Quietly, a little revolution has been launched out of Ellenville High School over the last couple of months. A group of local kids have been embracing journalism and have been steadily, poignantly, and often humorously, documenting the world around them.

With a free mobile app to go with it for any smartphone, a new online publication called Devil’s Advocate has begun for local high school students with a yen for reporting, allowing them to post news to be read and shared among the school community.

The brainchild of Alex Shiffer, proprietor of the Shawangunk Journal, Devil’s Advocate is an effort to give students a voice to expound on how they view their world — and allows for parents, teachers and administrators, as well as the general public, to read unvarnished reports on what’s going on in the school that occupies so much of their time and energy.

Recent stories posted on Devil’s Advocate ranged across quite a wide spectrum of concerns. "Days in Freshman Life" anchored things at one corner, a report with pictures on the Blue Devils’ home win over mighty Pine Bush in boys’ basketball starred on another day, while a lengthy interview with a popular teacher did so on the next. Music reviews vie with reports on the School District’s troubled Capital Project, while fashion is observed and reported on so everyone can be aware of what sneakers they should not be seen dead in. All of these aspects of life are important to various degrees in the under-18 set, and until now had not been available on their phones!

The world of high school is, in many ways, the world beyond high school, only with more bells and a greater variety of stresses. Replace Algebra with your monthly report for the regional sales meeting, replace your least favorite teacher with your least favorite manager, replace gym with gym, and when you’re commuting, perhaps hours on highways or in the subway somewhere, you may find yourself tearing up when you think about that big yellow bus that took you effortlessly across the hills to school.

Devil’s Advocate began in October and is slowly building. Around ten students have been writing, at various clips, spaced out on that spectrum. While most are girls, there is a male entrant, and there may be more of them. The standard of writing is high, intelligence is to the fore, and there are efforts at humor, too.

Jasmine Shiffer, now in her junior year at Ellenville and a columnist for this newspaper, is the editor for Devil’s Advocate. Despite the stress of meeting deadlines and tracking down assignments from a fractious group of writers (which includes her sister), she is philosophic about the role. "I’ve been surprised at how much I’ve liked doing it. I like working with what people write — it’s fun."

Alayna Stickles, a writer, says "I think it’s the first paper here where we get to choose our stories and make them interesting, not just falsely happy."

There is a post every morning at 7:30, and often a second one later in the day. Readers are notified as soon as something new is posted with an alert on their phone, adding to the timeliness of the experience.

Alex Shiffer makes some interesting points about this rising news service via an app. "It’s different in the delivery method of your typical student newspaper, which for most schools either is printed once or twice a year, or doesn’t even exist anymore. Kids will actually read words on a phone." He continues: "It’s produced by students for students, but it’s not a free-for-all. Every post is reviewed by a professional editor at the newspaper, and we make sure the student writers adhere to the same standards of the Shawangunk Journal: honest, fact-based journalism and responsible opinion writing. And lots of pictures."

The biggest challenge has been growing the readership. Devil’s Advocate has around 200 readers currently, and grows by a few every day. "One thing we discovered is that a school community is not inherently ‘viral’ — there are many small social worlds in the school and so news only slowly bleeds out from one group to the next. But we’re also waiting for that big story that everyone wants to know about. When that happens, just like with the Shawangunk Journal, readership will explode."

In time, Shiffer expects that Devil’s Advocate will bridge the gaps between groups and send news zipping swiftly through the high school, not as unsubstantiated rumors, nor as weird misinformation, but as properly reported and edited news stories. And it won’t just be Ellenville. Other schools are in the process of adopting the technology and will come online next year.

Shiffer also addresses the reason for setting up Devil’s Advocate.

"Previous efforts to bring students into writing for the newspaper, which we see as important within our communities, failed, because students today have very little contact with newspapers. We realized that they primarily read on their phones, and so we wanted to engage with them there. To reach that demographic with news content, it had to be delivered to them where they live, and that’s not print."

But what about the rest of us that still read on paper, or on a desktop computer? "We plan on publishing a selected post in the print Shawangunk Journal every week, and the entire Devil’s Advocate publication will be available on the newspaper’s online platform, NewsAtomic. We’re still working out the details, but we believe our newspaper readers would like to know what such an important part of the community — our kids — are thinking."