The lesson of what information is appropriately public or private is being lived day by day in the journalism class and month by month among its audience of readers. Public services are held to account without a second thought. Sometimes, as with journalism in the outside community, nothing happens. Inaction, too, is a subject for discussion, on and off the staff. Sexuality, by general staff agreement, is treated as a public matter when it is part of a trend or a problem.
Reporters encourage sources to go on the record, but sometimes they refuse.
Then we have to weigh whether the comments are likely true or invented. The whole school was left to debate whether the popular crushes section somehow could be screened and stay secret. There isn't an issue raised by the White House scandal that hasn't been argued from the heart in this community at some time in the five years of the newspaper's existence. A school that debates its own laws and politics, writes and speaks freely of the performance of its public officials, and struggles with its own feelings of sexuality gets to view Clinton-Lewinsky not as a lesson, but as a problem in living. The messy democracy of the country is also the imperfect democracy of the school.