At School Papers, the Ink Is Drying UpQuote:
Fewer than one in eight of the city’s public high schools reported having a newspaper or print journalism class in an informal survey this month by city education officials, who do not officially track the information. Many of these newspapers have been reduced to publishing a few times a year because of shrinking staffs, budget cuts and a new focus on core academic subjects. Some no longer come out in print at all, existing only as online papers or as scaled-down news blogs.
If New York is the media capital of the world, “you wouldn’t know it from student publications,” said Edmund J. Sullivan, executive director of the Columbia Scholastic Press Association, which runs award competitions and workshops for high school journalists. He counts 7 of the city’s 560 public high schools as active members, down from about 85 in the 1970s. In comparison, 23 of the city’s private schools are participating.
Nationally, nearly two-thirds of public high schools have newspapers, according to a 2011 media study by the Center for Scholastic Journalism at Kent State University. But Mark Goodman, a journalism professor who oversaw the study, said a disproportionate number of those without newspapers were urban schools with higher percentages of minority children. “They tend to have fewer resources,” he said, adding that this divide contributed to a long-term problem of low minority representation in the ranks of the media industry.
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Times]