You won’t often hear the scribbling of interview answers in notepads, see the curious eyes of student reporters looking for stories, or feel the tension of deadlines around high schools in Brooklyn. The number of student-run school newspapers is low, and, according to some, it keeps going down. 

“My generation consumes a lot of news on the internet. On Instagram, Shapchat, all of those things,” says Tahlya Valcourt, the 17-year-old Editor-in-Chief of her school’s newspaper, the Claw Weekly of the City College Academy of Arts (CCAA). “Especially if it’s coming from a pop-culture kind of thing, I don’t immediately believe it, but a lot of people do. Our brains are malleable and we believe things more easily.” 

This disconnect from traditional news among today’s teenagers is one of the reasons why Valcourt’s English teacher, Dennis Mihalsky, turned his classroom into a newsroom. He noticed that his students didn’t know the difference between fact and opinion and wanted to teach them using the classic journalism rule of “show don’t tell.” He was soon blown away by the positive results of the newspaper project.