Paper writes story of star high school player's failure to graduate

False equivalency. As lcjjdnh noted, it's the newspaper that benefits by writing stories. It's idiotic to suggest a high schooler should have to give up a right to privacy just because he's a good football player.

My goodness, it must feel good to play "real" reporter on the prep beat. That rush a "real" reporter is worth losing your humanity over, I bet.

 

Since it's a public event, it hardly seems like a pure privacy issue. It also hardly seems like a moment of losing one's humanity. I probably wouldn't run it outside a larger context, but losing one's humanity?

Reminds me of a football coach who grew quite mad when I called to ask about him applying for another job. He said it was private thing, and that he was a finalist for but didn't get it wasn't news.

 

This is why sports gets a bad rap as being the "toy department".

"You guys never do real stories, you just go watch games and write puff pieces on how wonderful all these jocks are, but never take on any real issues like the other departments."

If you want to make the argument that high school students are too young to be exposed to public scrutiny, fine. But to be consistent then, stop putting their games and features on the cover of the sports section.

 

And I've never understood why that's a bad rap.

Prep sports are something that the newspaper covers purely as a cash grab, a way to grab eyes and entertain people. There's nothing wrong with that.

Publicizing a single kid's high school academic status isn't "taking on real issues."

False equivalence is still false.

 

Rick,

I don't agree that covering prep sports is a cash grab. Nowhere I ever worked looked at it that way. At least not any more than any other non-sports community event that got covered.

If the powers that be think it's important enough to readers to cover it, cover it. If not, blow it off. But if you're just covering the stuff inside the lines, you're not a journalist; you're like the TV people who show up, broadcast a game and then go home. Maybe some people would prefer it that way.

As I've gotten older, I've seen so many games that they all run together. I could care less that Little Johnny Bedwetter passed for 400 yards and 4 touchdowns. Or 500 yards and five touchdowns. There are far bigger stories out there and this seems to be one of them. Kids going to school for four years and not knowing enough to graduate. (Yes, I know there are larger issues out there with the tests and the formats and so forth. Those are worthy of their own stories.) Maybe the story should have been done by the education reporter instead of a sports reporter. But it's still a worthwhile story and the kind we tend to shy away from all too often.

 

The rules about what makes a "journalist" vs. "not a journalist" remind me of the old rule about defensive stats in baseball: If you come up with a defensive stat that says that Ozzie Smith was bad, you have a flawed stat.

If you have a rule that says I'm honor-bound to report the academic status of a HS kid, then you've got a flawed rule. If that's what you have to do to be a real journalist, I'm quite comfortable being a fake one.

If you want to do a story about schools not taking care of athletes academically, then do that story. But this wasn't that story.

 

Focusing on one kid not graduating and shaming him is not a public service. As for the "we cover the good, so they should take the bad"-line of thinking, I don't recall kids asking to be covered. I am pretty sure 99.9 percent of kids would still play sports if only a handful of people showed up. In fact, outside of football and basketball, not too many people care outside of athletles, coaches, and parents, anyway.

There is nothing wrong with sports being the "toy department." It is different than covering regular news, unless prep reporters wear a dress shirt and tie to everything they cover instead of a polo and jeans. Embrace the fact it's different. The one's who think it should be exactly like news department seem to not understand sport's role in society in the first place.

 

While that is not my comment, I made one similar to that, and Drop, which I often agree with your opinion, I think the phrase "idiotic" is a little harsh.

A paper benefits from every story it runs, doesn't matter what it is, and I would argue that what we do as reporters is "real" reporting."

I think especially in this case, where the kid is good enough that he'd likely be high D-I if he had the grades, the story is legit.

Just my opinion.

Unsure on the placement though. I would have put it it in sports unless the editor wanted it on the front.

It's too bad we got so far into this discussion thinking it was on A-1.

Stitch: The kids chose to be covered by choosing to play athletics. (Yeah, a little weak, but it's true). I have only once had a kid ask me not to take a picture of her, and that's because she was a seventh-grader in business club who had been in a solo photo the week before and felt guilty, because the other kids worked hard too (true story).

Here's the example I draw the good/bad reasoning from.

Kid was one of the leading rushers in the area, led his small-town team to the sectional playoffs.

Got arrested for urinating outside the school. Met all the standards for publication in police logs. Got pulled out into a separate, because he would be suspended for the first playoff game.

That is slightly different from this, but still, in my opinion, legit.

 

A crime isn't the same as an academic failure.

The community has an interest (not the same as "being interested") in knowing about crimes committed in the community. Academic failures are not the same as crimes.

But personally, I'd put that in news and not sports.

 

It's MUCH different. For starters, not graduating high school on time is not a crime. A shame, certainly, but it's not an issue that requires the intervention of law enforcement. Secondly, your guy got suspended for a playoff game, which directly affects both his and his team's athletic short-term future. This guy not graduating on time does not affect his post-high school plans. He could still pass the final test in the summer. He is far from the first athlete to be forced to graduate in the summer. He will certainly not be the last.

Put another way: The NCAA and the media make a big deal of poor graduation rates at college athletic programs. The Academic Progress Rate punishes schools that don't keep enough of their athletes in school, and UConn basketball won't be in the postseason this season as a result. But how many stories do you see about individual college athletes not graduating? Maybe you'll see a story about someone who leaves early and never gets his degree, especially if they're extremely prominent. Every once in a while you'll see stories (or just bulletin board buzz) about big-time college athletes who stop going to class after their season ends, though that's usually because they thing it's a strong leading indicator that said athletes are leaving for the draft. But Joe Blow didn't graduate on time stories at that level are very rare.

This isn't a toy department/good news or no news argument. This is "why is this a story?" If it doesn't affect his athletic future, why does anyone care? What is gained out of running the story? Does it actually further an issue, or is it gratuitous and gossipy for the sake of snagging readers, all at the expense of a kid who has been open with his academic struggles and who has apparently experienced a lot of heartache in the last year?

But on the other hand, if you write the story, you get to brag to your newspaper buddies that you are a Very Serious Journalist and you refuse to engage in the dumbing down of America, instead writing an Important Story that proves you are quite above the simpleton worldview of the dummies in sports that write about fun and games instead of providing Probing and Intellectual Coverage.

 

If this happened in affluent area the kids parents would be suing the school and paper for violation his FERPA rights.

 

Rick: My approach would be that if the kid was not a sports star, you would just use it in the logs.

But because it means he's going to be visibly absent from a playoff game, it merits sports.

I do not remember where the paper played it.