Media

St. Louis SPJ event to focus on sports

In celebration of March Madness and the thrill of sports, the Society of Professional Journalists is presenting “March Madness: Covering the Wide World of Sports” for this month’s News at Noon speaker series in St. Louis, which takes place March 14 in the AT&T Room of the Missouri History Museum (co-sponsor of the event), located at 5700 Lindell Boulevard in Forest Park. A panel of veteran sports journalists will share the ins and outs of covering sports, and speakers will reveal how they got the best stories of their careers. The audience will get an insider’s view of the interviews, sports personalities and even behind-the-scenes anecdotes that never made it to print. From the stars of the high school playing fields, to college athletes, to World Series champions, our speakers have worked on the stories that have captivated our region’s sports fans.

Media

Founder's note

A founder’s note from Charles Klotzer: “In the print version of my article in the Winter 2013 edition of Gateway Journalism Review, I failed to note that in the late 1980s Roland Klose was the assistant editor of SJR for several years. My apologies for this oversight. Congratulations also to Klose for being named the business editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.”

Media

Hazelwood reverberates 25 years later

Twenty-five years ago, on Jan. 13, 1988, the U.S. Supreme Court announced a devastating blow to student speech and the student press when it validated the authority of the principal of Hazelwood East High School to remove controversial stories about teen pregnancy and divorce from the school newspaper over student objections. The court’s decision in Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier was one of the most far-reaching decisions restricting free speech in the past quarter-century.

Media

Illinois, Missouri universities fall short of protecting free expression

The First Amendment protects free expression. That, however, covers only governmental acts, “Congress shall make no law . . . ,” it says. That threat by officialdom is ever-present. But we are also facing a similar threat by private centers of power that may actually interfere more directly with our lives. Greg Lakianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), warns in a New York Times op-ed piece that colleges have enacted speech codes intended to enforce civility, “but they often backfire, suppressing free expression instead of allowing for open debate of controversial issues.”