The Bookish Lost Media I Wish I Could Watch Again

Set at Cypress Bay High School in Weston, Florida, the eight-episode series followed the lives of the teenagers running the school’s award-winning newspaper, The Circuit. A former high school newspaper and college newspaper editor myself, I knew the show would be ripe for interpersonal drama on top of the drama that simply exists in trying to put a regular periodical out for student consumption. And indeed, this show lived up to the promise.

Amanda Lorber, editor-in-chief of The Circuit, found herself in the midst of not only trying to ensure the standards and quality of the paper remained award-winning. She also had to navigate the realities of relationships with several other staff members, including her best friend and, of course, best rival, Alex Angert.

Many of Amanda’s staffers are worried about her taking control of the paper. They think she’ll be a dictator of the paper and unable to consider the interests her peers and fellow writers have in what they read or write. This ends up not being true — remember, we’ve got to have good framing to make a reality show here — and instead, Amanda is simply too overwhelmed to make decisions and instead pours her time and energy into stories with her byline on it. This doesn’t remain the note she keeps throughout, though. Instead, viewers get to watch her as she understands what it is to be a leader and what it looks like to find confidence and conviction in her own instinct.

One of the major storylines in Amanda’s life is her ultimate goal: getting into New York University. The paper is important to her, and it’s a passion, but throughout, she worries that she has not done enough to get into the competitive school.

The show isn’t exclusively about Amanda, of course, but because I cannot rewatch it, I recall very little of the storylines from other student perspectives. One that does stand out to me comes during the late night layout session the staff partakes in during their first issue. For anyone who hasn’t worked at a student publication — er, I suppose a student publication pre-digital only days — the layout was one of the typical responsibilities of editors. This would involve, in the olden days, actually cutting stories and pasting them into place to build the paper. In early digital times, like those I came-of-student-newspaper in, it was done through online programs. It’s a tedious process because you have to figure out how many inches of space a story takes and ensure it fits into that space. I recall some nights in college being on deadline and in the office until 3 or 4 in the morning when the paper was due an hour earlier because we had to delete “that” or “the” from a story to make the damn thing fit.

At The Circuit, during that first deadline night, the staff realize none of them knows how to proceed once they have the pages laid out. These were the days prior to everyone knowing how to make a .pdf, and so the staff have to track down the prior year’s editor to ask how to do that.

But the thing about this show I remember most is something that happened to me when I was an editor for my own high school paper.

It was typical for the administration to review student publications before they went to print. This is prior review, and it is a provision of the case Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier. School administrators have the right to censor student speech in school-sponsored forums like school newspapers if it falls under the broad and loosely defined category of “valid educational reason.” For staff at The Circuit, this happens when a story that Amanda and Alix Cohen (not to be confused with the other Alex) raises concerns with the school’s vice principal. She’d disagreed with part of a story.

My junior year of high school, I lost my best friend to something that very few people ever experience: a high school division. My high school went from two two-year schools to two four-year schools, meaning that half of the people I went to classes with my freshman and sophomore years were no longer my classmates junior and senior years. Their school was now several miles away. With that kind of distance as kids without driver’s licenses and with the two new schools still having nearly 3,500 students each, keeping friendships alive was nearly impossible.

The split was not exactly the best experience for us as students, and one of the first stories I wrote for the now-new student newspaper for our former two-year, now four-year, school was about the impact of this class division on students. My school was deemed the new one since it was technically newer than the one half my classmates went to. We’d had to pick new school colors and a new school mascot. All of that was framed as something to get excited about but the vibe was mostly…not excited.

I worked that story hard. I interviewed so many students, including those who were happy with the changes. I thought it was as fair and balanced as possible within the realm of a “news” piece, though certainly, the tone was about the impact of this on those of us who’d literally had half our classmates leave.

My school’s administration did not like the piece. It wasn’t “positive” enough about the changes and, thus, wouldn’t be approved for publication unless I changed significant portions of it.

