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New York was hit with an onslaught of record-breaking rain last September, leading to flash flooding across the city. As the storm pummeled the five boroughs, a leak sprung at Pace High School in Chinatown, soaking the rubber flooring of its basement gym. When the floor dried, it was bumpy and uneven, rendering it almost unusable.
For months, the school’s pleas to the City Council for funding to replace it went unanswered. Then, in December, The Pacer, the high school’s student newspaper, ran a 700-word article on the worsening issue.
This time, the City Council responded, agreeing to provide $750,000 for the gym’s renovation, according to the local council member and the school’s principal.
It was a big win for the 4-year-old, student-run outlet — and it exemplified a vanishing experience for New York City’s students. Only 27 percent of public high schools in the city have a student newspaper, down from roughly 50 percent in 2009.
The problem is even more stark at schools with many low-income students: Just seven of the 100 public schools with the highest rates of student poverty have student-run publications, according to data from Baruch College.
“When I got into journalism class, everything clicked for me,” said Katelynn Seetaram, 16, the editor in chief of The Pacer, who won an award from Baruch for her sports writing last year. “I was like, OK, you know what? This is it.”
The decline in school newspapers is not unique to New York. Across the country, rising costs, changing attitudes toward the news media, difficulties in finding faculty advisers and an emphasis on science, math and technology have led to a dearth of high school journalism programs — particularly at underprivileged schools.
Seeking to address the problem, local news outlets and universities in states like California, Illinois and Texas have teamed up to prepare teachers to lead electives and workshops for aspiring young journalists.
And now, New York City will have its own initiative, Journalism for All. The pilot program is a collaboration between the Youth Journalism Coalition, which is run by The Bell, a nonprofit; the City Council; and the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.
The program will create journalism programs at 30 high schools across the city, giving them a curriculum to follow and providing intensive training for teachers.
It will also provide $15,000 start-up grants to help get student publications off the ground and pay for four students from each school to attend summer internships in local newsrooms.
Schools can apply to join the program starting Thursday.
“I don’t have a publication — I’ve always wanted one and I know so many kids who do,” said Camila Sosa, a 17-year-old senior at Uncommon Collegiate Charter High School in Brooklyn and a member of the Youth Journalism Coalition.
Ms. Sosa, who has already nominated her school for the new program, said she felt like the administration promoted its STEM offerings as an excuse for not offering a journalism elective.
“They’re like, Oh, but we’re funneling a lot of money into robotics,” she said. “But here’s a program that is allowing y’all to have that support for a journalism program. So y’all aren’t alone.”
Before applications for the Journalism for All program had even opened, nearly 70 schools had expressed interest in the 30 available slots, according to Kyle Finck, the director of the Youth Journalism Coalition.
The coalition’s student members were responsible for organizing advocacy for Journalism for All, including a day of action called “J-Day” last April, when they rallied outside City Hall to encourage the Council to support their efforts.
Journalism for All, a $3 million initiative funded by the City Council and private donors, is expected to quadruple the number of Black and Latino students in journalism classes at New York City schools, according to Taylor McGraw, the executive director of The Bell, which created the coalition.
Also on Thursday, Councilwoman Rita Joseph, who chairs the City Council’s Education Committee, will introduce a bill requiring the city’s Department of Education to provide data on school journalism programs each year.
The Council passed another bill last month calling on the department to support the creation of student newspapers in all city high schools.
Ms. Joseph said that she hoped to “create a work force of young journalists that can tell the stories from their neighborhoods, where they grew up, of resilience, immigration, history, all of that.”
In California, the nonprofit newsroom CalMatters began its Youth Journalism Initiative in 2022 to help teachers become more confident teaching journalism, in hopes of strengthening student publications across the state.
Michael Lozano, who leads the California initiative, said the organization hoped to position student journalists to cover their communities as a whole — a goal that was particularly crucial given the decline of local news outlets.
“A lot of student journalists feel really empowered to represent student voices and opinions and views and themes, but also, they want to cover their communities responsibly,” Mr. Lozano said. “Whereas, in the past, they feel like their communities and schools haven’t been covered fairly or at all.”
Mike Hiestand, the senior legal counsel at the Student Press Law Center, a nonprofit that helps defend and support student journalists, said there was no national data tracking the number of high school news outlets, but that they had been on the decline for at least the past decade.
Student media programs are expensive to run, he said, so they tend to exist at more affluent schools, leaving a “visible gap” between those schools and those with fewer resources.
“Beyond money, student media programs also tend to identify and report on problems that poorer high schools would usually rather not have pointed out,” Mr. Hiestand said in an email. “Student voices can be quite inconvenient to administrators.”
The Student Press Law Center works with students to lobby for student-journalist protections to be included in state law. In May, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, signed one of these “New Voices” bills into law, making Minnesota the 18th state to do so.
New York’s version of the bill, which would protect outlets from censorship by their school administrations, did not make it out of committee this year.
Liza Greenberg, 17, a senior at the Bronx High School of Science and another member of the Youth Journalism Coalition, is in the process of lobbying the State Legislature to pass the bill.
Ms. Greenberg has been involved in journalism since middle school, when she helped start a newspaper at the Center School on the Upper West Side. When she started at Bronx Science, she joined The Science Survey, an 86-year-old school paper.
“In middle school, starting a newspaper, it was one of the hardest things I had to do,” Ms. Greenberg said. “And that was at a relatively well-resourced public school, where we had the administration’s support and we had a faculty adviser.”
Ms. Greenberg knows that her experience is a rare one in the student media landscape of New York City. She also acknowledged that if it had been that hard for her to start a newspaper, it would be “a million times harder” for students at less-privileged schools.
As they lobbied for the Journalism for All initiative, members of the coalition met with the City Council, testified at hearings and even appealed directly to Schools Chancellor David C. Banks.
Ms. Seetaram and Ms. Sosa hope to build on that experience in their careers as journalists. Ms. Greenberg is less sure, and is still considering studying medicine, or maybe pursuing public health.
But one thing they all plan to do after high school? Join their college newspapers.
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