news literacy
Throughout the 2017-2018 school year, vaping, in particular juuling, became prominent among students and social events. After hearing about students vaping in the bathroom, I anonymously polled our student body to see how widespread the issue was. With the poll, I learned that 59 percent of the students surveyed tried vaping, and 26 percent said they felt uninformed on the effects of vaping, we knew there needed to be a spread addressing the issue. After researching about vaping, on the Center for Disease Control's website, and polling students to learn about their vaping habits, I interviewed two students who vaped, a student who never vaped and an administrator on their opinions and experiences of vaping. It felt necessary to include students with differing opinions on vaping to gain a well-rounded view of how the student body feels about the issue.
I recognize the bias within this story. As a teen, I have a more lenient attitude towards vaping than most of the adults in my life because I empathize with my peers and their problems. The sources that I interviewed were not health professionals. Although my sources felt informed and shared information with me, their information about the health effects is not as accurate as a researcher studying the effects of nicotine on brain development.
Yearbooks should be journalistic in their news coverage and document the entire year. They are not a public relations piece for the school. It is my job, as a scholastic journalist, to document the good, and bad of what life was like for the year. It was important to publish this spread in the 2018 Legend for it to be timely and relevant to its audience, as it was extremely pertinent to a variety of students and vaping impacted students both physically and financially.
I recognize the bias within this story. As a teen, I have a more lenient attitude towards vaping than most of the adults in my life because I empathize with my peers and their problems. The sources that I interviewed were not health professionals. Although my sources felt informed and shared information with me, their information about the health effects is not as accurate as a researcher studying the effects of nicotine on brain development.
Yearbooks should be journalistic in their news coverage and document the entire year. They are not a public relations piece for the school. It is my job, as a scholastic journalist, to document the good, and bad of what life was like for the year. It was important to publish this spread in the 2018 Legend for it to be timely and relevant to its audience, as it was extremely pertinent to a variety of students and vaping impacted students both physically and financially.