By Brian Anderson
San Ramon Valley Times

Oct. 3, 1999

With 2,000 newspapers coming off the press and 1,915 students walking the halls, journalism teacher Brian Barr is confident most inhabitants of California High School can track down a copy of The Californian.

But for moms and dads, discovering what's news at the San Ramon school can be nearly as challenging as rousting teen-agers out of bed on the first day of classes. Surely some crumpled scraps of the paper find their way into parents' hands, but only after being mined from the bottom of a backpack.

Barr and his 31 journalism students are working to change the way local high school news is delivered with what likely will become the San Ramon Valley Unified School District's first online student newspaper.

"I know a lot of parents are interested in what's going on," Barr said. "They seemed to kind of like the idea."

The Del Amigo Times of Del Amigo High School and Dublin High School's Gael Gazette will join The Californian in the coming weeks with online versions of their newspapers. In doing so, local students are becoming part of a nationwide movement of high school papers steering onto the information superhighway.

Start-up is finding its feet

From the Black & White at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Md., to Kailua High's Surfrider in Hawaii, student newspapers are staking a claim in the age of digital journalism.

Finding out how many high schools have online papers isn't easy. Such endeavors can be transitory, and none of the major student press associations keeps a running count.

But there is enough demand for school newspaper sites to spawn a company devoted to bringing them online.

Highwired.Net, a Cambridge, Mass.-based Internet start-up, boasts having signed up 2,880 schools from all 50 states and 43 countries.

But the site is plagued by inactivity. Of 10 listed sites from California surveyed, seven turned up either nothing or a link with the paper's name that led to the statement: "Coming soon: new online publication." Highwired.Net officials did not return calls for comment.

Even without reams of data, there is no mistaking that a trend exists, said Tom Rolnicki, executive director of the National Scholastic Press Association at the University of Minnesota.

"I don't see it as a fad at all," Rolnicki said. "I think it's going to be a commonplace alternative for students to publish as an official school medium."

School papers are making the move into cyberspace for various reasons. In this changing world of computers, many school officials believe there is a high present and future value in having technology-literate students. Others believe the thrill of fast-paced high-tech publishing is focusing attention on writing and language arts.

Grants pour in

Perhaps surprisingly, in this age of government cutbacks, high-tech costs are generally of little concern. Given the San Ramon Valley district's proximity to Silicon Valley, electronics and training are often donated. Additionally, the governor's approval in 1997 of the Digital High School Education Technology Grant Program flooded some high schools, like California High, and their districts with money for computer equipment, support and training.

Having spent a few years collecting computers and learning to use them, students and their advisers are starting to show off what they know.

Dublin High's publishing class aims to launch an online newspaper Oct. 11, said faculty adviser John Oldham. The Gael Gazette would be updated weekly, allowing for 25 issues as opposed to last year's six issues.

Not only will the Web allow students to work under more realistic, pressing deadlines, it will be vastly cheaper than publishing hard copies, Oldham said.

"Number one, it's just the emerging technology," said Oldham, whose professional background includes desktop publishing. "(And) it allows the parents contact, it allows the community contact."

Some reluctance

Still, some local schools that put out standard print newspapers are reluctant to expand online.

Bob Bronzan, deputy superintendent at the Livermore Valley Joint Unified School District, said using computer resources for electronic school newspapers would be a waste.

"If you have only 30 to 40 percent of your community with computers in their homes, you're missing 60 to 70 percent of your student population," Bronzan said. "So putting a lot of resources into that doesn't make a whole lot of sense."

Still, the district could re-examine the issue at some point, he added.

Adding to the mix are confusing press freedom issues that make some schools wary of going online. Foggy sections in First Amendment case law have long been troublesome for school districts and student-run newspapers. The issue becomes even stickier when a paper is on the Internet, said Craig Elliott, webmaster for the Mt. Diablo Unified School District.

Freedom of the press

"You get into the same sorts of issues the school districts get into trying to tell students what they can publish and what they can't publish," Elliott said. "That just extends out to the Internet. It's just another layer that we don't want to add on to the system."

Arnetta Garcin, president of the Journalism Education Association of Northern California, said some district officials are pushing student newspapers toward online editions and away from printed versions because the law could be interpreted to give authorities more control over a Web site than a printed page.

"There is quite a controversy arising from advisers throughout the state because the administrators are saying, 'We control what goes on the school-sanctioned Web or anything that's connected to our school,' " Garcin said. "We talked to the Student Press Law Center, and they said it's a gray area right now. Many administrators are taking advantage of that."

There are limitations to what can be posted on school and district Web sites in San Ramon Valley schools, but students have a great deal of freedom, said district spokesman Terry Koehne.

"The schools pretty much do their own thing," Koehne said. "We have responsible journalism teachers in place who are charged with the assuring that the whole process is an appropriate process."

None of that legal mumbo-jumbo means much to Schuyler Campbell, 16, a Cal High junior who was thinking of putting The Californian online even before Barr. The Web-savvy Schuyler said he was thinking about taking what he learned putting together his own Web site and using it to help get the school paper up and running.

When Barr asked his newspaper class at the beginning of the year who was interested in working on the project, Schuyler's hand shot up.

There's a great opportunity, Schuyler said, to improve the paper's quality and draw even more than the 60,000 people from as far away as Sweden who have visited the school's site since 1998.

"With the newspaper last year, pretty much people got them and threw them away," he said. "Now everyone will be able to see it whenever they want to. So that's another good thing."

Barr hopes to have the online edition ready to go by Nov. 1. He said it is not intended to replace the print edition, but that as a journalist, he's just keeping up with the industry standard.

"If you look at every major newspaper in the country, they're really pushing for online editions," Barr said. "It's the wave of the future for newspapers."