Unfortunately, student newspapers are increasingly rare. A national found that fewer than half of high schools had student newspapers in 2021, down from almost two-thirds a decade earlier. The situation is even worse in New York City, the so-called media capital of the world, which must fully implement its “Portrait of a Graduate” framework by the 2029-30 school year. A found only 27% of the city’s 400-plus public high schools had a student newspaper — and that number was even lower among schools serving high-poverty communities and those with the lowest graduation rates. 

For five years, the nonprofit I lead, Press Pass NYC, has been addressing this gap by training teachers to advise student-led news teams, both online and in print. We’ve partnered with more than 40 schools across the city, launching brand-new news teams or revitalizing those that may have closed or had trouble getting off the ground. 

Because newspapers are no longer so visible or easily obtained as they were when New Yorkers used to leave them on buses and subways, many teens have never seen one until joining a news team. I realized this when I visited schools to watch how the teachers and students are working together. I got a few bewildered looks when I asked some students what kind of artwork or photo they thought should go with their articles. But as a former reporter, I was thrilled to see how much they love journalism when they realize what they can do with it.

Middle and high school students spent last year writing about controversial new policies like the city’s school phone ban. At one school in Chinatown, an editorial against the ban revealed that for students to use during class. A student at a Queens high school told me how interviewing people for an article on immigration taught him that writing a news article is different from an opinion piece. “ This is this person’s life, this is their story and you’re listening and you’re resonating,” he explained, with reverence. 

A Bronx River High School student, Lathania Williams, won a for teen journalism for her report on the impact of immigration enforcement on her community. “I didn’t know my voice could reach that far, or that I had power in my writing,” she said. The news team at a school in Brooklyn that a school lockdown had been caused by immigration enforcement agents (it wasn’t). One student who works on the publication said the article, “let people know what actually really happened instead of the lie or the rumor.”

At a time when 84% of U.S. teens have a of journalism, student newsrooms create a source of accurate local news, showing the whole school community the difference between journalism and the unvetted information kids get from social media. In the process, students learn through a collaborative workplace driven by a shared mission with deadlines and standards — the same type of skills “Portrait of a Graduate” standards will be looking for.

St is far more complicated than simply finding a teacher willing to advise one. An effective adviser must understand journalistic ethics, interview skills, audience engagement, newsroom management and the legal and editorial responsibilities that come with student journalism. Those professional skills cannot be acquired through a weekend workshop. And while artificial intelligence can help a student brainstorm questions or polish a headline, it can’t substitute for an adviser who knows when a source needs to be corroborated, when publishing could put a student at risk or when an administrator is improperly trying to influence editorial decisions.

Building those skills requires sustained professional development, practice and support. My colleague Lara Bergen, who founded Press Pass NYC five years ago, learned this the hard way. A former teacher, she had started a student newspaper at her New York City public high school and was thrilled to see how well it engaged her students. But she had zero training in journalism, and that limited what she could accomplish. Her solution was to create a three-year, in-depth Journalism Adviser Fellowship for teachers, a cohort model where teachers learn together from experienced journalism educators. 

This type of training is essential for a school-based newsroom to last. Unlike core subjects, very few states license teachers specifically to teach journalism. In most places, including New York, the subject is folded into the English Language Arts curriculum, which means an ELA teacher can get handed a newspaper or yearbook to advise with no real journalism training. Because requirements differ widely by location, the Journalism Education Association offers a designation for teachers to prove they are highly qualified.

For student journalism to help prepare the next generation of citizens, schools have to stop treating the person running the newsroom as just another teacher with room in his or her schedule. Journalism advising deserves professional preparation and ongoing support, and schools must treat advisers with the same respect as any other educator. That means building journalism into teacher credentialing, funding the sustained training that advising requires and counting the work of a student newsroom as evidence that a graduate can think critically, communicate clearly and engage as a citizen.

Just as the technology has rewired the relationship between young writers-in-training and their teachers, it has also changed how student journalists and their editors work together — or, in some cases, don’t. 

And AI has created headaches for these journalists that mirror those afflicting their professional peers, with school newsrooms struggling to figure out how to respond.

As with their schools more broadly, student newsrooms have spent these years deploying surveillance software and, in many cases, drafting zero-tolerance policies for AI. Different newsrooms have developed different answers to the same basic question: How much do we trust teenagers to not let a chatbot do their work? 

