On Paulson

Ken Paulson's First Amendment session today was so incredibly relevant. I know many of us are are touching on the First Amendment, prior review, censorship, and things like that for our final articles. I thought his message aligned in a couple interesting ways with some of what Dean Callahan spoke about. Maybe that's kind of obvious since they are both deans of journalism schools and they were both speaking to journalism teachers, but both talked about students having full First Amendment rights, about students having the freedom to pursue stories that interest them, and even to make mistakes. I wrote down a few of his statements that I thought were empowering to student journalists, and that might show up in my article about students having editorial control.

1. “3 out of 4 Americans believe high school principals have no right to censor.”

2. “The essence of education is making those choices, about deciding what your community needs to know. It’s the essence of journalism.”

3. “I had absolute autonomy. I was the editor of that paper and I ran it as professionally as possible, which meant I decided what went in. I decided what was not fair to put in.”

4. “This is not an exaggeration. The lessons I learned when I was 18 years old I applied when I was editor of the largest newspaper in America.”

Here is a fun video in case you missed some of Paulson's talk.

Shannon Kuehmichel
Berlin High
Berlin, Wisconsin