Managing the news

Fifteen-year-old Brittany Morris isn’t sure what to expect when she begins editing news stories sent from high school students in the Middle East next year.

Some of the material may be hard for the Spokane Valley High School student to read. And not because of any language barrier.

“Some of them might say bad things about (America),” Morris said.

“But we cannot judge them, or change their opinion.”

Morris’ school has been selected to take part in a project called PEARL World Youth News, an international Web-based news service inspired by Daniel Pearl, the Washington Post reporter murdered by terrorists in Pakistan in 2002.

Seven schools worldwide – but in America only Spokane Valley High School – have been selected to serve as “editorial schools” for the project.

The others are in Iran, Lebanon, Uzbekistan and Pakistan.

“We’re, like, representing our country,” Morris said. “It’s just really awesome to be chosen to do that.”

Whatever the views of people quoted in the stories, Morris’ job will be to make sure the stories themselves are accurate, fair and balanced, as any professional journalist would create.On Monday, Morris and several other SVHS students began a two-day journalism workshop to learn the fundamentals of reporting, writing and editing. They discussed the elements of a news story, accuracy, attribution, objectivity, and completed exercises to fix a sentence that’s too wordy. Today, they will discuss media law and ethics.

The workshop is being taught by Spokesman-Review reporter Kevin Graman.

“Listening to him, he makes it look so easy,” Morris said. “It’s actually pretty hard.”

Like the Associated Press, and other similar news wire services, the PEARL news service will be a compilation of stories by journalists from around the globe – only PEARL journalists will be high school students. It is sponsored and funded by iEARN (International Education and Resource Network), an organization made up of 12,000 schools in 110 countries from which students and teachers collaborate on Web-based projects, and the Daniel Pearl Foundation.

Student journalists who wish to contribute to the news service will have to go through an online certification to submit stories, said Ed Gragert, executive director of iEARN. The certification process will be created in part by professionals from the New York Times and the Columbia University School of Journalism, Gragert said.

Those stories will be sent to the six editorial schools based on content. For example, the Habib Girls School in Karachi, Pakistan, will edit news stories, while the Dr. Beheshti Boys High School in Rasht, Iran, will edit entertainment stories.

Then, those schools will send the stories to Spokane Valley High School – the “managing editor” – for final editing before the stories are posted to the Web for free download by student newspapers across the world.

“This project will bring not only skills in the area of journalism to the Spokane students … it’s also going to bring a lot of responsibility,” Gragert said. “Because the school will make the final decision as to which articles will be available for downloading by school newspapers worldwide.”

The students at SVHS will not only use their journalism skills to edit stories for the PEARL international news service, but to produce their own radio station broadcast over the Internet, called Phoenix Radio.

The radio project, which will cost the school $1,000 a year to run, will feature student-produced news stories, commentaries, features and investigative reports of local and national concern to teens, said teacher Sarah Conover. Some of the content will come from PEARL.

Conover, who has worked with iEARN for several years, helped develop the PEARL and the radio station curriculums at the school.

“The media is the arena where everything happens worldwide,” Conover said. “For the students to have a chance to be involved at this level, it’s a wonderful, wonderful thing.”