Lissauer and Maddie Schutte listen to Star Tribune journalist Neal Justin speak. When Echo received a takedown request a few months later, Lissauer, Schutte, the former editors-in-chief and Echo's adviser met with Neal Justin for advice.
Law and ethics
Take down requestsIn the midst of the Black Lives Matter protests last summer, an account on Instagram called @exposingslpracists started posting anonymous accusations and stories about racist issues at Park. They posted several things about Echo pertaining to a story written in 2016. Over FaceTime, my adviser, co-editor-in-chief and the previous year's chiefs met for hours to figure out what to do about it. We ended up bringing in Neal Justin, a journalist for the Star Tribune that had come to speak with Echo earlier in the year, to talk through the issue with us. At first we decided that it was not per Echo’s policy to take down the posts as they were still factually accurate. After some time, the writer reached out saying that she was receiving hateful and threatening messages and that she no longer believed what she had written. Because of she no longer held those beliefs, the stories contained information that was factually inaccurate and were thus removed from Echo’s website.
Before the writer reached out, for the first time my morals were put at odds with my ethics. We had to think about what it would mean to censor one side of an opinion. As stressful as these couple of days were, I am so glad I had this experience as it helped me to truly understand the importance of free speech and press both in schools and across the nation. |
New Voices
The opportunities I have had because Echo is not censored or subjected to prior review feel endless. Ever since I was assigned New Voices as a presentation topic in journalism during freshman year I have struggled to understand what it would be like to not be able to cover (almost) anything. From going with a fellow staffer when she testified for the bill sophomore year to being one of two Minnesota student leaders for New Voices, I have done what I can to try to get New Voices legislation passed in Minnesota.
News literacy
During the switch to newsmagazine, I learned so much about the way we show our content. Since this format of content was new to not only our publication, but likely many of our readers, I put together a “how to read a newsmagazine" section to go with the table of contents in the first print issue. I took a single page and explained a few elements that may not be as obvious to someone who has not worked with a newsmagazine before. Hopefully, when readers open our newsmagazine it will help them to understand more of what we are doing. In future issues, I hope to do it again with different pages as there are many more elements that could be explored.
|