Author: Kendra Hurley

Youth Media Reporter previously ran an in-brief item about the teen journalist who went undercover to see how far the army would go to get one more soldier. His “sting operation” drew national attention (and criticism). An Editor & Publisher article takes a closer look at how the young reporter got his story and the aftermath of his investigation. The piece provides a good way to get teens talking about what constitutes ethical reporting.

Foundations have a penchant for collaborations. As Children’s PressLine program director Katina Paron told Youth Media Reporter, foundations “love partnerships because it saves on resources for them.” But finding the right group to work with isn’t easy, especially when many nonprofits want to partner only with organizations sharing their own beliefs and missions.
But that’s going about it all wrong, argues Michael C. Gilbert on Nonprofit Online News. “The great secret of successful collaboration is this: The only agreement you have to have is on what you are all going to do,” he says. “You have to agree on actions. You don’t have to bring the visions and missions of your organizations into alignment…The less tightly we hold to our narrow organizational identities … the sooner we will forge the movements and coalitions needed to truly save the world from the forces of fear and greed.”

“Today’s publishers are eager to work with teen authors, because they want to reach younger readers,” says the Christian Science Monitor, quoting the author of a book for teens looking to publish. Every now and then a teenager emerges from the woodwork with a blockbuster book, most recently Nigerian-born British author Helen Oyeyemi. At 18, Oyeyemi penned the acclaimed novel The Icarus Girl. But a youthful sensation doesn’t always lead to a literary career, the Monitor warns.

For mentoring programs to work, they need to be done right. For instance, studies show that a mentor who ends the mentoring relationship too soon can actually harm a young person. It’s one of the reasons that finding ways to retain staff is crucial at youth media organizations. Mentoring.org now offers a (free and downloadable) tool kit, Elements of Effective Practice, with templates and advice to help organizations ensure quality mentoring.

“Technology is making today’s kids the most demanding and challenging students in history,” writes Don Tapscott on the Milken Family Foundation website. Surfing the web, young people “are not viewers; they are users and they are active.” By giving kids “the tools to question, challenge, and disagree,” technology is morphing them into “a generation of critical thinkers.” It is also, little by little, revolutionizing education, shifting the learning experience from teacher-centered to learner-centered. One study, comparing a traditional classroom to one taught virtually, found that those in the web-based class performed higher on their exams, felt more interested in the class, and said they understood the material better.

Talking to the Press

Ginger Thompson, executive director of the Bay Area-based website Youth Noise, talked with Youth Media Reporter about working with adult reporters. For more advice on collaborating with the press, Thompson recommends a report produced by the organization We Interrupt This Message. Researched and written by teens, “Speaking for Ourselves: A Youth Assessment of Local News Coverage” explores how the Bay Area media represents young people. “What they’ve discovered is the press in the Bay Area is negatively skewed towards youth, and that’s the general state of affairs in the media,” explains Thompson. The report provides tips for encouraging reporters to write positive stories about teens.

Teaching Media Literacy

“It’s not a book,” admits former Wiretap editor Twilight Greenaway about her recommendation, Just Think’s “Flipping the Script.” “But it’s a very thorough discussion of media literacy from a hip-hop perspective.” The curriculum and its 30-page guidebook help educators use hip-hop to engage young people in thinking critically about the media. Packed with detailed lesson plans and activities that can be incorporated into most youth media programs, it was recently extolled in the Los Angeles Times.

Taking It to the Ivory Towers

An increasing number of youth media educators have recently written books and articles about their work. Many of these ruminations place youth media in an academic context, such as Steve Goodman’s Teaching Youth Media: A Critical Guide to Literacy, Video Production, and Social Change and Kathleen Tyner’s Literacy in a Digital World: Teaching and Learning in the Age of Information. Youth Radio‘s Nishat Kurwa recommends a book that continues this trend. Coedited by Kurwa’s colleague Elisabeth Soep, Youthscapes: The Popular, the National, the Global explores globalization through young people’s perspectives, including their media. Though published just this summer, a chapter of Youthscapes is already assigned reading for at least one Oberlin College American Studies course.

Continue reading What’s on Your Bookshelf?

Rap provides a precious means of self expression for Israeli Arab youth, reports the Christian Science Monitor. In contrast to American “gangster rappers,” young Palestinian hip-hop musicians eschew terror and violence. To reach as wide an audience as possible, the band DAM (Da Arabian MCs) raps in Hebrew, Arabic, and English, and it pays off. Their performances regularly sell out in Israel, the occupied Palestinian Territories, and Europe. “We take things day to day, just trying to survive,” said one band member. “And that’s hip-hop. Hip-hop is about surviving.”

A new survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project looks at teens and the Internet. The results are no surprise: teens use the net in record numbers. Still, some three million teens remain without web access, most of them low-income and a disproportionate number are African American. “When so many teenagers have such access,” Susannah Stern, assistant professor of communication studies at the University of San Diego, told the Associated Press (here via Yahoo! News), “the few that don’t are at a significant disadvantage.” Further fueling this digital divide is the fact that it’s a challenge to find people to teach teens how to use the Internet.

Crusaders against gangsta rap often fail to include in their reform plans those most affected by its explicit sex and violence: young people, points out the Los Angeles Times (registration required). That’s where media literacy programs like the San Francisco nonprofit Just Think come in. “As activists busy themselves with boycotts and contemplate how low hip-hop culture has sunk,” reports the L.A. newspaper, “media literacy programs provide young people with the skills to process intelligently whatever that lowbrow culture should send their way.”

Critical of what they consider attempts by conservatives to take over mass media and public broadcasting, two U.S. congress members have introduced a bill seeking “to undo the massive consolidation of the media that has been ongoing for nearly 20 years,” says the Hollywood Reporter (via Mediachannel.org).