Author: Kendra Hurley

Censorship at high schools seems to be growing, and not just in the journalism departments. School administrators at one D.C.-area high school recently denied a teen his diploma because he wore a braided bolo beneath his purple graduation gown. The tie, a quiet tribute to the student’s Native American heritage, was too thin, administrators at his high school declared, according to the Washington Post. Meanwhile, opponents of education about homosexuality or acceptance of gay people are launching an attack on student activities related to those issues, the New York Times reports.
Might these events be related to a trend recently observed in the Christian Science Monitor? Worried that schools are becoming breeding grounds for liberal indoctrination, the paper reported, conservative activists are attempting to limit what teachers may discuss in class.

As an editor for Represent, a magazine written by teens in foster care, I sometimes felt besieged by requests from reporters looking to interview them. For a while Represent had no set policy for handling these requests, and I deliberated, sometimes painstakingly, over each one.
One of the organization’s goals, I knew, was to get teen voices heard as often as possible. Having writers quoted in stories was certainly one way to do that. On the other hand, Represent writers come to the organization to tell their stories in their own words, not to have their views interpreted for them by yet another adult. So each time a request arrived I went through the same consuming process of weighing the pros and cons to decide how to respond.
Staff at most youth media organizations find themselves in this position at one time or another. Reporters often want young people quoted in their stories but don’t know where to find them. In the best of worlds, making young people available for interviews is a good way to secure publicity for your organization while helping to get teens better represented in the press.
At Represent, a few reporters who interviewed our staff carefully quoted the young people in thoughtful, analytic stories that went a long way toward helping the public understand life in the system. In particular, an Associated Press article (here via CentreDaily.com) on some of our writers who’d once been labeled “crack babies” ended up in over 50 papers, attracting publicity for us while exposing the damage caused by labelling kids.
But there’s no guarantee that you’ll like what the reporter writes, that your organization will be credited in the story, or that the interviews themselves won’t cause problems with the young people you work with.

It seems ethically questionable to ask young people to divulge personal details about their lives to a stranger who promptly disappears once the story goes to press.

One reporter whom I helped fairly extensively while editing Represent ended up taking a position on child welfare that I found offensive. Another time, a TV show’s search for the right kid to interview spawned competition among my writers as they jockeyed to get on prime time, disrupting the newsroom’s normally congenial feel. And it almost always seemed ethically questionable to me to ask young people to divulge personal, often difficult details about their lives to a stranger who promptly disappears once the story goes to press.
To get an idea of how others in the field handle this tricky terrain, I talked with a handful of staff at other youth media organizations. Many of the newer organizations, I found, seem content treating requests from reporters on a case-by-case basis. But as an organization grows, requests come rolling in, especially if a group is working with a particular population that reporters have difficulty accessing, like kids in foster care or teens caught up in the juvenile justice system. At this juncture, most organizations find it helpful to form a few guidelines to fall back on when a reporter calls.
Having a clear mission helps many organizations determine how to respond to media requests. Like Youth Radio, a number of groups aim to ensure that young people are “the ones telling the story themselves, as a reporter,” explains Youth Radio news director and international desk editor Nishat Kurwa. With this in mind, staff at Youth Radio generally decline requests from reporters wanting to interview teens, though they do make young people available to speak on panels or to be interviewed as reporters themselves. “For the most part, we let them be in that outlet, telling that story instead of an adult,” says Kurwa.
Pacific News Service shares the view that teens should not be mere sources, but should be telling the stories themselves. Pacific News Service posts teen-written stories on its wire service alongside those written by adults, where other outlets can pick them up.
Children’s PressLine maintains a healthy sense of competition with more traditional news outlets. Executive Director Katina Paron expects reporters knocking on her organization’s door to acknowledge that the organization is set up to work with young people in a way that is more respectful and comprehensive than a reporter’s usual “hit-and-run” approach to getting quotes from teens. When a reporter requests an interview, Paron suggests that her own young reporters do the interview for them. Though reporters usually decline this offer, Paron allows them to interview her young people only if they identify them as journalists for Children’s PressLine.
Laura McCargar, executive director of Youth Rights Media, considers it “a win anytime we have a young person quoted in any form of mainstream press.” The organization’s mission views youth-made media as a tool for organizing and generating social change. “One of the bigger, systemic things that we’re looking at is ways in which young people have opportunities to contribute to mainstream dialogue and discourse,” explains McCargar.
All of the organizations I talked with take measures to protect young people who speak with reporters. Steve Goodman, executive director of the Educational Video Center describes his staff’s attitude toward the press as “skeptical” and “a protective one with our students.” An EVC staff member is usually present when reporters interview teens, says Goodman, though reporters who have earned the staff’s trust do get greater access.
Ken Ikeda of Youth Sounds never gives out information on youth directly, no matter how well his organization knows a reporter. McCargar at Youth Rights Media extensively prepares her teens for each interview, and Ginger Thompson, executive director of Youth Noise, requires all young people interviewed from the site’s advisory board to have parental permission. Donna Myrow of the teen-written newspaper LA Youth requires reporters to submit interview requests in writing for the teens to read.
At Represent, we eventually formed some rough guidelines for handling reporters’ requests. We decided to almost always say “no” to requests from journalism students, who frequently called. We figured that if a teen was going to open up to a reporter, we needed a guarantee that the story was going to be widely distributed. If a reporter wanted to write about the writer’s work at the magazine, we usually said yes. We also generally granted interviews if the reporter was from a news source that we trusted and felt could have a large impact, whether or not the story mentioned our magazine. Otherwise, we politely explained that it was not the mission of the magazine to make our young people available to reporters and instead encouraged them to quote liberally from the magazine.
Often I’d fax the journalists teen-written articles on the subjects they were researching, and a handful of reporters did quote from those stories. This thrilled me—the reporter got a teen voice in the story while still respecting the teens’ right to carefully choose their own words, and both the teens and the organization received proper credit. It seemed like the best of all worlds. After all, building support for an organization, as well as for the youth media field, means not only pushing to get young voices heard, but making sure youth media’s contributions receive due recognition.