����Ӱ�� spoke recently to three student journalists from three very different newsrooms about their experiences:

• Cid Frydman, a rising senior at Berkeley High School in California, who writes for the ;
• Veronica Mollod, a rising senior and current events editor at , the student newspaper at the High School of American Studies at Lehman College in the Bronx, N.Y.;
• Tova Weiss, a recent high school graduate in Ann Arbor, Mich., who has split her time between Pioneer High School and . Weiss has written and edited for the and , a publication written by and for Jewish teens.

Here are eight-and-a-half ways — including one counterintuitive, not-for-attribution observation — in which AI is changing their realities:

1. In a few schools, AI has overturned the culture of newspapers.

Frydman, the Berkeley student, said strict AI use policies at her publication have bred resentment among student writers. 

“I think a lot of the people higher up on my paper, and in journalism in general, don’t have a lot of trust in writers anymore, especially with so many AI resources that are out there,” she said. 

Editors are “very harsh on writers” over worries that they’ll use AI, keeping strict controls over documents, she said. They’ll poke around writers’ search histories and analyze their typing speed and word choices, matching drafts to previous work. 

“It’s very strict when you put it all together,” Frydman said. “They don’t have a lot of faith in our ability to actually produce real journalism, and so just assume the worst automatically, which can be a little frustrating when you’re just trying to do your best as a writer.”

At the Berkeley High newspaper, staffers have been let go over suspected AI use. 

Frydman sees the high cost of such heavy-handed policies: “We’re here because we love journalism,” she said. “We’re here to write about things that we’re hopefully passionate about, and the heavy approach of ‘There’s no tolerance whatsoever,’ and not even giving writers the grace and the trust to make their own decisions and do this work on their own — just minding it and monitoring it so heavily, I think it’s very discouraging.”

More broadly, getting caught using AI to write academic assignments carries weighty consequences, she said. You’re unable to get a letter of recommendation from any teacher, Frydman said. 

And a single infraction travels fast: Get caught using AI once, she said, and teachers will tell all of their colleagues “to watch out because this student has used AI before — they might use it in your class.”

2. AI is changing how — and how much — students write.

Frydman said she’s adopting what’s basically a minimalist approach to writing these days, holding back details so she doesn’t draw suspicion from editors or teachers. 

Though she doesn’t use AI for writing, she said, “A lot of times, I find myself sort of slimming down my writing to not go so into detail on things because it’ll be suspected to be something that’s not original. You don’t have a lot of room to be creative in this process, so it’s definitely been a little challenging.”

Ann Arbor’s Weiss said she’s also seeing many young journalists “adjust their writing voice” to avoid being flagged as relying on AI. Many students, she said, now intentionally add typos to their writing to support its legitimacy. “It’s absolutely devastating to watch how many people are intentionally damaging or diminishing the quality and authenticity of their work,” she said. 

At Berkeley High, school-issued Chromebooks are locked down to block access to ChatGPT, Claude and other major AI tools outright — and any attempt to reach them gets flagged. “It notifies the teacher through this program that we have called Go Guardian, which is embedded into a lot of the Chromebooks, where they can sort of see what you’re doing and be able to call you out on it,” Frydman said.

3. A few newsrooms are writing AI policies.

At Youth Environmental Press Team, where Weiss is an editor, staffers have been talking “in pretty much every director’s meeting” about the implications and problems surrounding AI. “We are an environmental publication, which means a lot of us are very climate-conscious.”

The environmental impacts of AI data centers are a cause of great concern, Weiss said.

After fielding a wave of questions from reporters, the publication developed formal guidelines rather than instituting an outright ban on AI. “It was always very clear for us that we would not publish or even entertain the idea of publishing anything that was written by a chatbot or any kind of generative AI,” Weiss said. But they soon got queries from reporters asking if they could use AI for outlining, for formatting statistics, for interview transcriptions and the like.

The policy that emerged prohibits AI-written and AI-edited work, including work that heavily uses tools like Grammarly. But transcription services and basic spell-check are still allowed. 

The organization, she said, wants to make writing “as accessible as possible so people can have their work published — but not if that means it’s not really their work, and especially not if that’s at the cost of the environment.” 

