Of all the stories I covered in 25 years of newspaper work, one of my favorites was the Kindling Five.

They were a clutch of anonymous high school students putting out an underground newspaper in a small school district near Atlanta, Ga.

The Kindling, as they called their paper, came to be particularly annoying to the local school superintendent, a Sunday school teacher given to crew cuts and educational pieties.

This usually mild-mannered superintendent showed a different side of himself when he told me in an interview that the Kindling was “smut” and “slanderous.”

I thought the newspaper was rather demure, considering its apparent lack of adult supervision.

Four-letter words were rendered with dashes. Critiques of school policy were clever, satirical and accurate.

The superintendent denied that he was mad that the Kindling revealed that he was being paid 20 times more money per pupil than any other superintendent in the area.

Several things made this story fun.

One was the Kindling Five’s ability to hide their identity while at the same time letting me interview them via anonymous e-mail.

Also of interest was the superintendent’s growing fury, insisting that his investigators were closing in on the culprits and would have them expelled presently.

Then there was the revelation by civil-liberty experts that not only had the Kindling Five done nothing wrong, but that the superintendent may have been violating their free-press rights with his threats.

Finally, the best part of the story: the Kindling Five came out. A happy, charming group of lads they were, as pictured above my story in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

It turned out that they were the high school’s valedictorian, followed by the senior class’s number two, three, four, and eight in grade-point averages.

They were all planning to attend top colleges around the country.

Thinking back, I realize that what I really enjoyed about this story was the delicious blend of education and journalism. Here were high-achieving students, perhaps a little bored with their good grades, jabbing authority and the culture of their school.

They weren’t great journalists, but they had a kind of heady autonomy and they had skillful use of the printed word. This is the nub of journalism, from Ben Franklin to Ben Bradlee.

The Kindling Five stirred things up. And to round off their high school education, they learned something real about power and the power of the press.

Student journalism does not have to be underground to be real journalism or to teach real lessons.

But the relationship between a legitimate school newspaper and its school is always a tricky business.

Take college newspapers, for example. Universities that subsidize and house campus newspapers are to be commended for letting students commit a rough-hewn journalism and for providing an open forum. But the holder of purse strings can call the shots. An administration nervous about the negative image that a campus newspaper often projects can clamp down.

Few universities are so short-sighted. But it is no accident that the campus newspapers most highly regarded by professional journalists, papers like the Harvard Crimson and the Daily Tar Heel at the University of North Carolina, have a long history of complete autonomy from the schools they cover.

Another tricky balance is the relationship between journalism programs and campus newspapers. Good journalism programs groom skilled student editors and reporters who compete with one another to practice their classroom learning in the pages of the campus newspaper.

But a strange thing has happened at Oregon State University since budget cuts killed its journalism school 10 years ago. For a few years, the student newspaper turned threadbare. But then it began to develop a new vitality.

Non-journalism students found they could contribute as soon as they walked in, and they brought with them a variety of new perspectives.

Summer internships with news organizations and support by outside journalists also helped.

This year, the OSU’s Daily Barometer shocked the world of campus newspapers by making it all the way to the “final four” of the Society of Professional Journalism’s Mark of Excellence competition.

Then, at the SPJ convention, the paper was named “best overall” among all college newspapers.

The Maroon navigates these difficult balances by the existential seat of its pants.

Loyola University supports and houses the newspaper, and wisely allows the student staff room to practice journalism that can be rambunctious and imperfect.

The staff tends to be students from the communications department, but your newspaper welcomes all students gladly, even desperately.

They don’t work 45-hour weeks, without pay, for brownie points in their communications classes.

I’m not involved with The Maroon, but I can see how hard the staff works.

These ragtag few, I say, have been bitten by the journalism bug. Good for them.

It’s the best form of learning I know. And it is open to all, like good citizenship. Consider joining them.

Douglas Cumming is an assistant professor of communications.