Sara  Wilson: Describe the publication a little bit: how big was the staff? How did y'all fund yourselves? What was your role and involvement?

Rebecca Griesbach: We were funded by ad revenue, and we each had to sell at least 2 ads a semester. I can't remember how much the ads typically sold for, but I can probably dig that up if you need it. We also were required to write at least 4 stories per grading period or semester. I joined my sophomore year, and there were about 10-15 kids (mostly seniors) enrolled in the class. Halfway through my first year, I became the news editor, which basically meant that I was responsible for designing the news page (we were an 8-page monthly tabloid). My junior year, our staff was at its smallest, at probably around 8 people. I became the features and managing editor, which meant that I designed the feature spread, wrote a lot of in-depth stories, and was responsible for editing the entire paper and sending the pages to the printer. I kept those roles my senior year, and I also handled social media. Our advisor, Susan Newell, also retired my senior year, and our staff about doubled, so I spent a lot of my time teaching freshmen and sophomores the basics while our new adviser learned the ropes.

 

SW: Why did you decide to join the publication in high school? What are some of your most interesting memories from your time on it?

RG: I actually joined The Northridge Reporter because I like art and wanted to draw comics. I had no interest in writing, but we were required to write in order to get a grade. For one of my first stories, I followed a janitor around and wrote about how nasty the bathrooms were, and he actually framed the story in his house, lol. Around that time, Nikole Hannah-Jones, who was working for ProPublica, came to our classroom told us she was working on a piece about resegregation in Tuscaloosa, which ended up really impacting her career. She came with Amanda Zamora, who's now at the Texas Tribune but did engagement stuff for ProPublica back when engagement was kind of a new thing, and together they worked to involve area students in the project. They asked students from The Northridge Reporter and Central High's journalism class to take photos of race relations in our schools, which they later picked from to display in a local gallery and on the New York Times' LENS blog. The gallery and panel discussion was around May of my sophomore year, and that's when my friend on our staff suggested we take things further and start an exchange program between Central and Northridge (and later Bryant) to emphasize student voices and see for ourselves what each others' schools were like. Our friends at Central agreed and we approached the superintendent that night, who told us to come up with a plan the next fall. Long story short, junior year was a mess and we had to jump through a lot of hoops to even get the board to listen to us, but the Exchange happened over the course of 2 days that April, and we  all contributed to a publication called "It's Not So Black and White." If you want to know more about my thoughts on the whole ordeal, let me know, because I could go on about school board bureaucracy and problems with diversity on Northridge's staff and how much agency and authority we had in this project vs kids at Central and Bryant, etc. But it finally happened, and that's what really got me thinking about journalism as a career. At the end of my junior year and into my senior year, I was taking on most of the in-depth features, and I was writing about drugs and death and all kinds of stuff, which, combined with the Exchange, helped me win Journalist of the Year for Alabama Scholastic Press Association. Some other fun and strange things we did were pizza parties every month, and we had a wedding every year where we "married" the paper.

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SW: What were the strengths of the publication? The weaknesses?

RG: Our old advisor was really embedded into ASPA, so we were pretty serious about competitions. By my junior year, I was writing 2000+ word stories about dark things like death and drunk driving and drug abuse and sexual harassment, but also fluffier pieces about students breaking all kinds of barriers and building bonds with one another. We were a really strong paper under Newell's leadership, but I also remember being extremely stressed pretty much all the time. Especially when our school went from block periods to the hour-long seven-period schedule, we struggled, because we went from having a lunch period and a whole 1.5 hour block to do work to about 40 minutes. I was also in band and had a schedule full of APs, so I spent a lot of late nights designing and editing, which took a pretty big toll on me. The big thing that I think wrecked us, though, was rezoning. By my junior year, our school had about 1300 kids, and the racial mix was about 60 percent Black and 40 percent white. When we rezoned, the board cut bussing from the predominantly-Black Southview area from Northridge to Bryant High School instead, which already had about an 80-20 mix. Our newspaper staff was predominantly white in the beginning, but we lost what little diversity we had, as well as a really talented student (Destiny Hodges) who was slated to become editor-in-chief, with rezoning. I think that really affected how we approached traditional hard news stories about our administration. Now that I look back on things, we had some really problematic policies in place, like no-tolerance discipline tactics, drug testing and dress codes, that should have been addressed more aggressively in our newspaper.

 

SW: What is your current involvement in campus media?

RG: I joined The Crimson White as a designer the second semester of my freshman year, then I worked my way up to lead designer, then production editor, and I'm currently the managing editor. I also did some election data stuff for the OpenElections project last year, I wrote for Mosaic last fall, and I interned at Chalkbeat over the summer, where I covered teacher training and diversity in Tennessee's largest school system. I'm still actively involved in ASPA – I judge and lead sessions at their state conventions, and this is my second year being a summer counselor at their Multicultural Journalism Workshop.

 

SW: Why did you decided to continue your involvement in scholastic journalism into college? How has it benefited you?

RG: I was hesitant about joining the college newspaper my freshman year, simply because I was burnt out. I knew that I still wanted to write, but I was spending a lot of time experimenting with different forms of writing and doing a lot of reading and thinking more critically about how news is made and how I can maybe work to change things that need to be changed. Quite honestly, sometimes I feel like I produced more in high school than I have in college, but I think that's mainly because I'm more on the production/editorial side of things now rather than working as a reporter. While my heart's still in reporting and writing for news and I fully intend on making non-fiction writing a career, I think my experience on a high school publication really helped me get the experience needed for the leadership positions that I'm in now.

 

SW: Why do you think scholastic journalism is important?

RG: I owe everything I have to scholastic journalism. I don't think there's any other elective or activity that held as many opportunities as my high school newspaper did. We got experience in advertising and finance, in graphic design, in all forms of writing, in photography, in website and social media management, in drawing and multimedia, in interviewing, in teaching, and in running what was essentially a business. I was pretty shy in high school, and newspaper definitely forced me out of my comfort zone and taught me some important social skills. I also think having that experience where I was writing so much and putting so much on the table when I was young has really helped me reflect on how I can grow as a journalist. But even if I didn't choose journalism as a career, that experience in high school would have helped me in pretty much any field.