Start Your Own School Newspaper: A Media Literacy Toolkit

The Start You Own School Newspaper toolkit was produced to help encourage students to produce their own newspapers as a way to assist young people to be more critical consumers and producers of media, as well as to stimulate an interest in media as a field of study. The toolkit is a result of numerous consultations with key stakeholders and experts in the field of children/youth media, journalism practitioners, educators, and the learners themselves. According to the toolkit, it is envisioned that through this initiative a platform will be created to develop media literacy skills which can be used across the school curriculum, thereby contributing to the upliftment of educational standards and promotion of a culture of reading.

The toolkit consist of the following chapters:

• Introduction: So you want to start your own school news paper?
• Beginning a newspaper: What will it be about?
• Finding your team: your first journalism job and getting everbody together
• Making this a school project: Pulling together the strenghts of classmates/roles in a newspaper
• School news: What is news? in our case, what is school news?
• Covering local events: The sport championships
• Profiles: Local celebrities and newsmakers
• Using illustrations and photographs in your newspaper
• Making it fun - cartoons and graphics
• Ethics: Being right or wrong, good and devil