Coming Full Circle: How Student Journalism Shaped A Lifetime of Listening

Excuse me if Elton John’s “Circle of Life” becomes your earworm for a bit.

It’s been mine for 24 hours.

And it may stick around awhile.

At our high school’s Curriculum Night, a father walked up and said, “Chuck Small! Do you remember me?”

It’s not typical for a parent to address me using my first name. But this wasn’t any parent.

I’ve known him since he was 17.

In 1995-1996, he was part of a group of area teens who helped launch NandoNext, a website with youth-created content, sponsored by Raleigh’s daily newspaper, The News & Observer.

In 1995, The N&O was still a family-owned newspaper. Its entrepreneurial editor launched Nando.Net, an Internet service producer and early online news provider.

I was a news copy editor at The N&O. Jean House and Anita Stack, who ran the Newspapers in Education department, worked with me to launch NandoNext.

Initially, we reprinted the best work from school newspapers. But quickly our student staff began to create original content – from editorials to movie, concert and TV reviews to news and feature articles.

Between 1995 and 2001, dozens of young reporters, writers, photographers, and designers shared their work not only with North Carolina’s Research Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill) but with the emerging World Wide Web.

My bosses knew of my love for student journalism. As long as I could complete my copy desk work, they were fine with my pursuing this passion.

By the late 1990s, they allowed me a shift a week to work exclusively on editing youth content. Providing a space for youth voices came naturally

In 1980, as a high school senior, I wrote a feature on the chaplain at St. Joseph’s High School for the Next Generation page of the South Bend Tribune.

It was my first byline in a professional newspaper.

I didn’t know then that I would be bac:

In 1983 as a reporting intern
In 1984 as a copy-editing intern
Or from 1987-1993 in a variety of roles, leaving as arts and entertainment editor.

What I did know was that I loved using my voice to tell others’ stories and, sometimes, my own. I was grateful for the Next Generation page, which didn’t patronize my teen voice as lesser than those of the adults whose bylines dominated the rest of the paper.

After I graduated from college, I went to the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette.

**In my year there, I helped coordinate Insights, a page of content created by the area’s Explorers troop.**

Coming back to South Bend, I became adult coordinator of the Next Generation page – the same page where I made my debut.

The Tribune was still an afternoon paper. So it was the Wednesday edition that featured a report on the U.S. Supreme Court’s January 1988 decision that school-sponsored newspapers could be subject to prior review by administration without violating the First Amendment.

Wednesday was when the Next Generation staff met after school to determine content for that Saturday’s page.

That day, I told the staff we were starting from scratch: Each student journalist would take the next 90 minutes and write about what this decision meant to them.

I couldn’t have been prouder with the results. One wrote:

“Students should not be expected to report on quiz bowl and choir concerts forever.”

That experience stayed with me long enough that, when I moved to Raleigh, I wanted to replicate it. NandoNext gave us the chance – with a much nimbler medium that could reach a much wider audience.

In 1996, Hurricane Fran tore through Raleigh, disrupting power for weeks. I was out of town at a journalism convention.

But using email and File Transfer Protocol, my students wrote and sent me dispatches from the destruction, and I posted it on NandoNext. It was my first experience marshaling online reporting for greater immediacy than print journalism.

Still, our young voices told us, their parents and grandparents wanted to see their work in the newspaper. And it would be helpful to have clips to show colleges and future employers. Since Jean and Anita’s NIE division was managed by the advertising department, they could secure businesses to provide a monthly ad-sponsored page of youth content.

We called it Horizons, and it ran from 1997 to 2000.

Horizons offered youth the chance to create their own newspaper page – from logo design to page layout to writing and editing. I worked with the students, but sought to preserve their voice.

For example, in April 1999, within 48 hours of the fatal shootings at Columbine High School, student authors produced a commentary addressing the question “Why?”

The work of the NandoNext and Horizons staff began to earn the attention of professional colleagues.

Student voices were sought out as part of The N&O’s weekly schools page and its Sunday analysis section, Q. College alumni of our staff earned jobs as newsroom interns.

And in 1998 when Jean, Anita and I launched an annual High School Journalism Day with the N.C. Scholastic Media Association at UNC Chapel Hill, newsroom staff readily accepted roles as speakers, panelists and judges.

All this activity inspired me to apply for a semester sabbatical at UNC Chapel Hill in fall 1999. Auditing graduate courses in law and censorship, I wrote a paper on the changing face of student media. (If you’re curious, you can find it here)

That paper led with an anecdote about a Raleigh high school where the principal exercised control over the content of an ad in the student newspaper.jean

**That Raleigh high school is where I work three decades later as a school counselor.**

It’s the alma mater of my one-time NandoNext student. And next year, it will become the alma mater of his child, the junior class president who helps raise more than $100,000 annually for area nonprofits as part of our school’s Charity Ball.