On-line censorship - know your product

In Jescador, our on-line magazine, there has been a vox pop on "what do you like about sex?".... a gay advice column called "poofters and dykes" and a girl describing a bad drug trip....

Some teachers have been concerned...

"students shouldn't be giving advice - they are not trained counsellors"

The student hosting the gay advice column runs a support group for gay teenagers dealing with "coming out" issues which meets monthly at a coffee shop in town. Another student wants to write about Depression and where you can go on the net for help....

What checks and balances might you put in place? When might it be appropriate for students to give advice to others? Peer mentors? What training might they need?

"What image of the school are we projecting? The students need to understand they are writing for an audience, not for themselves!"

The students see the audience as a College student audience, not a parent audience, prospective student or teacher one. They have done detailed thinking on the market segments of their audience - different subcultures, their interests and needs and are writing articles based on that. But should they take into account the greater audience?

"The College intra-net should have a PG rating. Prospective students could see the contents of the intra-net."

All our College students are over 15 and have moved from a PG rating into M (and even MA and R) in their own reading and viewing. They are looking for articles which reflect their maturity. What rating is suitable for the College (16 to 18 plus) age group? Should the intra-net of a College reflect the age of students?"

It is now available for the whole world to see - what message are we telling the world?

While the Jescador magazine is on our intra-net and not available for outside viewing, the blogs where students write their stories are visible on the wider net - so if you google search key words a student blog may come up.

In teaching journalism one always comes up against issues of censorship when students are producing magazines for an audience of their peers. They want to cover social issues - sex, drugs and rock and roll. They want to cover issues happening at school, highlighting injustices. Some want to give advice to other students. Some want to voice their own opinions.

Their experience of doing journalism brings a greater awareness of responsibility in what and how one reports ... greater balance, checking facts, aware of the ramifications... but until these lessons have been learnt what happens? Can we allow students to put out their products to the world in imperfect states?

When doing a print magazine there usually are quite a few checks - it can't be printed until all the articles are in and editted (though mistakes still get through), there is a limited print run, and soon it is in the bin. Out of sight and out of mind. And sometimes a magazine gets banned.

But with our online magazine it is a lot easier for individual students to get something out there quickly in blogland without checks. All the articles stay on-line unless we pull them. It has taken a bit of time to put team structures and thinking in place which teases out issues of quality, plagiarism, censorship, ethics, audience, aims of the magazine... and in the meantime what is happening?

Just last week my two editors presented a powerpoint to the principal to address the concerns of teachers.... stating clearly the team goals, their notion of where the censorship line is and how they will place M warnings on articles which they think deserve it, their complaint procedure and what their quality control process is. They did it with comittment and passion and careful arguments. It was based on experience... they had already canned one article which looked at music lyrics on drug themes, saying it was poorly written, self indulgent, with an ambiguous message.

But it has taken us a four months to get to this point. And in that time we have had 10 issues of Jescador.

READ HERE... The thoughts of the co-editor of Jescador on Freedom of Speech