Newspapers team up for #RealNewsCO roundtable

    Fake news. Clickbait. Social media. Responsibility. Trust.
    In honor of Colorado Journalism Week, April 16-22, staff from The Dragon Times and The Holyoke Enterprise teamed up for a roundtable discussion that wasted no time in getting to some of the big issues in the world of journalism today.
    Staff present from The Dragon Times, the school newspaper at Holyoke JR/SR High, were Emma Thompson, Haley Van Overbeke, Rylee Schneller, Tuff Sigler and Dylan Hielscher. Throughout the year, they’ve been learning what it takes to put a newspaper together and gain the trust of readers as a dependable source of information.
    At the roundtable, students said that much of the news they take in as readers comes from Twitter or other social media, and as a newspaper, their articles are posted to the school website. Same goes for the Enterprise: it’s not just print. Regardless of the form their news comes in, readers deserve reliable reporting from their journalists.
    Staff from the two newspapers touched on the difference between news and opinion, building trust, and the idea that unwelcome news does not equal fake news.
    The writers’ time together culminated in a conversation about the Ethical Journalism Network’s five core values of journalism: accuracy and truth; fairness and impartiality; independence; humanity; and accountability. Whether it’s for a school newspaper, a weekly with a circulation of 1,400 or the New York Times, responsible reporting adheres to those five guidelines.
    Roundtable participants discussed each of the values, often in relation to sports, an area in which everyone involved has experience.
 

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