For more than 50 years, the Student Press Law Center has operated as a national resource for young journalists seeking clarity, protection, and guidance in an increasingly changing media landscape. The nonprofit organization’s mission has remained steady, offering free legal information and assistance to student journalists and their advisers at both the high school and college levels. Looking back at this past year, many challenges shifted the ground beneath student media in ways the SPLC had not seen before, according to Senior Legal Counsel Mike Hiestand.
“Our whole reason for being in business is to provide legal help and legal information to student media,” Hiestand said. “We work with high school and college student media, and with the advisors that work with them, and sometimes with the attorneys helping them out. We assist on pretty much every sort of media law issue that comes up, such as libel, censorship, copyright, things like that.”
Hiestand, who has worked full-time in student media law since 1991, says he has watched school years come and go under changing legal pressures.
“I’ve been doing this work for a little over 30 years,” he said. “This year has been one unlike many others.”
When reflecting on the most significant issues of 2025, Hiestand pointed out first a case that sent shockwaves not just through student journalism, but across the nation as a whole. In March, Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk was detained by federal agents after publishing an op-ed calling on the university to divest from Israel. The incident marked a moment Hiestand never thought about witnessing.
“It was a one hundred percent lawful op-ed,” Hiestand said. “I’ve seen a lot of pieces like that over the years. But in this particular instance, the federal government sent agents after her. They arrived masked, unnamed, unmarked, arrested her and took her down to Louisiana, where she remained for about 60 days. That’s a line I never thought we see crossed, that a student would be treated in the way she was simply for having engaged in fully protected speech. That was a huge alarm bell.”
The SPLC responded by issuing a nationwide student media alert, something the organization had never done before.
“We did it in conjunction with a number of journalism education groups,” Hiestand said. “We basically said, clearly the rules have changed. The world we’re living in now is significantly different from what we’ve been living in previously. And as a result, we caution student media to take that into account, especially with things like anonymous sources.”
The detainment of Öztürk was not the only incident raising alarms. The situation of Gaza protests spreading across college campuses led to student reporters finding themselves caught in the middle.
“We’ve been involved over the last year with journalists being detained during some of the Gaza protests on campuses,” Hiestand said. “They were trying to cover those events just as journalists, and we saw a number of them swept up in law enforcement actions taking place against students.”
Beyond legal threats, economic pressures also played a role in 2025. Student journalism programs faced significant cuts to their operating budgets, altering or even ending longstanding traditions of print publishing.
“At a lot of college papers, budgets were wiped out entirely or significantly reduced,” Hiestand explained. “One of the biggest cases was at the University of Indiana with the Statesman, a storied newspaper. They were told they could no longer put out a print publication, and if they did put out special editions, like homecoming, the only thing it could talk about is football. They said you can’t even talk about news. Fortunately, these issues ended up getting resolved. But again, that’s another unprecedented action we had not really seen or anticipated.”
One of the SPLC’s key areas of work this year stemmed from a policy shift allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to take action on school campuses, something Hiestand said had never been permitted before. This led to the SPLC fielding questions from teenagers about protecting themselves and their sources, another new act they carried out.
“ICE was changed to allow for raids and actions on school campuses,” he said. “We started getting lots of calls from high school student media wondering, ‘What are we going to do about this? How do we cover this issue? How do we cover how our district is going to respond? Most importantly, how do we talk to our classmates who are being impacted by this?’ I was talking to high school students about using Signal and encryption so they could contact sources.”
Even as the issues have escalated, the SPLC continues to support students and advisers primarily through communication and accessibility. But even familiar tools feel different under the notion of the year’s events.
“We try to keep folks in the know on legal developments,” Hiestand said. “We have a really active legal hotline where they can call and get in touch with us. We talk things through one-on-one, that’s a big part of what we do. I don’t know that there’s anything a lot different from our regular ways of communicating and working with student journalists and advisors, it’s just that the topics have gotten much more intense.”
Looking at the bigger picture, Hiestand said the challenge for student journalists now reflects the struggle of the entire media industry. But at the core of every discussion lies a timeless principle that he believes must be reinforced more urgently than ever
“Student media are like all media now,” he said. “We’re trying to figure out our place in this new ecosystem. But it goes back to reminding people of the value and the absolute necessity of having an independent, robust press if you’re going to have a free society,” he said. “You need good information on which to make your decisions.”
In a year filled with dramatic stories, policy shifts, budget cuts, and rapidly evolving threats to the field of journalism and student press, Hiestand and the SPLC’s work has only grown more essential. To learn more about the SPLC, including their mission and how to contact, check out their website below.
https://splc.org/
