Cieslik-Miskimen Podcast: The Birth of High School Journalism

For the 128th episode of the Journalism History podcast, researcher Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen describes how student newspapers became prominent parts of the American high school experience in the early 1900s.

Transcript 

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Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: The real tension in the 1920s is how much control to give the students, because creating an authentic product would hopefully result in higher sales.

Ken Ward: Welcome to Journalism History, a podcast that rips out the pages of your history books to reexamine the stories you thought you knew, and the ones you were never told.

Teri Finneman: I’m Teri Finneman, and I research media coverage of women in politics.

Nick Hirshon: And I’m Nick Hirshon, and I research the history of New York sports.

Ken Ward: And I’m Ken Ward, and I research the journalism history of the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains. And together, we’re professional media historians guiding you through our own drafts of history. Transcripts of the show are available online at journalism-history.org/podcast.

High school newspapers have long been, for many aspiring journalists –

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– a first chance to give journalism a try. In many ways, today’s high school newspapers look a lot like their professional counterparts. But as today’s guest explains, that hasn’t always been the case. In this episode, we talk about how journalism became integrated into American high schools in the early 1900s, with Dr. Caitlin Cieslik Miskimen, assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Media at the University of Idaho. She walks us through the origins of high school journalism and the adaptations it underwent in its early years, an era in which collegiate journalism was itself growing, and journalism as a whole was undergoing professionalization.

Caitlin, welcome to the show. So, why don’t you start by telling us –

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– what brought you to research high school newspapers? It seems like an interesting choice of topic.

Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: Yeah, so it was actually one of those moments where I was sitting in a seminar taught by an education historian at the University of Wisconsin, William Reese, and he had an aside in class about how much he loved looking at high school yearbooks and student print culture. And, and this was a seminar broadly focused on education history, but his area of specialty was really the Progressive Era and early 20th century. And, you know, being a media historian, I kind of took that as, you know, as a gentle nudge to, for me, to start looking at the world of student print culture. So, while I was in that seminar, I started exploring, you know, kind of what materials existed in the way of high school student newspapers in the 1920s and from that, really started to find a lot of really rich materials.

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Um, both in terms of the variety of high school newspapers that were saved but then also materials from the University of Wisconsin, which ran a high school – they ran a program targeted toward high school journalism and printing instructors in the 1920s and the 1930s. So I also had access to materials from that era, with the advice that was given to the people in charge of instructing these students. So I really enjoyed looking at that in the seminar, and when it came time to start pulling together my dissertation, I was really interested in questions about print culture in communities, and notions of identity. Um, particularly, particularly at a point in time that might be seen as a turning point. Uh, so I was interested in the 1920s, because for the places I was studying, it was sort of this time where smaller cities were trying to really articulate and achieve these very urban aspirations.

So I felt that I couldn’t really capture –

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  – the mood of print culture especially in conversations about the future, if I didn’t look at the materials that kind of the future itself was creating. Uh, so, not just what were newspapers and kind of institutional media saying about its future but what were students saying. And how were students kind of articulating their own aspirations, but also trying to navigate a decade that really saw a lot of change when we talk about things like youth culture and coming of age, and, and the concept of, you know, what, what it means to be a teenager in a more modern society.

Ken Ward:  Sure. So, you get to the 1920s eventually. What, what was it that led to the start of high school journalism, right? ‘Cause if I remember, right, from your research, it starts a little bit earlier than that. Why did high school journalism start spreading in the early 1900s?

Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: Um, yeah, so, high school journalism exist – so it’s, it really depends on what we count as high school journalism. Uh, you know, if we look at, you know, if we take a very –

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  – broad view and we’re looking at kind of any material produced by high schoolers regardless of its content. So, if we look at, you know, more of, like, these literary journals, those had been produced by high schools dating back to the 19th century. Um, what happens in the early 20th century and really starts to spread in the 1920s is the confluence of a couple of things. So number one, just simply, more students start going to high school in the 1920s. Enrollments really start to increase across the board. Um, so before that, high school had really been an experience that was saved for the children of the elite. It wasn’t really an educational experience that many students got to partake in.

But in the 1920s, more students start going to school, so enrollments themselves are expanding. So that’s kind of trend number one. Trend number two is that, quite simply, it gets cheaper to produce print products. There’s cheaper printing presses that are available. A lot of – 

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 – high schools initially had their own in the 1920s, and then also, from a pedagogical standpoint, newspapers really provided high school administrators and, and high school advocates with a practical application of some of the skills that students were learning in the classroom. So for a lot of high school administrators, they saw that backing a student newspaper would provide their students with the opportunity to put into practice things they were learning in English classes, or things they were learning in civics classes. So, it was sort of this, you know, practical application of some of these more theoretical concepts.