Continue reading When a Reporter Calls

A new study from CIRCLE, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, suggests that students in service-learning programs are more likely to say they enjoy school and that they plan to vote. “Service-learning,” or “sustained community service projects that are closely connected to formal instruction and curriculum,” could describe many youth media programs. The report also explores the conditions that make for effective service-learning. For example, such a program must last at least a semester.

A 20-year teaching veteran offers hard-earned advice on how to stay motivated over the long haul in the newsletter Classroom Leadership. Not all of her tips apply to those in youth media—most of us don’t assign homework, for instance—but much of her wisdom does cross over. Her tips are especially applicable for those weathering the first year on the job.

Two magazines—one for-profit, the other not—give adolescent girls a space to explore and share the kinds of hard-hitting issues rarely found in the adult-written teen glossies. This Women’s Enews profile of Teen Voices and New Moon breaks down just how both magazines work, from paying the teen writers to sustaining the publications.

In the palms of young people, cameraphones are a new, personal form of storytelling, says Bonnie Bracey on the Digital Divide Network. Citing studies of Japanese mobile users, Bracey speculates that cameraphones might well “be the early indicators of a new dimension to social sensibility, the kind of media-enabled sensory shift that…changes not only the way we make small talk with friends, but the very fabric of social relations, in ways that are not possible to predict when they first surface.”

“Youth media” used to refer primarily to the radio snippets, video, and publications made by teens, for other teens. That has changed over the last decade as an increasing number of youth media groups and professional news outlets have forged relationships, allowing young voices to reach a wider audience.
Some of these unions resulted from professional outlets’ desire to attract younger viewers, readers, and listeners. Many of these outlets have since discovered that teen-produced material brings a voice and flavor that appeals to adults as well.
“Political commentary can be staid and stodgy,” explained Davina Baum, former managing editor of the website AlterNet. During the last presidential election, AlterNet ran youth-written stories about politics, giving its readers “a different take than typical commentaries,” said Baum. “Leaving out [young people’s] impressions of the world around them would be a huge gaping hole in our coverage.”
A Washington Post staff writer agrees. “Far too often we’ve failed to tell….stories [about young people] from the most telling perspective, which is the kids that are affected by them,” the unnamed writer told Washington City Paper.
Still, some adult-made media outlets are reluctant to pair with youth media makers. Forming partnerships with nonprofits requires new ways of working, and that can take considerable time and effort. Some editors and producers who have not seen examples of youth media aren’t convinced the effort is worth it. Several local newspapers with teen-written pages, for instance, do not hire editors trained and assigned to work with teens. As a result, many publish mailed-in material from teens largely “as is,” resulting in pages that the writer at Washington City Paper complained “are bad enough to repel readers of all ages.”
Nishat Kurwa, Youth Radio‘s news director and international desk editor, found that convincing producers and editors that teen-made media can be powerful is generally most difficult the first time a group makes a pitch. Kurwa, who has guided young people to create radio spots for National Public Radio, warns that youth media makers first approaching an outlet need to be ready to explain why their stories are newsworthy, and why a young person can tell them better than an adult.
Kurwa has found that editors and producers who do take the risk and effort of incorporating young people’s work into their usual fare are almost always willing to continue doing so, often discovering unexpected perks along the way. Youth bring story ideas that adults might never find on their own and have even broken national news. When the teen staff at the Tulsa World ran a story about pro-anorexic websites, Time and Newsweek covered it a week later, said Barbara Allen, editor of the newspaper’s teen pages.
But partnering with other media outlets isn’t for everyone. Not all youth media groups want to reach a wide audience, and some groups feel that time and resources could be better spent building partnerships with schools or helping young people gain a sense of ownership over their work.
The following is a sampling of successful unions—some fleeting, others sustained—between youth and adult media outlets.

