LAWRENCE — Journalism classes usually are not paired with business lessons. While there have been calls for increasing business knowledge in journalism, research from the University of Kansas has found that high school journalists are learning business skills even though they are not a core part of the curriculum.
To better understand how high school media advisers address business challenges, researchers conducted interviews with 29 such educators from across the country. Findings showed that while the programs rarely addressed business concepts and skills directly, students did learn about the business side of the trade through practice and experiential learning.
“The reality is high school journalism has been leading financial literacy education for decades out of necessity,” said Sarah Cavanah, assistant professor of journalism at KU and the study’s lead author. “There has often been intense pressure on school publications to pay for themselves. They have been at the forefront, these publications, but we rarely talk about it.”
In detailed interviews, the journalism advisers told researchers about how their publications operated. While the majority said they did not include information on financial topics like budgets, payroll or operating costs, students still learned about the business side of media. Many students were required to sell advertisements to local businesses to fund their publications such as newspapers and yearbooks. Others held fundraisers or took part in events like running concession stands at school events to raise money.
Just as financial strains are real in the media industry, the researchers found the financial pressures of leading student media are a concern for those charged with the task.
“Finances are a gigantic source of stress for educators,” Cavanah said.
Several respondents reported their publications were routinely run at a deficit or told they would be responsible for making sure their operations broke even or turned a profit. Several educators reported writing grants to fund their operations.
For example, one adviser in the study admitted to crying when her administration asked her to take over the yearbook program because she knew the financial stress would be huge.
“I don’t know exactly what happened, but when I took over the program, it was almost $30,000 in debt,” the adviser told the researcher team. “And so, the activities director at the time, he … bailed us out for two years in a row there, because we couldn’t come up with the money to make the payment for the yearbook. And that’s when I vowed, I was not going to, I wasn’t going to be in the red ever again. It was too stressful.”
The study, written with Peter Bobkowski of Kent State University, Leslie Klein of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Marina Hendricks of South Dakota State University and Monica Hill of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was published in the journal Journalism & Mass Communication Educator.
The authors wrote that student media in general is overlooked, especially the financial side. To their knowledge, the study is the first in the last 50 years to examine the business side of high school journalism education.
While the study’s findings revealed that high school students are getting financial lessons, even if indirectly, they also show there is a real opportunity to improve financial literacy and business of media education. To that end, the authors make three practical recommendations for improving the state of business and journalism education.
First, journalism educators at the university level could better prepare future journalism teachers to teach the topic. While some curricular materials related to business are available to high school teachers through organizations like the Journalism Education Association or offered through sessions at state organizations like the Kansas Student Press Association, they are a tiny fraction compared to curricular materials focused on reporting, writing, editing and shooting news. High school advisers are stretched thin, and making these materials available for their use could ease the teaching burden and enhance student learning outcomes, the authors wrote.
Second, journalism advisers could take full advantage of their experiential learning environment by more fully involving students in financial planning and business strategy for their publications. The best practice in student media has been to let students take control over news decisions as much as possible. This recommendation pushes advisers to consider extending that to the financial operations of the publications as well. Making lessons a more formalized part of curriculum could also enhance lessons students learn through experiential practices like selling ads, the authors wrote.
Finally, journalism educators and school leaders could help their cause by formalizing pedagogy and accurately expressing the value student media provides to its practitioners. While student media provides real-world lessons in sales, budgeting and other business concepts, communicating that value to policymakers and communities would be beneficial, as those skills are highly transferrable, Cavanah said, pointing out that the majority of student journalists do not go on to careers in media but do take those acquired skills with them.
The multi-university research team Cavanah is a part of is currently conducting research into how high school educators are teaching about the role of objective facts in their classrooms, how high school journalism education aligns with federal requirements for what all students should achieve in high school and on how former high school journalists have applied their skills in their careers 10 years after graduating.
“I’ve seen that student media is under-researched and underwritten about, even though it is very beneficial to students,” Cavanah said. “But it can be difficult to show that benefit without empirical evidence and studies. That got me motivated in doing more of this research.”
Journalism & Mass Communication Educator
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Balancing the Budget: Educator Perceptions of the Business Side of High School Journalism
23-Mar-2026