And then I would just say the kind of fourth thing that contributes to just really this, this rapid rise in the number of high school newspapers in the 1920s is this push toward vocational education, as well. Um, so as more schools start to integrate things like trade schools, um –

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 – or they start to integrate these trade programs, you know, we think of, like, shop classes or woodworking classes or auto classes, a fair number of high schools also had printing classes. So it was a way to combine, again, those English-style classes and civic-style classes with those, that hands-on vocational training.

Ken Ward: Sure. So, you mention that one of the purposes of, of this, of high school newspapers was, was sort of pedagogical, right? We can use these as sort of a laboratory in which they can apply things from English or vocational courses. What are some of the other purposes that these schools or that these papers had for their schools? Were there other things that the high schools were trying to use them for?

Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: So, one of the other uses of the high school student newspaper was for publicity purposes. So, several high school administrators saw an opportunity to use the work that students were producing on these newspapers and treat –

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– the student newspaper as a type of publicity tactic. Um, and this was, these were recommendations that high school administrators were getting in a lot of publicity manuals that were published during 1910, the 19-teens, and the 1920s. So the thinking there was that, at a moment in time when high school administrators and advocates might be asking for more community support, especially financial support for the building of high schools, having a well-run student newspaper would provide an opportunity for the community to really see the benefit that these institutions had on the students that they served. So this was, again, kind of an opportunity to get a window into the classroom, to not only see the academic achievements of the students and the athletic achievements of the students, but also get a glimpse into this whole social world that had built up around the high school. The clubs, the organizations, the theatrical performances, the charity fundraisers.

Um, so student newspapers –

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 – were treated as this opportunity to really publicize the good work that the high school was doing in educating the next generation, and, and educating the next generation not just, again, in terms of academics, but also equipping teenagers with the characteristics and the morals that they would need in order to be good upstanding American citizens in, you know, the late-1920s and, eventually, as they became adults in the 1930s.

Ken Ward: Sure. Now, that, in my mind, raises some, some questions, because how, you know, how do you strike a balance between wanting this newspaper to promote your school, as an administrator, for instance, but then not necessarily wanting to be – I don’t know, like, what was their attitude toward managing these papers? Were they fairly hands-on or hands-off to let students do what they wanted?

Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: That is a fantastic question, and I think that’s one of the reasons that, you know, that that question –

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 – gets at one of the difficulties in studying these newspapers because we kind of know that, eventually, these newspapers become a very institutionalized part of the high school curriculum. They have teachers. They have advisers. Some of them have to go through administrative approval processes. Um, but in the 1920s, it’s another kind of interesting historical moment, because that formula isn’t fixed, yet. So, there’s a lot of debate happening among the circles of high school student newspaper advisers and journalism instructors about how much control to give students in the printshop. And as luck would have it, in my research, the student newspaper that I focused the most on which was produced at Superior Wisconsin’s Central High School, the printing instructor who oversaw the newspaper there advocated a really strict hands-off approach.

He was part of a group of printing –

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 – instructors and journalism advisers who saw that the best way to win support for the high school newspaper was to largely be absent. There was a great quote from him that he wrote in a column for other high school printing instructors about how he really saw himself only stepping in to intervene in the production of the newspaper when personal injury might occur.

Ken Ward:  [Laughs]

Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: So, he really thought that leaving, you know, letting students be in charge would allow the creation of a much more authentic product, and, you know, another part of the equation, here is that we, as newspapers, were supported, largely, through subscriptions that were sold to other students. So the concern here was that if you produced something that, you know, seemed to be too much, you know, reek too much of administrative oversight, students wouldn’t buy it. Uh, so the real tension in the 1920s is how much control to give the students, because creating an authentic product –

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  – would hopefully result in higher sales, but this hands-off approach is not necessarily the norm. There are high schools in the 1920s where there is a very strict oversight process in place from almost the beginning, but it’s really kind of this moment of experimentation where it’s not quite sure how much administration should be involved in the operations of a newspaper, how much control they should have over content.

Um, and in some cases, you can find these newspapers where students were really given free run to publish the things they wanted to publish and to criticize the teachers that they wanted to criticize. In the case of Superior, Wisconsin, the students often critiqued the decisions made by the school board in the pages of their newspaper. So, they can become these really interesting spaces to see a different perspective on the events of the 1920s unfold but again, it’s really a case-by-case basis.

