Every summer, the Provincetown Independent, with funding from the Local Journalism Project, welcomes four college students who spend 10 weeks researching and writing articles for the newspaper. This summer’s group starts work on Monday. Their hometowns are Austin, Texas, Pennington, N.J., Vestal, N.Y., and Waterloo, Ontario. They have been reading the Indie, and we’ve already given them their first assignment: to come up with a list of things they want to see in person as part of understanding the Outer Cape and being reporters here. We’ll ask them to compare that list to one they’ll make at the end of the summer about what matters most here.
Working with young people is a pleasure and a central part of our larger purpose in building a high-quality news organization: we need critical, literate students to help sustain the ethical practice of journalism. They will be digging up documents and history, fact-checking, and questioning assumptions.
We have from time to time worked with younger students, too, from our middle and high schools. Maybe that’s why several readers sent us copies of a recent New York Times article about the Long Island kids who started The Ditch Weekly, an “unexpected print publication from members of a digital generation.” The headline was “They’re 15. Wait Until You Read Their Newspaper.”
They are writing about the Hamptons, a “playground for the superrich,” but they are bored by celebrities. Working on the paper, 15-year-old reporter Ellis Rattray said, “I learned so much about the town I live in.” The Weekly has reported on how local businesses manage to stay open during the off-season along with police news and interviews.
The Times article implies that these kids have little adult help, but it turns out that Ellis’s father is owner and editor of the East Hampton Star. Clearly, they have a good model in their community and mentors when they need them. The Independent would like to do something similar here.
Nauset Regional High School has no newspaper, but its students have important things to say. That was clear in last week’s report on the school administration’s decision not to renew drama teacher Ian Hamilton’s contract. The school does have a video production class that puts out a weekly news show, but we reported last year that the teacher in charge said serious reporting was never the goal of the program. Occasionally, she said, students would want to do a story that might make the school not look so good. “I would always say that we can’t do that,” she said. “I’d tell them, ‘We need to make it a little more fluffy.’ ”
The Local Journalism Project is advertising for an experienced editor to work with us and with local high school students to learn newspaper reporting, editing, and production. The news from Long Island is encouraging. “I hear a lot of, ‘Print is dying,’ ” Ellis told the Times. But “despite industry headwinds, The Ditch Weekly is ‘very profitable,’ said Charlie Stern, the paper’s chief financial officer.” Charlie is 17.