4. Other newsrooms rely on experience and vibes.

Weiss helped craft the formal AI policy at the environmental journal. At jGirls+ Magazine, by contrast, she said there’s no written policy. But in practice the standard is clear: Submissions and even staff applications that appear to be AI-generated are not accepted. In one case, she recalled, an obviously AI-written editorial board application — with a stiff style that lacked personal voice — tested with an AI detector as 100% AI, “which was really something none of us had expected.”

Weiss said AI detectors should be used only “when there is already prior reason to suspect something might have been AI generated” — a student with a track record of misusing AI, for instance, or because something just simply reads a little “off.”

5. In most cases, AI detectors are widely seen as unreliable.

Weiss described a tiered system in the environmental outlet’s workflow, with writers operating on an “honor system” but with student editors flagging “sketchy” pieces such as those that are missing statistical sources or those that quote dubious ones — or writing that doesn’t sound like a typical teenager’s.

“The thing about student voices is typically each writer has a distinctive style of writing,” she said. “We’re high schoolers: We have typos, we make mistakes in there. And if we’re finding something that’s void of personal style or just generally reads in a way that doesn’t seem like it was written by a student, we’re going to look into that further.” 

But she and others worry that using an AI detector could unfairly flag strong writing as suspicious simply because it’s polished — a phenomenon that happens more than you’d think in many schools, Weiss suggested.

AI detectors aren’t really reliable, said Frydman, the Berkeley senior, “so even if you write something really well, it’ll just automatically assume that it might be AI and your writing will get flagged, which has happened to a lot of my friends.” 

6. A few simple rules can keep AI from taking over, journalists say.

Mollod, the New York City journalist, said a somewhat arcane editing rule at her publication basically serves to help keep AI-generated content at bay: At Common Sense, every article is required to include a quote from a student in each grade level — a structural feature that makes it hard for AI to intrude, since students typically remember what they’ve said to a reporter. 

7. In a few cases, teachers are using AI more than students.

The journalists described several instances in which teachers, not students, were the ones turning to AI, relying on the technology to formulate lesson plans, create assignments and grade them.

One student who asked not to be quoted directly spoke of a teacher who “will just copy and paste straight off of Chat GPT or Claude, and just give us assignments that are so clearly AI that it’s ridiculous.”

Others rely on it for grading assignments, which “leads to a lot of people getting unfair grades, because AI can mess up,” said the student.

The more teachers rely on the technology, “the easier it is to just forget that you’re there for a reason, you’re trying to do your job for a reason — and AI should not be teaching kids Spanish or English or math or anything like that. It can’t reproduce real thinking. So it’s definitely a little dystopian.”

8. For many students, refusing AI isn’t a school rule. It’s personal.

Weiss, the Ann Arbor writer, said she has never used Open AI’s popular ChatGPT, due to environmental concerns over data centers as well as personal concerns over AI more broadly. “It just does not align with my morals at all,” she said. 

But casual AI use has become normalized among many of her peers, she said, with students openly saying, sometimes within earshot of teachers, that they ran an assignment through a chatbot the night before it was due.

The best way to fight AI, she said, is basically to boycott it. “The strongest way anyone can combat artificial intelligence is just by refusing to have anything to do with it,” she said.

While AI-generated writing more broadly can damage the way that people learn and is worth thinking about, Mollod said, she’s not sure that it has gotten to the point where “just everyone is just cheating, and no one’s really actually taking their work seriously.”

She reads the coverage and believes most people who don’t spend time in schools overestimate how much teens use AI. “People not in school are like, ‘Well, I didn’t have this great tool. If I had it, I wouldn’t have done anything,’” she said. But relying on the technology, which showed up in the middle of her eighth-grade year, isn’t yet common practice for most students she knows. 

Whether future students will warm to it more isn’t yet clear, Mollod said.

Weiss, the Michigan student, said her work — especially at the environmental publication — has taken on a new significance in the age of AI, pushing to celebrate and highlight “authentic youth journalism and youth narrative” in the face of encroaching technology. “In my view,” she said, “demonstrating our talents as humans and as youth is a form of silent protest against AI by proving that artificial intelligence isn’t necessary to produce professional-quality journalism.”

Bonus: Non-AI cheating abides. 

On background, one of the students said she thought a lot of the news coverage about AI cheating, while serious, simply misses the point. The old-fashioned kind of cheating, for now, remains much more common. In 2026, students are still relying on copying each other’s homework, just as generations before them did. 

