The Signal celebrates Student Press Freedom Day 2021
Student Press Freedom Day is an initiative by the Student Press Law Center to promote student journalists’ protection across the country.
This year’s theme, Journalism Against the Odds, illustrates the hardships the student journalists have overcome to continue to publish content despite the challenges of 2020.
There are four categories for the theme:
- Journalism in the Time of COVID
- Reckoning with Racial Justice
- Elevating Civic Engagement
- Targeting and Censorship of Student Journalist
These issues are not foreign to the student journalists at The Signal. Members of our Editorial Board spent weeks leading up to Student Press Freedom Day reflecting on the challenges and hardships because they are student journalists.
From prior review to COVID to the impact of being a student journalist of color, here are the stories of student journalists at UHCL.
Student Press Freedom Day
INTERACTIVE INFOGRAPHIC: Student Press Freedom Day highlights importance of censorship-free student journalism
The 2021 theme is of Student Press Freedom Day is “Journalism Against the Odds.”
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What's Prior Review
COMMENTARY: Introducing the First Amendment and prior review
However, no issue is as threatening and damaging as university administration, faculty and staff demanding a prior review of our articles.
COMMENTARY: The importance of understanding (and respecting) press freedom at learning institutions
Years of case law maintain that prior review at the college level is unconstitutional. Despite this, staff, faculty and administrators on this campus routinely try to demand to review content prior to publication. For the most part, this occurs because sources are uninformed about the concept of prior review.
Personal Experiences
IMO: Recognizing the power and necessity as a student journalist
In what has been quite an eventful past few years, topics of race, politics, power and corruption have dominated conversations both in college and beyond. Such events only further make me see what it means, and what it takes, to be a journalist.
IMO: Acknowledging the importance of student press in COVID-19
For me, continuing to cover things that include COVID-19 as well as things happening on campus make it easier to find an explanation to what was going on in the world and in the community. It allows me to center myself during such a chaotic time.
Previous Student Press Freedom Day Content:
What The Signal would look like without freedom of the press
On Jan. 30, the Student Press Law Center celebrates Student Press Freedom Day. Without freedoms for a student press like UHCL's The Signal, the content we publish would look different. Here is a redacted version of our editorial "The discrediting of the press places democracy at risk" for a glimpse of what censorship of the student press would look…
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