Weekly Scroll for March 16: Walkout Edition

News, tips and advice from and about Quill and Scroll International Honor Society for High School Journalists

The Lede:

Walk Hard.

This week’s fusillade of national news has still been dominated by the #marchforourlives movement orchestrated by teenagers in response to the mass shooting and the 17 lives lost at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School earlier this year. Here’s a roundup of how some Quill and Scroll charter schools covered the walkout:

This is just a sampling of all the coverage that student-journalists did this week. If you’d like your coverage included in the next Weekly Scroll, please email Executive Director Jeff Browne.

Disciplined.

Meanwhile, students at this Kansas City, Missouri, school were disciplined for participating in the walkout.

It’s an Honor:

Be A Mentor. You’re never too young.

From Roxann Elliott of the Journalism and Women’s Symposium, a plea for female journalists of all ages to be mentors in their newsrooms.

Get it delivered.

You know you can have the Weekly Scroll emailed to you every week, right? Do it, and save yourself a click or two. You’ll also get an email to every news story posted on our site. And with the spring magazine deadlines approaching, we’ll have lots of content just like Roxann’s story.

News Media Evaluation time is coming.

Quill and Scroll will make its News Media Evaluation service available April 1 on this website. Over the past two years, our Board of Directors and our executive director have been working closely with each other and with the Journalism Education Association to make all of our evaluation/critique services more useful to student-journalists and their advisers. We’re proud of the instrument we have created, and it will be available in just a few more weeks. Stay tuned.

Adviser scholarship applications open.

Advisers in active Quill and Scroll chapters have until April 15 to apply for the Lester G. Benz Memorial Scholarship for College Journalism Study. All high school journalism teachers, and newspaper and yearbook advisers who have had at least six semester hours of journalism courses; a minimum of four years teaching experience and advising school publications; currently teaching a journalistic writing class; and a definite commitment to return to the high school classroom and publication advising next year to apply the information gained in the coursework taken as a result of this scholarship. The scholarship program’s objective is to identify and reward experienced journalism teachers and publication advisers (as defined above) who seek the opportunity to upgrade their journalism skills, teaching methodologies and advising techniques.

What’s Viral?

“Abhorrent”? Or just having fun?

Does it bother you when the U.S. president, in front of members of the military, points at the media and calls us “fake news?” Well, it bothered a former Navy admiral, who said President Trump’s speech was “abhorrent.” Check out this Twitter thread after the president’s Tuesday address to Marines.

Watch Facebook Watch.

Facebook announced this week that it will launch a news channel on Facebook Watch and that it will work with established news producers for content. Is this Mark Zuckerberg’s payback for all the fake and misleading troll-produced and bot-supported fake news we’ve been flooded with? Will Facebook’s programmers figure out a way to keep this venture from being overtaken by Russian troll farms and Macedonian fakers? As the president might say: “We’ll see what happens.”

Harnessing the Power of Facebook Live.

Speaking of Facebook, if you haven’t read Erica Hernandez’s initial Digital Quill post on using Facebook Live in your newsroom, now’s the time.

Just a Thought:

White men and guns.

Why are white men stockpiling so many guns? Scientific American answers that question. Recent research says, “They’re anxious about their ability to protect their families, insecure about their place in the job market and beset by racial fears.”

How about starting a fact-checking service?

The American Press Institute has been a leader in training journalists to do more thorough fact-checking of political speech. As the 2018 political season gets underway, are you thinking about providing a fact-checking service for your readers? It’s not easy, but API can help you get started with its “Better News Project.”