Richland Northeast student media

Zoe Becraft, a senior at Richland Northeast High School, anchors the March 24 RNE-TV broadcast. Ian Grenier/Staff

COLUMBIA — As Richland Northeast High School students evacuated their campus Feb. 1 after receiving social media threats, it wasn’t any of Columbia’s professional newspaper reporters who first broke the news of the emergency.

Instead, it was 17-year-old Hallie Palmer, co-editor-in-chief of Richland Northeast’s online student paper The Saber — who wasn’t even at school at the time.

Palmer was off campus picking up her younger cousin when she got word from Bill Rawson, the online paper’s advisor and a Richland Northeast journalism teacher, that something was going on.

“I’m like, 'OK, well, I'll just tweet about it,' " Palmer said about her reaction to the news.

So she went to work, fielding photos taken of the evacuation by other students and posting updates about the situation to the paper’s Twitter page.

The Saber’s student journalists would continue covering the incident on social media throughout that afternoon and into the next day as the school faced a second day of disruption from another hoax threat, part of a larger wave that crashed onto many Columbia-area schools the same week.

Hard-hitting news coverage wasn't unusual at the 1,300-student high school where the student media program also includes a broadcast morning show, a literary magazine and a yearbook.

RNE-TV, the broadcast program, is one of the top three student broadcast programs in the country, according to A.J. Chambers, another Richland Northeast journalism teacher and the program’s director.

“We might not have the nicest sets or the best technology compared to some of the other schools in the nation, but what sets us apart is our stories," Chambers said. "We tell stories that other schools don't touch.” 

That praise isn’t just from a teacher who’s proud of his kids — the program and its students regularly rack up wins in national and state scholastic media competitions, including recent awards from the National Scholastic Press Association’s 2022 Pacemaker awards.

The Saber's space is a full-fledged studio next to the school's library, with a separate control room looking over a multi-camera set for each broadcast’s different segments. A team of students run the show, cutting between cameras, overlaying graphics, monitoring sound levels and adjusting as necessary when a guest administrator runs over the segment’s allotted time.

Everett Joyner, 17, was at the studio’s “switcher” for the March 24 broadcast, meaning he was responsible for adjusting which camera feeds and graphics viewers saw on their screens. The senior, who worked for the organization for all four of his years at Richland Northeast, said he got into RNE-TV because he wanted to work with cameras.

But the program gave him more than just time behind a camera, he said, including experience as a sports producer and the chance to put together reporting on serious subjects that impact his school’s minority populations, such as language barriers and Black male students’ graduation rates.

Those sorts of stories need to be highlighted, he said, even though they require “uncovering ground” and “ruffling feathers.”

Despite the serious nature of the young journalists’ stories, Joyner said he and his fellow students aren’t constrained by their teacher in what they cover.

“If you feel like it needs to be covered, he’ll be like, ‘OK, go cover it,’” he said about Chambers. “He’s just the teacher — our names are the ones on the stories.”

For his part, the broadcast teacher is ambitious about what the students can do.

“We’re talking about what it is to be Black in America, we’re talking about queer stories,” Chambers said. “We’re not acting as PR for the school, we’re actually telling the stories, whether or not it’s positive or negative, it’s their right as journalists to tell the stories.”

That student-driven approach also lends itself to The Saber’s coverage of Richland Northeast and the larger Richland County School District Two, with reporters and columnists covering issues that touch on their classmates' lives, such as district dress codes, the school's academic programs and Cavalier sports.

"We've ... been doing a little bit of everything," said Rissy McDonald, the paper's other co-editor-in-chief. 

That work has given the students experience reporting and writing, and also a sense of the important role that journalism plays in a community. After the paper's coverage of the schools' evacuation, Palmer said parents thanked her for the information about what was going on in their children's school. 

"It ... brought to light a lot of what journalism could do," she said.  

Reach Ian Grenier at 803-968-1951. Follow him on Twitter@IanGrenier1. 

Education Reporter

Ian Grenier covers K-12 and higher education in the Columbia area. Originally from Charleston, he studied history and political science at USC and reported for the Victoria Advocate in South Texas before joining the Post and Courier.

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