Ken Ward: Well, so you mentioned that these –

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  – newspapers, at least some of them, early on, relied on subscriptions for support. Uh, and you gave the example, I think it was one of those Superior newspapers, of a paper that went from only 250 student subscribers early on to 1,105, which represented about 85 percent of the student body was a paying subscriber to the newspaper. That’s uh, that’s incredible, right? To me, that sounds really remarkable for a news publication. So, what did these papers look like? Like, you mentioned some of the criticism they may have contained. What were the actual, you know, what would you see when you opened one up?

Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: Yeah, well again, it’s really interesting because when papers start to be a much more common feature of the high school experience, they really look more like I wanna call ’em almost like your colonial-era pamphlet. You know, they’re four pages. They’re very crude in terms of –

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 – their layout. They are jampacked with text. There is not a lot differentiating one story from the next. In the case of a lot of these high schools, the newspapers started as an extracurricular activity. There wasn’t a formal education program tied to it, so the content of it was very much determined by whatever student group was in charge. Um, so, often, it would be a rotating. There would be one student group who would run it for one semester, and then another student group would run it for another semester, and it would really vary quite widely from semester to semester.

Uh, but really quickly, the newspaper kinda starts to settle into a much more professional-looking product by the mid-1920s. Um, so if you were to open up a paper in, you know, 1924-1925, you would see something that looked very similar to whatever the local paper was in the town where these student newspapers were produced. You would see a well-designed –

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– newspaper flag at the top with the name of the publication. There would be a clear priority of front-page stories, different headline sizes, illustrations, photographs you know, depending on the budget of the school. Clear sections. There would be, typically, an opinion page where there would be student editorials as well as letters to the editor interior pages would have special sections for news from clubs and organizations. And then there would typically be a full page or so devoted to athletics. Um, and, and they really looked like professional products.

And we know that in some of these newsrooms, you know, as high school journalism instruction became much more formalized, the student newspaper, newsroom started to mimic the professional practices of a regular newsroom. Students had beats. There were different editors of different sections. There was a management structure that reflected a newspaper management structure. There was an editor in chief.

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There was typically a managing editor, someone in charge of advertising sales, someone in charge of subscription sales so it really becomes, you know, a bureaucratized, a mini-bureaucratized environment.

Ken Ward: Well, I’m glad you mentioned the rise of, like, college journalism and structure, because I was really interested, from your research, to learn a little bit about the attitude of some, at least some, college journalism professors toward these high school newspapers, right? Like, when I think of a high school newspaper, I think, “Oh, of course, that’s a good laboratory,” but to train journalists, right? To try and spark interest in journalism and get them to continue on the road to a career. And while I don’t think college journalism professors were against that idea, they certainly seemed to cast doubt on the ability of these high school newspapers to train journalists. Can you talk about that a little bit?

Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: Yeah, that was a really fascinating –

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I wasn’t expecting to stumble on this debate in the research that I was doing, but it kind of made sense, because the rise of high school journalism coincides with the establishment of journalism programs at the university level. You know, we know that university-level instruction for journalism started in the late-19th century. Schools of journalism were being founded in the early 20th century. More and more universities were adopting them as the decades wore on. So there was really this struggle to articulate what the role of high school journalism was versus college journalism. So, what I found was that for some college journalism instructors, there was this effort to keep high school journalism in a box, more or less.

To treat it as a good introduction to journalism but to really set the stage for why, then, high school students needed to pursue journalism at the college level.

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So one of the places where I saw this play out was within the Central Interscholastic Press Association, which was housed at the University of Wisconsin, and then eventually moved to the University of Minnesota. Several of the individuals who were associated with that who are some of the founders of college journalism education, like Willard Bleyer, were very careful to dismiss high school journalists. Uh, and, and again, try to really sell them on the value of a college education. So there was this fear that high school students, if they were in a newsroom that felt too professional or if they were getting too much journalism instruction at the high school level, that they would feel that they were prepared to be journalists, and they would not pursue journalism education at the college level.

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 So there is this real struggle to articulate what education a journalist needed and where that education should occur. We were particularly concerned that high school journalists, again, would see themselves as being well-trained enough to start in the field of journalism, and that they would actually not have the maturity, they would not have the worldliness, they wouldn’t have you know, a really strong basis in a liberal arts education that Bleyer and others believed that journalists needed to have. And the only place to have that was within a college setting.

Ken Ward: Interesting. So that, I think it’s really interesting, and I think that that raises a question in my mind, which is, why isn’t there more research done about high school journalism? And this question gets brought up about collegiate journalism, as well, but why does this sort of scholastic journalism, newspapers, in this era or another, why don’t we pay more attention to them?

Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: I think there’s a couple of things that are happening. Um, so I think one of the issues is that question of control. You know, if we look at high school journalism in the ’40s, ’50s –

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  – ’60s, and ’70s, we’re really looking at a product that is very closely tied to an institution. And by that point in time, there is a lot of instructional oversight. So, the question there becomes, you know, if you’re looking at these print products, how much are you looking at what a student thinks versus what an institution thinks? Or how much are you looking at work created by students to please someone else who is in charge or in a position of power? Um, and so I think that makes it really tricky to look at these, because it’s hard to disentangle the motivations of the students producing them from the motivations of the individuals who, for better or for worse, you know, funded these programs and made sure they had a place in the school.

And there’s just not a lot of records that exist that give us insight into some of the curriculum decisions that were made at the high school level and debates around instruction of journalism. I think one of the other reasons –

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 – that we tend not to look at high school newspapers is that, you know, at least within the field of education history, the student experience has been something that has been largely deprioritized in favor of studying questions related to the institutions themselves, bigger questions about curriculum development. And, and recently, a lot of historians have been making strides in trying to look at the student experience and to kind of resurrect the voices of students, but it’s been more of a top-down versus a, you know, a bottoms-up look at how education plays out in the United States. And I think that is, you know, that’s not something unique to education history.

Communication history, journalism history, we all struggle with trying to centralize the voices of the readers or, or look at the audience. And it can be really tricky to look at, you know, the people who these products were created for because we do tend to be limited a bit by –

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 – what we can find available in archives. But I’d really encourage anyone, especially anyone looking at questions of, of power – even in interesting alternative media outlets and kind of underground publications – to take a look at student publications. Because the other really neat thing about student print media is, yes, there’s sort of this institutional overlay, but high school students are high school students. And, uh –

Ken Ward:        [Laughs]

Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: – if, if, if you’re lucky and you can read between the lines, you know, there are very subversive jokes that get through publication, that can find themselves in newspapers.

Uh, high school yearbooks are a fascinating sight where you can see both an institutional narrative clash with an alternative narrative. If you have the time to look through annotations in yearbooks and see, you know, what were the memories that people wrote when they, when they wrote autographs to one another. I did have a chance to look at some high school –

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 – yearbooks, and the version of high school present in these yearbooks, if you just looked at how people signed each other’s yearbooks, was very different. There were a lot more parties, uh –

Ken Ward:  [Laughs]

Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: – present in these yearbooks than the official institutional record would have you believe. They are a tricky product to make sense of because they do have kind of all of these intervening forces. Um, but they are, like I said, they’re worthwhile because, you know, as we start to think especially about these questions of power, these questions about control, advancing narratives, we don’t just have a world of, you know, we don’t just have a world of readers who are 18 years and older.

 There’s a lot of people consuming media at a much younger age, and, and I think we would all do well to look at how they experienced media and how they experienced things like newspapers by taking a look at where they first encountered, you know, newspapers and journalism, and where this instruction all began.

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Ken Ward: Well, that’s an excellent point. And unfortunately, we’re running short on time, and so, I think we should get this last question in, ’cause I really wanna hear your opinion on it. We ask all of our guests: Why, in your opinion, does journalism history matter?

Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: I’ve listened to the podcast and everyone always seems to have such wonderful things to say, and, and, and I knew you were going to ask this and now I feel intimidated. I feel – I believe really strongly that journalism history matters because, in order to really appreciate the role that journalism in all its forms plays in society, I think we need to have a really rich and deep understanding of the, the various roles that journalism has played in the past.

There’s lots of really brilliant journalism historians have argued that journalism itself is this ever-evolving entity, and newspapers are these things that evolve, you know, in response to their environment.

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But I think, you know, especially as we get fixated on what’s next in this current moment, it’s really hard to make those judgments, but also without a sense of what happened in the past. And I would just add that the other thing that I think is really important to understand about journalism history is if we can think about all the ways that people have used these different platforms and the different roles that they’ve served, then we can also really have a much better understanding of the role that journalism plays in our current lives and what we’re at risk of losing as we have to grapple with different environmental changes and resource constraints in the present media market.

Ken Ward: Absolutely. Well, Caitlin, we’re out of time, but I just wanna thank you one more time for being on the show. I really enjoyed our conversation.

Caitlin Cieslik-Miskimen: Great, it was so great to speak with you today.

Ken Ward: Well, that’s it for this episode. Thanks for tuning in, and be sure to subscribe to our podcast. You can also follow us on Twitter, @jhistoryjournal – that’s all one word.

Until next time, I’m your host, Ken Ward, signing off with the words of –

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 – Edward R. Murrow: good night and good luck.