{"id":20820,"date":"2017-04-06T21:50:22","date_gmt":"2017-04-06T21:50:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=20820"},"modified":"2017-04-06T21:50:22","modified_gmt":"2017-04-06T21:50:22","slug":"students-kick-new-life-into-gumshoe-journalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=20820","title":{"rendered":"Students kick new life into gumshoe journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Pittsburg, Kan., has become the print journalism capital of America.<\/p>\n

It’s because a group of high school students\u00a0demonstrated to a local school board and the school system’s superintendent that they didn’t do their due diligence in hiring a school administrator.<\/p>\n

Man, I love this story.<\/p>\n

Six students at Pittsburg High School, who happen to serve on the staff of The Booster Redux — the school newspaper — managed to dig out the truth about the resume presented by the school’s new principal.<\/p>\n

Amy Robertson was hired as the principal. Then the students begin sniffing around about the school Robertson had listed on her credentials. It turns out that Corllins University — which Robertson listed as where she earned her masters and doctoral degrees — is nothing more than a degree mill. It ain’t accredited, or legit, the students learned.<\/p>\n

Students show up their elders<\/a><\/p>\n

The students, though some vigorous gumshoe reporting — and the help of the Internet doing basic Google searches — managed to show up the school board and the superintendent, who should have vetted the principal properly before hiring her.<\/p>\n

And what, in this instance, constitutes proper vetting? Nothing more than checking to determine the quality of the school that Robertson had listed as providing her education.<\/p>\n

The students did the school board’s and superintendent’s job for them.<\/p>\n

Get this from the Kansas City Star: “On Wednesday, Destry Brown, the Pittsburg schools superintendent, said the district was reposting the job and from now on will be doing a background check and vetting credentials before any candidate is hired.”<\/p>\n

Background check and vetting credentials? No spit<\/em>, folks.<\/p>\n

What gives this story its additional legs is that the student\u00a0 reporters employed basic journalism principles in rooting out an important story. It gives some of us old-school journalism dinosaurs hope that the profession is about to jump off its death bed before it is overcome by “click-bait journalism” preferred by too many publishers these days as they stagger away from traditional print journalism to something called “the digital product.”<\/p>\n

The students didn’t expect this kind of attention. The national media have jumped on this story, I believe, because it speaks to old-school journalism values exhibited by a group of young people who — one might surmise — are more attuned to social media and other 21st-century technology.<\/p>\n

Nice going, students. You have made many of your journalism elders — including yours truly — quite proud of you.<\/p>\n\n

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Pittsburg, Kan., has become the print journalism capital of America. It’s because a group of high school students\u00a0demonstrated to a local school board and the school system’s superintendent that they didn’t do their due diligence in hiring a school administrator. Man, I love this story. Six students at Pittsburg High School, who happen to serve … Continue reading Students kick new life into gumshoe journalism<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,1],"tags":[2587,4300],"class_list":["post-20820","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media-news","category-uncategorized","tag-journalism","tag-social-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20820","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20820"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20820\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20821,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20820\/revisions\/20821"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20820"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20820"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20820"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}