“Mostly it’s just, like, circles of people, where there’ll be a math class and five people do the homework — and the other 20 got it from this person, [who] got it from this person, [who] got it from this person — which has always kind of been going on.”

To be part of the growth and development of these young reporters, to watch and help them develop the skills and curiosity needed to become effective observers has been rewarding work.

This year, we worked with them on stories ranging from the rise in homelessness among LAUSD students; the making of an Academy Award-winning film about LAUSD’s musical repair shop; to the school system’s iconic coffee cake. Their enthusiasm for their work always comes through in their stories and in their willingness to work hard even as they carry a full load of classes, and, often a job.   

Here are 10 of the most read 2024 student stories:    

1. An LAUSD School Battles Chronic Absenteeism With Washers and Dryers

For most students, having clean clothes to wear to school is not a problem. But for many at 112th St. S.T.E.A.M. Academy in Watts, clean clothing is such a struggle it has become one of the main contributors to chronic absenteeism. In May the school was one of 20 to receive a new washing machine and dryer from the Rams and the Think Watts Foundation. Principal Jose Hernandez talks about the impact of the washer and dryer. Jinge Li has the story. 

Gen Z Black and Latino educators are passionate about inspiring their students but face significant challenges in LAUSD. A recent study highlights their experiences and concerns about job satisfaction and retention, finding that more than 70 percent are considering leaving the profession. Read the key findings and insights from the report. Jack Waterman has the story.

3. LA Housing Crisis Hits LAUSD as Number of Homeless Students Continues to Grow

The number of homeless students who attend Los Angeles Unified schools rose by more than a quarter in the last school year, new statistics show. As of the 2023-2024 school year, LAUSD enrolled 17,245 homeless students, up 26% from the previous school year, according to data the district made public last month. The dramatic jump comes as the district struggles with  in the enrollment of homeless students, and the  that has since 2020 propped up programs to aid kids experiencing homelessness. Katie VanArnam has the story. 

The number of homeless students who attend Los Angeles Unified schools rose by more than a quarter in the last school year, new statistics show. As of the 2023-2024 school year, LAUSD enrolled 17,245 homeless students, up 26% from the previous school year, according to data the district made public last month. The dramatic jump comes as the district struggles with  in the enrollment of homeless students, and the  that has since 2020 propped up programs to aid kids experiencing homelessness. Katie VanArnam has the story.

5. All About LAUSD’s Iconic Coffee Cake: A Sweet Tradition Dating Back to the 1950s

It’s not every day a public school system produces a cafeteria item with a cult following — but that’s the case with iconic LAUSD’s coffee cake, one of the most popular items on the menu. The recipe dates back to 1954 and even after 70 years, it is still in high demand, with 800,000 slices served annually. Jinge Li got to watch LAUSD staff make the coffee cake and now we’re introducing people outside of LA to the recipe and its history.

FX’s Social Studies delves into the lives of Los Angeles teens navigating the complexities of social media and mental health. Through raw footage and candid interviews, the documentary exposes the challenges young people face—from substance abuse to bullying—and highlights the urgent need for community support and action. Enzo Luna has the story.

7. LAUSD Opens Housing Complex to Combat Rising Student Homelessness

LAUSD has partnered with housing developers to create affordable housing for struggling families after the district faced a 19% increase in homeless students from the previous school year. Once we know better, we need to do better,” said LAUSD superintendent Alberto Carvalho.  “Sun King is evidence that the impossible can be turned into the inevitable.” Katie VanArnam has the story.

8. LAUSD Rolls Out New Food Truck Program With Chef Roy Choi Teaching Students How to Get Cooking in the Real World

It has been a big priority for LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho to ensure student access to successful academic and career pathways post-graduation. His newest achievement is partnering with private sectors to establish a food truck program at LAUSD. “We don’t want a single student leaving high school without a college or university ticket or an opportunity for career and technical programming,” he said. Carvalho hopes that he will bring more partnerships like this to the district. “Today’s announcement is not only important,” Carvalho added, “It’s also a very cool announcement.” Jinge Li has the story.

