High-school newspapers and student journalists have been a tradition in Williamsburg.
School papers have figured prominently in popular culture, too, including in Jeanette Walls’s memoir The Glass Castle, which was made into a movie and released earlier this year.
Now, student reporters are something of a dying breed.
In the past few years, most high schools in the Williamsburg area have either moved their student newspapers to an online publication or stopped publishing one altogether.
This change has come as a result of lack of student interest, according to Arletha Dockery, Bruton High School’s principal.
Student papers disappearing
Of the nine schools in greater Williamsburg, only four — or less than 50 percent — still have a student newspaper, according to school officials. Just a few years ago, eight of the nine schools produced a student paper.
Bruton High School stopped printing its paper in 2014, Dockery said.
The Warhill High School newspaper, The Lion’s Den, stopped publishing in 2015.
Walsingham Academy stopped its student paper, The Shield, as far back as 2001, according to Principal Corrie Bishop.
Walsingham’s newspaper had been almost 20 years old, with the oldest known edition printed in 1986, according to Bishop; the paper had been published three times a year, but interest dropped around the start of the new millennium.
Another school had a similar experience.
“We struggled to create interest in journalism for quite a few years,” said Whitney Cataldo, principal of Grafton High School.
Only two schools in the area still publish in print: York High School’s newspaper, The Talon, and Jamestown High School’s paper, The Eagle Eye.
Jamestown also has an online version, which is what only two other schools in the area offer. Lafayette High School and Tabb High School both offer online-only student newspapers.
In fact, one school official cited the embrace of digital as a positive development.
“The shift from print to online publishing has freed us dramatically to focus more on news writing and less on technical layout skills,” said Michele Newcomb, assistant principal at Lafayette High School.
Another school had a different take.
At Jamestown High School, only around 50 percent of people at the school actually read the paper — and most of the readers are teachers, according to Dr. Catherine Worley, the school’s principal.
Overarching positive effects
Still, a 2008 report by the Newspaper Association of America Foundation suggests high-school journalists benefit from the experience they gain.
Students who worked on school newspapers had higher grade-point averages and higher scores on standardized testing such as the ACT, the report said.
Almost half of student journalists were also enrolled in advanced placement, accelerated or honors courses. These students also had better writing and grammar skills in college than those who hadn’t worked on school papers, according to the report.
One former high-school journalist echoed this view.
“I have a lot of fond memories from journalism class,” said Journee Dandridge, who worked on Warhill’s The Lion’s Den.
Dandridge wrote for The Lion’s Den for three years and the experience helped her realize that her opinion mattered; it also gave her life skills, she said.
“It definitely taught me how important deadlines are and that procrastination always affects me negatively,” she added. “I learned how to interact with people more comfortably, how to formally write, how to formulate my thoughts clearly.”
Reporting contributed by Tom Davis.
