Welcome to NYC's New Student-Powered Newsroom

By Julian Roberts-Grmela

Welcome to Report Card: New York City’s student-powered newsroom focused on covering education from a student perspective. This is your host, Julian Roberts-Grmela: Report Card’s adult founder and editor. 

In New York City, where 73% of public high schools don’t have a school newspaper, Report Card’s mission is to equip students with the training, resources and guidance they need to hold their school system accountable with the power of journalism. This newsletter, which currently lives on Substack, is where the world can read their hard work. 

Posts will include reported stories about local education issues, opinion articles that uplift student perspectives and multimedia journalism. New content will be posted when training, reporting and writing is complete. The amount of articles we are able to produce depends on how many students are interested and how many people decide to donate.

Report Card operates like a club. When students join, they get trained and paid to co-report a story about a local education issue. Students in middle and high school can sign up to join by filling out this form.

Students will be admitted on a first-come basis.

The trainings that I provide are based on my experience as a middle school teacher, an independent education reporter and a journalism student in a masters program at CUNY. It is my belief that the best way to learn journalism is by doing it, so I have students get started right away.

Students pick a local education issue to co-report a story about. I provide guidance and help throughout the entire process. The reporting and writing process can be time consuming, but hopefully educational and exciting. I do my best to accommodate students’ schedules. We meet remotely most of the time and can accommodate any student who requires an entirely remote schedule.

The stipends that students receive will come from donations that our audience provides. The amounts that students receive are subject to change as the reality of our funding situation becomes more clear.

Paying students is important. Without compensation, many students that Report Card wants to hear from may not have free time to dedicate to the hard work that is journalism. Paying students makes Report Card accessible to the students we are trying to serve. It also shows the respect that student journalists deserve for their REAL JOURNALISM.

Funds to pay students will be raised through this Patreon link.

It is my hope that we will be able to provide the following rates to students:

Once their first co-reported story is published, students receive a $100 stipend. Students who are interested in continuing as Report Card journalists may continue to submit reporting for publication and participate in newsroom discussions. Reported stories receive $100 stipends. Opinion articles receive $50 stipends. Visual journalism submissions (like photography, multimedia and illustrations) will receive $20 stipends. Rates are subject to change depending on if enough supporters decide to support us through Patreon.

That’s why Report Card is an experiment. Its success depends on whether or not our hypothesis is correct: that there is a significant audience out there that cares enough about Report Card’s mission to help make it sustainable. No donation is too small or too large. We appreciate anything you can offer.