9. Unsung LAUSD Workers Starring in Oscar-Nominated ‘The Last Repair Shop’ to Walk the Red Carpet With Directors

When the directors of the Oscar nominated short documentary “The Last Repair Shop” walk the red carpet next month, the four LAUSD workers who keep thousands of musical instruments in good repair will be right by their side. The four craftspeople are at the heart of the documentary, out now via the Los Angeles Times  and Disney +. “Everyone was over the moon excited for this once in a lifetime experience,” film co-director Ben Proudfoot told LA School Report. Sara Balanta has the story.

826LA, a tutoring program, is promoting out of the box methods to get LAUSD students confident in their writing abilities. “I think that when they’re in school every single day, they kind of start struggling to find the spark when it comes to writing,” said 826LA program development manager Alma Carillo. “I think being in spaces like this helps encourage that.” The organization partners with over 100 schools and uses activities such as publishing student work and hosting readings. Sara Balanta has the story.

Martin, editor-in-chief of the student paper The Daily Tar Heel, mapped her escape route in case an active shooter broke through the library’s glass walls. 

By midnight, Martin was finally alone, safe but at a loss for how to visualize the crisis for the paper’s front page.

Scrolling through unanswered texts and classmates’ online posts, she found her answer. 

“That’s when I realized that that is what our front page had to be,” Martin told ����Ӱ��, “because those text messages — the sentiment of ‘are you safe’ was something that was shared by everyone who experienced this, but also by anyone who has been in an active shooter situation across the nation and across the world.” 

Within 72 hours, she and her Tar Heel colleagues were thrust into the national spotlight as their front page coverage from the campus shooting , reaching President Joe Biden’s desk and amassing nearly 8 million views on X, formerly known as Twitter. During what would’ve been an open house to attract new staffers, editors instead shared their stories on NBC, CNN, MSNBC and PBS.

In what may be the darkest stream of consciousness to catalog the emotions of a generation constantly plagued by gun violence, the cover strings together text messages between students and their loved ones as chaos unfolded: “Are you safe? I wish these never happened. Someone is already shot. Run if you can. I love you.” 

As the font gets smaller and smaller, reality sets in: the pain, outrage and fear is endless. 

“We wanted to tell the story of three hours and ten minutes. Of just being scared, not knowing how many people may be on campus, not knowing how many people may have died, or been injured,” the Tar Heel’s print managing editor Caitlyn Yaede told ����Ӱ��. 

im still reeling from the events of yesterday. my heart goes out to the family and friends of the victim, as well as the entire chapel hill community. i never thought i would experience something like this and wanted to share my conversation with my mom and dad as the events unfolded.

The Daily Tar Heel is both a student-run nonprofit publication, independent of university funding, and the only print publication for Orange County, read by locals for generations.

Editors intentionally highlighted messages that would do justice to the full spectrum of emotions, choosing not to censor expletives. News organizations around the country have preserved the graphic’s language in its entirety, too. 

“We had people whose response was expletives, ‘What the F is happening?’ And there are people who say, ‘I love you, I love you so much, call me.’ No matter how you express that stress and overwhelming concern, that’s shared humanity. I think that the width of that and the breadth of that and the range of that is really captured in that cover,” Yaede said. 

Their work struck a chord: Locally, Wednesday’s papers ran out by 1 p.m. Faculty, staff, students and community members came by the newsroom on Franklin Street in the heart of Chapel Hill to ask for more copies. 

While the nation has been exposed to frantic messages sent during shootings — notably those from and — the cover’s unique design landed like a gut punch. 

For the first 10 hours, “nothing felt right,” Martin said. Editors deliberated and discarded other versions of the front page: a quote spread, or full blank page with key words like 3 hours, 10 minutes, 1 dead — which may have understated the death of associate professor Zijie Yan. 

Once they’d agreed on the string of texts, over 36 editors collaborated to gather content, collecting anonymous screenshots from peers. Yaede and Martin weeded through them to find common themes, an order, and begin transcribing. 

“If there was a moment when I was going to break down, it was reading those,” Martin said. Some of the messages came from close friends. “I can hear their voice.” 

The order and jumbled nature of the texts was also intentional, “even if it may have not been the most straightforward approach in terms of readability,” said multimedia managing editor Carson Elm-Picard. The block mimicked the experience of those on campus sitting in silent, panicked rooms receiving message after message. 

Elm-Picard helped fine tune the design throughout Tuesday, changing what would’ve been a black background with light blue highlights to the final white background with black and red highlights.

