Recently, our publication has taken notice of a downturn in our readership. We see it all the time, especially when everyone is glued to their phones during Advisory periods when w e come to distribute our papers every month.
It’s a pattern we’ve noticed for a while. But don’t worry. We see you. We see your struggle and how excruciatingly hard it is for you to put your phone down for five minutes to pick up our newspaper every month and actually read something.
Researchers at some highly esteemed institutions recently conducted a study, which was sponsored by Meta’s Instagram and TikTok, in which anonymous high school students were strapped to chairs and forced to read a passage from a book for fifteen minutes straight, without cellphones, without music, and without distractions. They found that in 76% of cases, reading actual words and text can actually be dangerously corrosive to the average teenager’s brain.
The study has brought forth a glaring reality to light. If reading is permanently damaging to the young mind, then obviously, reading The Voice is only going to add to the problem.
Do you know what the difference is between fact and slander? Because we definitely don’t. If you’ve ever wondered what actually goes on in our Journalism class, we don’t teach anything. As part of our robust onboarding process, staff writers receive a computer and a camera and are thrown in the deep end. It’s not like we actually teach journalism — interviewing practices, fact-checking, or how to write a comprehensible article in this class.
As you may remember, last year, The Voice released a press statement regarding various issues that arose with our publication. In that statement, our editorial board took the time to address and apologize to our esteemed readers and school faculty, noting that we were becoming involved in conversations with the Student Journalism Legal Center at the time in order to address the issue.
Since then, we’ve regrettably been unable to resolve the issue. It may have gotten worse… Well, actually? We’re not too sure — we haven’t been working on anything in Journalism for a while anyways.
As such, you should probably start getting your information from somewhere else with more credibility, for your own good. Like the three-person group chat you’ve had with your friends since middle school with a weird name. Or your mom’s WhatsApp group with her friends, where they gossip about you and other kids.
So next time you see us come to distribute our papers, we urge you: please stop reading The Voice.
