Champion Journalist Portfolio
Media Law Presentation
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I presented to the ODYSSEY class about media law and ethics, alongside former Lead Copy Editor Jordan Rhym and former News Editor Delia Adamson. We attended a media law session at the Southern Interscholastic Press Association 2017 conference and wanted to bring back what we learned to our own workroom. Our rights, as well as our restrictions, as student journalists are not discussed enough as they should be, so our goal was to better inform our staff in order to avoid sticky situations and to spark a dialogue about our rights and ethics as student journalists.
Sensitive handling of challenging sources ​
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When I was notified by a sophomore member of the sports staff that she was receiving nearly daily text messages from a sports trainer she had interviewed for a story about two boxers at our school, I was immediately concerned. The texts indicated that the trainer wanted to ensure that the boxing facility was presented in a good light, and he requested to see the story before publication. After consulting with our advisor, I made a call to the manager of the sports facility and asked him to instruct the trainer to no longer make contact with the writer -- contact we believed was highly inappropriate. I also expressed that it is not in our journalistic practices to share stories with sources before publication or make changes in order to satisfy a person or business' wishes. Ultimately, I sent the manager a PDF of the story for viewing a few days before publication, simply to check for accuracy. Again, I was clear that we would not be making any changes content-wise. This experience taught me a lot about how advocate for one's staff and journalistic integrity when faced with challenging circumstances.
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*Click on image to enlarge
Staff handbook​
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Each member of the ODYSSEY staff receives a copy of the staff handbook at the beginning of the school year. Before we start magazine production, we take time during the first week of school to ensure that everyone knows the handbook front to back. One of the most important sections is "Legal Advice", which contains information about libel, slander, privacy, the Freedom of Information Act, copyright, and other essential legal knowledge for student journalists. As Editor-in-Chief, I reviewed this section with the entire staff at the beginning of the year to reinforce this information and ensure every staffer was empowered with the legal knowledge necessary to be good journalists.
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*Click on image to enlarge
Transcribing with fidelity
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We have had some issues with particular members of staff who have chosen not to transcribe their interviews, or have improperly transcribed -- leading to accuracy issues. As a Leadership Team, we took these issues extremely seriously. We made it a standard policy that all stories turned in without audio and transcriptions would receive a grade of zero. We also had one-on-one meetings with those who had a habit of not doing transcriptions. We took these conversations so seriously because accurate transcriptions of interviews are crucial for our credibility as a journalistic organization.
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*Click on image to view feature story rubric, in which audio and transcriptions are required elements
Calling the Student Press Law Center
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Before publishing a highly sensitive story about the state of our school district's accreditation, the author -- Senior Copy Editor Mackenzie Caudill -- and I made a call to the Student Press Law Center. We had questions about our legal right to publish documents that we had received from a source. The documents had been obtained through an open records request, but we were unsure of our legal standing because we had not made the open records request ourselves. The two of us had an extensive conversation with a lawyer from the SPLC, who gave us guidance and said that we had the right to publish those documents.
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*Click on image to view the sensitive story which required me to reach out to the SPLC
