By Jim Killam
NINA Communications Coordinator

Quick: Name the advisers of the high-school newspapers in your circulation area.

If you're already thinking of names and faces, when's the last time you had a conversation with those people about getting students involved with your newspaper?

If you didn't think of anyone, you have work to do. Find those people and start identifying promising young journalists.

If that person doesn't exist at your local high schools, look in the mirror. You might be the perfect one to spark a student's interest in a journalism career.

Here's one example of what could happen:

I attended tiny North Boone High School in Poplar Grove ... well, it's actually in a cornfield somewhere near Poplar Grove. The school didn't have a newspaper or a journalism class. But it did have a football team. Prior to my senior year, my mom showed me an ad in our local paper, the Belvidere Daily Republican, seeking a sports stringer to cover games. I'd thought about majoring in journalism in college, so this was a good chance to see if I liked it.

Once I started working on my first story, a season preview, I was hooked for life. I think I covered nine games that fall, and probably set the North American record for bad cliche usage. But the paper let me write and, better yet, paid me: $10 a game, plus mileage.

I couldn't cover basketball because I was on the team, but that winter, the Daily Republican's editor, Al Post, asked if I'd be interested in doing a weekly "North Boone School News" column. A friend and I decided to combine on the column for the rest of the school year. It was no great journalistic achievement, although we did occasionally make the superintendent nervous by covering issues like the availability of drugs in the school.

A few days after I graduated, Al called. The Daily Republican's sports editor was leaving for another job. Would I be interested in serving as interim sports editor for the summer, until I left for college?

Hmmm. Be the sports editor of a daily paper at age 17, or keep my part-time job busing tables at a mall steak house?

That summer, I covered countless youth baseball games --. some of which are still going on -- and learned editing, page layout and photography. I dealt with crazed parents, late ads and learned what happened when you forgot to change the ribbon in the AP teletype machine.

And, the paper helped me develop something else: appreciation for my community. Three years after I graduated from college, the paper hired me as its managing editor.

Though I'd eventually move onward in my journalism career, it all can be traced back to that one local editor giving a high-school kid a shot. And, I even wound up living today in the same community where I went to high school.

So that's my pitch: In a small-town newspaper world desperate for good journalists, you can plant seeds. Do everything you can to support your local high school papers. And whether those exist or not, give students access to your paper. Try a teen page (Jan Larsen at the Joliet Herald News can show you a great example). Develop a school news column. Get into high schools and talk to classes.

Let students feel they have a voice and a stake in their community now, and they just might come back someday. And even if they don't, you've helped the greater journalism community by giving students a head start toward fulfilling careers.

Jim Killam is adviser for the Northern Star, the daily student newspaper at Northern Illinois University. Contact him at (815) 753-4239, or jkillam@niu.edu.

Related links

• The NINA Web site offers an area for high-school journalists, with writing and editing tips, scholarship information and links to other high school sites. www.star.niu.edu/nina/highschool.
• The Herald-News teen site, Web Street Cafe. www.webstreetcafe.com.
• The American Society of Newspaper Editors maintains a comprehensive site for high-school journalists.
  www.highschooljournalism.org