“The association with Tar Blue is something that our students normally think of as a good thing. We’re proud of it. It’s like our color,” Elm-Picard said. “I saw that and I just thought that this event, this isn’t something we really want to associate with that.”

Trying to heal together

The Tar Heel’s coverage spanned well beyond the graphic cover. This week’s stories included how the , and training that left many in the dark, and . 

While the coverage has been necessary, it’s also been traumatic and draining for everyone involved. Going viral was the last thing staff expected.

“It’s hard to say any of this feels good. Because it doesn’t,” said Elm-Picard, who grew up near Columbine High School in Colorado and is all too familiar with gun violence. He knows the site of the Aurora shooting; many of his friends attend school near the site of the Boulder grocery market shooting. 

“Our whole entire generation, it’s not really that foreign to us, but it’s different when it’s where you live and where you feel comfortable,” he added.

In the Daily Tar Heel newsroom, staffers share meals, check in with each other and have been encouraged to take time off when needed. Student journalist alumni have reached out with support in droves. 

“To be honest, it’s been a horrible two days for everyone in the newsroom,” Martin said. “To see such a huge response from our community and also people across the nation has helped us keep going on.”

Delilah’s reporting in her community and school led to her selection as California’s 2023 Student Journalist of the Year. Last month, Delilah was recognized as for the Journalism Education Association Journalist of the Year and awarded a $1,000 scholarship. 

“This four year journey as a journalist has been really life changing and having all these people behind me has made it even more amazing…” Delilah said. While jumping over countless hurdles, Delilah realized the importance of advocating for your work and supporting fellow journalists.

When Delilah’s class at Daniel Pearl Magnet High School faced censorship from the school administration, journalism teacher Adriana Chavira defended them, . Rather than being silenced, Delilah and her classmates found their voices through journalism.

After writing nearly 100 stories for her school newspaper, Delilah found a sense of purpose and passion as a student journalist. She will be attending the prestigious Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University this fall.

In an interview, LAUSD student Delilah talked about what led to her becoming California’s Student Journalist of the Year: 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity

How did Ms. Chavira and your experience at Daniel Pearl help you get into Northwestern? Do you owe part of your success to her?

Ms. Chavira is one of the most important people in my life. She has impacted me not just by being my teacher, but supporting me in my journey. If it wasn’t for her, I would probably be a completely different person! I am so thankful to her.

She doesn’t lead our newspaper; she lets us take the reins. She supports each and every one of us in any way she can. We always joke that she’s super strict or passive aggressive, but she’s just a great person who wants to see you succeed. She definitely is one of the biggest reasons I got into Northwestern, but beyond that, she’s one of the biggest reasons I know what I want to do in life.

Looking back at her suspension last year, what are some things you can take away from that experience?

I think that the censorship incident was really, really scary and stressful, but at the same time, it did teach me a lot. It taught me more about journalism law and journalism ethics. It taught me that it’s important to stand up for my work and to know that if my work is solid, there’s nothing to be afraid of. I didn’t write the story that caused the censorship but the student who did, who’s also my friend, did a great job reporting, so there was nothing to be afraid of. 

The fact that was kind of a punch; it was out of the blue. It took nine months of behind the scenes fighting and organizing and all that kind of stuff. While it taught me to be more confident and careful in my work, it also showed just how much Ms. Chavira was willing to fight for us. 

I think most journalism advisers would at least second guess potentially losing their job for a story their students wrote, but it was never even a question for her. Ms. Chavira was there for us, and she said, “It is your decision. And I will go along with it. Whatever it is. If you want to take down the article, if you want to adjust the article, if you want to leave it up exactly how it is, it’s all up to you.” 

We were scared of her losing her job or being suspended. A lot of us even wanted to bend to the district’s will because of it. But we also knew that if we did that, we were just showing them that they can continue to censor us like they can continue to censor other schools. That was the biggest reason we decided to continue fighting after we made the initial decision to keep the article the way it is.

I want to talk about your achievement as California Student Journalist of the Year. Congratulations! Tell me more about that. 

I think one of the biggest things I learned is that people are watching you and the impact you’re making in your community. As I was putting together my portfolio with almost a year’s worth of work, seeing people respond to all of it was so amazing. I knew that the reporting I was doing, whether it be about my school district’s bus driver shortage or about a new club at my school, the readers cared, and people do care about student journalists.