When my journalism teacher and newspaper advisor delivered this news, I was far from happy. This was censorship, stemming directly from a story that refused to tell a lie about the experience impacting thousands of students in the school. She presented two options: rewrite the story to fit the narrative of the administration or pull it all together.

I wish I could remember all that went through my head that minute, but that was 20+ years ago. But I think about that moment nearly every day as I read story after story about school censorship. About the ways adults use their positions of power to silence the voices of those they’re supposed to be supporting and championing.

The Circuit comes together to fight the attempt to change the article and they succeed at doing so.

I pulled my piece. To this day, I think about being put in that position, and to this day, I’m mad about it. I’m proud that I didn’t bow down to pressure to tell a false story. But that silencing was chilling — and seeing such a similar story to my own playing out on screen via The Paper many years later reminded me how vital it is not to take the right to free speech and press for granted. That young people day in and day out traverse a wholly different landscape when it comes to the First Amendment.

When The Paper concluded in May 2008, there was an announcement of a second season. This time, the story would move to a different high school with a different school paper. Per the sparse Wikipedia page on the show, though, that second season ended up changing entirely, becoming a show called My Life As Liz.

The show got media attention when it came out, including a nice writeup in The New York Times about how The Paper and several other new teen-centered reality shows at the time were in stark contrast to the popular shows of that ilk like Laguna Beach. But maybe one of the best write ups came from MTV itself, where Charlie Toft praises how its goal was to show the real real world of that generation of teenagers. About Amanda, Toft wrote*:

What’s most likable about Amanda — aside from the fact that even with the new nose there just aren’t many girls who look like her on MTV — is that she’s unapologetic about wielding power, and doesn’t put boys at the center of her world. Where most teenage girls in pop culture would react to being ostracized by playing down their intelligence, Amanda knows she’s good and is proud of it. She’s not a machine — you can tell she’s bothered by the disrespect and the chatter behind her back — but Amanda is willing to stick up for herself when she believes she’s right.

Then there’s this fabulous review from Newsweek, pulled from the TV Tropes page for the show created by a Reddit user who, like me, wishes we could find it to stream again:

These are the kids who aren’t popular in high school. The ones whose parents assure them that while the cool kids will never amount to anything, it’s them, the bottom rung of the high school caste system, who will be the cool kids when they grow up. And the thing is, they’re right. These kids know it and act accordingly. These aren’t the gorgeous people who will be pumping your gas in 20 years. They are the nerds who will be shredding your résumé.

The teens in the show were not necessarily thrilled with how it ended up. In interviews afterward, they talked about how when they were approached, they thought that it would be more focused on journalism itself than on interpersonal drama (bless them, honestly, because this show came from MTV during the height of reality TV shows). Those videos are much easier to track down than the show itself. Here’s one with Amanda and Cassia. Note the comments full of people who, like me, want to stream the series again.

And maybe that’s an important takeaway here. The reality show wouldn’t have been as exciting for viewers without the conflict — certainly, the need to find sources to write a big important story matters (and I love that the girls here emphasize this!), but does it keep a viewer on the edge of their seats? For me, sure. But the average person? I’m not sure.

I suspect that’s why we only ever got this one season. Yet, for a one-season show about teenagers at a high school newspaper, there is a whole lot of interest in tracking it down and watching it again. It appears the closest anyone has gotten to fulfilling that goal, per the Lost Media subreddit, is knowing that episodes were on some Cypress High School educator’s computer in some ill-defined previous year.

Twenty-plus years after my own high school newspaper work, I’m still doing what I did then. I write stories that matter and try to get to the heart of it through a people-centered approach. I especially pride myself in amplifying young people’s voices and pushing back again and again and again against censorship because no one should have to feel like I did.

And while it hasn’t quite been 20 years for the cast of The Paper, it comes as no surprise that Amanda is as of this year a director of development for Disney Television Animation, helping get original animated series onto the network.

*We’ll ignore the weird fixation on the fact Amanda chose to get a rhinoplasty — folks can do with their bodies what they’d like, and in 2008, there was zero care about body shaming folks in the media who elected to get plastic surgery!