coverage.
Journalists who are students also learn in real time how to adapt reporting to meet the needs of their communities. “I'm not ashamed to admit I learned quite a few valuable lessons on preserving protesters' identities thanks to the people reading the live tweets, messaging me and reminding me that police could be watching our threads for evidence to use against protesters after actions,” says Eduardo Acevedo, 20, the news editor for Virginia Commonwealth University’s Commonwealth Times. “It became a regular habit of mine to cover protesters’ faces in the pictures I took for threads to ensure the police had nothing to use.”
Eduardo, alongside the Commonwealth Times’ executive editor and managing editor, says he was subjected to excessive use of police force on multiple occasions while covering protests. “We wanted to make sure we got the full story of what was happening in Richmond and how the police were brutalizing protesters and members of the press nightly,” he explains. (Teen Vogue has reached out to the Richmond Police Department for comment.)
As they work to advance their careers, young journalists are also trying to tackle inequality issues in their newsrooms. Marissa started the diversity and inclusion chair position her sophomore year. “We don't need more mentors, per se,” she says. “We need more job opportunities, or more chances to connect with fellow marginalized journalists, or more tangible ways to help ourselves in the industry.” Marissa says students are sometimes shut out of summer internships because they can’t afford to take them. She wishes student journalism was treated more seriously, adding that she worked 40 to 50 hours per week on the newspaper with a full course load. “I think I got a lot out of that experience, but when I look at my resume, I feel disappointed, even though I know I'm doing a lot of work. I feel like it's because this industry has such crazy standards for who is acceptable to report and who is acceptable to get that internship and go to the next level.”
Student journalists may be considered some of the journalism heroes of 2020, but their work began long before this year, and it will continue long after as they fight for responsive, well-resourced newsrooms, break barriers to cover current events, and defend the press freedom that enables them to do their jobs. “In the middle of writing multiple stories on a pandemic, protests, and an election, it's hard to keep track of all the responsibilities you sign up for as a college student,” Eduardo tells Teen Vogue. “It felt like I had to grow two extra heads to make sure I didn't miss anything. Even then, assignments and deadlines slipped through the cracks, but I just told myself to keep moving and to keep pushing forward or I'd crumble under the weight of it all.”
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