Another thing I learned as I was putting my portfolio together is that I have done a lot more than I thought I have done. I’ve written almost 100 articles! As I was combing through thousands of photos, it was really mind blowing to just see my work all together. It’s easy over four years to get used to what you do, because you care about it. It was nice to step back and be like, “Wow, I’ve grown a lot.” So that was really great.

The way I found out was great, too, because . That day, we were passing out our magazine, so I was very stressed because magazine distribution is always a hectic time. As I was coordinating, Ms. Chavira kept telling me how we had a magazine critique at 10 a.m. and emphasized how I needed to be there. So I went in and saw my principals and counselors and staff writers who are in other periods, but I didn’t think anything of it because I was still stressed.

We go on Zoom where Mitch Ziegler from the Journalism Education Association starts actually talking about our magazine, kind of playing the role, and I didn’t think much of it so I started listening and taking notes. He then calls out my name and asks me to raise my hand. I do and that’s when he tells me, “you’re the California Student Journalist of the Year.”

I was so confused and stunned that I didn’t even get to scream or jump. The disbelief left me speechless, it was just absolutely incredible. My staff and Ms. Chavira being there for me was very special.

What would you say would be one of the most memorable experiences that you’ve had as a journalist?

One of the most memorable stories I’ve covered was when I was interning with the LA Times High School Insider this past summer. I noticed my friends and myself really struggle with the college application process. I saw other students from all different walks of life: first generation students, low income students, wealthy students, students from all over the state, all of us were just struggling with the process. I wanted to look more into that, so I started to do some research into things like the teen mental health crisis and how college applications played into that, especially because the process is now so much harder than in past years.

After connecting with other students, I was able to write an impactful piece on how teens are not just dealing with the college application process, but also how they’re overcoming their difficulties. And I think that it was really impactful. 

I was able to have that , which is crazy to me! The fact that such a big news outlet would publish my work, and also that that work got to be read by such a huge audience was amazing. I especially think it was beneficial for adults to read the piece, because a lot of times they don’t know what goes on in teens’ lives.

Congratulations for being published in the LA Times, and congratulations on getting into Northwestern. What is something that you look forward to when you enroll in the fall? 

I think the biggest thing I’m excited about is joining the newspaper. I want to learn from all these amazing college students and hone my skills, so I’m really excited to join that community. I think that going halfway across the country is so scary, but having that community I know be able to form makes it more exciting and less terrifying.

What has been your journey as a journalist? What has shaped you into the reporter that you are today? 

I go to a journalism magnet school, but at first, I had no interest in journalism. I argued with my school counselor about being put in the class at all, actually. It was at that time, as a freshman, that I began to explore storytelling almost against my will. But as I learned how to write well and take photos while doing all of this really exciting work, I realized my work was really impactful. Ms. Chavira, my journalism instructor, really helped me start to find my voice in journalism, and so has my newspaper staff, because after I finished my freshman year, I was completely hooked.

Tell me more about the types of journalism that you’re interested in. What are some formats you may want to try in the future?

The main thing I do is write more long form pieces. I do a lot of both breaking news and investigative and a lot of newsy feature pieces. I also love photography. While I’ve done a couple of videos through with my school, I want to learn more video journalism. I think that it’s really important for journalists to have multimedia skills and to be able to tell stories in unique ways. Another thing I want to branch more into is audio journalism. One of my best friends runs the podcast for our school, and I want to learn more about what she does. Overall, I’m interested in becoming more of a multimedia journalist because that’s really important in today’s media landscape.

To close this interview, I want to ask you how you find value in journalism. In your opinion, why is journalism important work?

I’ve always heard that journalists are the voice for the voiceless, and I have to say I disagree with that. I think journalism is a way to amplify people’s voices, not to speak for them. I think that’s what’s so impactful about journalism is that through interviews, people shine through and tell you their most important stories. 

I recently wrote , which I’m freelancing for. The story was about pollution near the Van Nuys Airport and I interviewed some residents who lived right next door. I had an hour-long conversation with a mom who was worried about her kids because in the past three years, the pollution has become a lot worse. Throughout the interview, I was able to hear this complete stranger open up to me, and I was able to publish her voice. And I think that’s so impactful.

This article is part of a collaboration between ����Ӱ�� and the USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism.  

Bryan Sarabia is a junior at the University of Southern California, originally from Houston, Texas. He is majoring in journalism and Spanish.