Inner-city high schools that publish newspapers are on the decline p.

By: M.L.Stein

EIGHTY-FIVE PERCENT of inner-city high schools still publish a newspaper but an "alarming" number of papers have folded in the past five years, according to a university study.
This should cause concern to the nation's newspapers trying to diversify staffs and create future readers in the minority communities, said the study's author, Mary Arnold, program associate for scholastic journalism at the University of Iowa's School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Of the school newspapers still being published, 38% come out only four or five times a year, 20% once a month, and 11% less than four times a year, according to the survey.
Arnold, who presented her findings at the annual convention of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) in Kansas City, sent questionnaires to a random sample of 267 metropolitan high schools last February. She received responses from the principals of 135 schools across the nation.
Arnold said the good news is that 127 schools are publishing a paper. The bad news is that of the 19 schools not publishing, 17 of the papers died in the past five years, mostly because of lack of funding for production costs. Other reasons included no qualified faculty, no money for an adviser's salary, and little student interest.
Arnold said support for high school newspapers should come from the newspaper industry and colleges and universities which seek to diversify their staffs and student bodies.
"Without some sort of help and support, most programs will continue to limp along by providing old news to disinterested students," she warned.
Arnold suggested that newspapers use as a model the Detroit Free Press journalism program under which 20 city high schools publish a page in the paper once a month. She also praised a journalist-in-residence in the Washington, D.C., public school system. Funded by the Freedom Forum of Arlington, Va., the project provides a full-time journalist to work with the school district in helping to improve its high school journalism programs.
In addition to seeking minorities on their staffs, Arnold observed, newspapers "naturally look to high school newspapers as a place that can provide one of the first opportunities for students to become regular newspaper readers."
Despite the number of high school papers still alive, Arnold said it would be "very much overstating the case to say the papers are healthy or thriving since two-thirds of them publish less than once a month and half once a quarter or less frequently . . . . The most alarming concern is whether the trend of last five years will continue."
Given the rate of closures in the past five years, she pointed out, another 135 papers or more could shut down in the next five years.
"That would mean that about one-quarter of the students in inner-city schools would not have the opportunity to read or work on the newspaper in their home schools," Arnold observed.