Students at Toronto’s Rosedale Heights School of the Arts have launched their own newspaper to create space for discussions about the issues that matter most to them.
Led by editor-in-chief, Dylan Follett, The Spectacle is being put together by a team of 17 editors with roles that range from running the opinion section to answering questions in an advice column.
The team is hoping their second volume can tackle more sensitive issues.
Follett was inspired to found the paper after he heard about a memo Education Minister Jill Dunlop warning school boards to keep away from political discussions in preparation for the anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7th attack on Israel.
“I just hated that. I think schools need to be a place where we can have conversations that matter, difficult conversations,” Follett said.
“Because if not, we won’t have them in a civil and informed way, or we won’t have them at all.”
A school newspaper is his way to start those conversations.
Follet pitched the project to Rosedale Heights teacher Todd Light last spring. At the time, Light had no idea just how serious the 17-year-old student was about the project.
“I thought he would probably just go away,” Light said.
But Follett followed up with emails about the project over the summer. He even planned the schedules for the nonexistent editorial board and visited the New York Times office for inspiration.
“The very first week of September, there he was to make sure we were going to start,” Light said.
Ink on paper
At the paper’s first meeting, there were more than 100 students in the room for their first meeting.
Light found old editions of Rosedale’s previous student paper, which ceased publication in 2017. He shared them with the would-be editor-in-chief as potential inspiration, but Follett wasn’t impressed.
“They were called The Spectator. I was just thinking about that name and it just felt so passive. It didn’t feel like the kind of newspaper I wanted to make,” he said.
The title of the new publication: The Spectacle.
Follett said the new name represents their editorial philosophy. He doesn’t want his reporters to be passive, or avoid controversial stories.
“Our news isn’t spectating what’s happening. It’s a spectacle,” Follett said.
Follett always intended The Spectacle to be a printed product, counting The New York Times and The Globe and Mail as both key inspirations in his decision to pursue journalism.
He likes that newspapers lack the instant gratification of a web search. Readers have to flip through the paper’s pages to find the story they’re looking for and have to glance at every story along the way, he said.
The school helped find the students a place to print the paper, but left them to fend for themselves in getting it ready for production.
“There was a huge learning curve for them, but I didn’t know how to do that either,” Light said.
“So now they know how to do it and I don’t. That institutional knowledge is with the kids, and they will have to pass it on when they graduate.”
Moving forward
The future of The Spectacle is uncertain. The school has only funded two issues of the paper, and it will say goodbye to its founder when he graduates this spring.
Follett thinks the paper will outlive his tenure.
“People have really caught on to the newspaper and it’s become not just my newspaper, but the whole editorial’s newspaper and the whole staff newspaper and the whole schools newspaper,” he said. “I believe in their ability to keep it going forward. I’m hopeful that it will outlast me.”
Bill Hutchinson, a journalism professor at Seneca Polytechnic, says this kind of eagerness isn’t something he sees from young students very often.
Hutchinson, a former news anchor for CTV Toronto, says the work The Spectacle is producing is of surprising breadth and quality.
“Anybody can tell you what happened. A good journalist will tell you why it happened and why it’s important to you, and that’s what these students have,” Hutchinson said.
He hopes to see some of the young journalists from The Spectacle in his classes someday.
