RSS
Twitter
Yet Another High School Newspaper Goes Online To Avoid District Censorship
from the control-is-a-funny-thing... dept
This is hardly the first time we've seen high school administrators try to censor the student newspaper because they were upset about article -- only to find the students simply moved over to the web and were able to get their message out to a much wider audience. The latest, coming to us via Romenesko, involves a student newspaper in Faribault, Minnesota. The superintendent got upset that the students wouldn't share the results of an investigative report before publishing it, and so he shut down the newspaper completely.
Without skipping a beat, the students set up shop online, entirely independent from the school (they even got a site that hosts student newspapers to give them free hosting). They'll continue to publish, but without support from the school (though, the teacher who was an adviser to the paper, will continue to informally advise the team). Basically, the students are realizing what plenty of others have discovered in the past: it's tough to shut people up these days, now that there's a big internet out there. The superintendent who shut them down doesn't seem to mind much either, saying: "It's well within their right. Any group of students could put together a website like that. That's the way life is in this electronic age." Of course, if that's the case, why did he bother shutting down the paper in the first place?