In-House

Recognizing the importance of young people’s perspectives, some news outlets have created their own youth media groups. New York Public Radio began Radio Rookies, which trains teens to make first-person radio stories that air on WNYC. HBO began teaching New York City teens filmmaking at its Young Filmmaker’s Lab, and much of this work is broadcast on HBO or PBS. AlterNet began WireTap, a youth-written portion of its website, and Pacific News Service posts articles from its youth publications on its wire service, along with stories written by adults.
A number of smaller newspapers have also begun producing “youth pages” in-house. The best of these have committed to hiring a full-time, adult editor assigned to the teen staff. (The National Association of America Foundation’s Youth Editorial Alliance provides tips for reporters who want to convince their papers to produce a youth section and support for those already overseeing them.)

The “Midddleman”

Some of the most effective partnerships between individual youth media organizations and adult-made media outlets hinge on a liaison between youth and professional media outlets. These “middleman” organizations can help the youth media groups they work with focus more on producing quality work, and less on trying to distribute it.
WireTap produces its own youth-written material, but it also picks up and posts some of the best articles in youth media that have an activist slant.
The radio and video fields each have organizations that help distribute work to professional outlets. The well-supported Public Radio Exchange, which lets public and community radio find and air work from other stations, recently launched Generation PRX, which connects youth-made radio to stations nationwide, and will soon provide rankings of radio spots, making it easy for producers to sort through them.
For video, Listen Up! periodically commissions short documentaries and compiles them into a series to pitch to professional media outlets. Recently, Listen Up! commissioned teens at 15 groups around the world to produce shorts on fear and security. After pitching the idea to several outlets, Listen Up! agreed to work with a group that will show the videos on national television, said Sharese Bullock, manager of strategic partnerships in marketing.

Ongoing Partnerships

A handful of news outlets have formed ongoing partnerships with youth media groups. Scripps Howard News Service distributes Children’s PressLine articles to 400 papers across the country, said executive director Katina Paron, and the New York-based Amsterdam News has been publishing youth-written articles for over 20 years.
The Teen Environmental Media Network Team, a Bay Area program that trains teens to produce print and radio journalism on environmental issues, distributes articles through the local Marin County Weekly, which goes to 40,000 homes. Its two-minute radio reports air weekly on a San Francisco NPR station, said program coordinator Rachel Kleinman.

Case-By-Case

Many other youth media groups do not have regular partnerships with professional outlets, but have worked with news outlets when they themselves are approached first. Other youth media groups pitch their radio snippets, articles, or videos to listservs and more traditional outlets on a case-by-case basis.
Whatever type of relationship a youth media group desires with a professional outlet, getting a foot in the door is usually the hard part. “We do recognize someone is going to take a risk to run our material, and our job is convincing them that the risk is worth taking,” explained Paron of Children’s PressLine. But once they take the risk, she added, they’re usually sold.
Above left: Radio Rookies, started by WNYC, cohabitates peacefully with the NPR affiliate.

Continue reading Courting the “Other” Media

In the New Yorker article “Brain Candy,” Malcolm Gladwell reviews Steven Johnson’s provocative book Everything Bad Is Good For You (Riverhead), which purports that video games provide teens with an intense learning experience. The book reminds us, writes Gladwell, “that we shouldn’t fall into the trap of thinking that explicit learning is the only kind of learning that matters.”

Last winter, a study commissioned by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation found that one in three U.S. high school students say the press ought to be more restricted, and even more say the government should approve newspaper stories before readers see them, USA Today reported.

At the time of the report’s release, David Shaw noted in the Los Angeles Times the disturbing connection between the study’s findings and his observation that “Censorship of high school papers and disciplining of their editors and reporters are at an all-time high.” This climate seems to be continuing–last month a Georgia high school newspaper as well as the school’s journalism class were shut down after the principal criticized the paper for its negative stories and a lack of thorough reporting, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Early last year I attended a conference, hosted by the Time Warner Foundation, for adults who help teens produce their own media. One of the writers I’d worked with, 20-year-old Miguel, came with me. He listened intently when a panel of editors and producers from mainstream media outlets mentioned their desire to appeal to a younger audience. It’s a hot topic, as newspapers and television news have steadily lost young readers and viewers for the last two decades.
Miguel sensed that he might be part of the solution. His articles for Represent, the magazine by teens in foster care, which I edited, were among the most popular with its young readership. Miguel asked how he might get one of his stories reprinted in a glossy publication. One editor politely explained that magazines like hers do not reprint stories—they want original material—but Miguel was welcome to pitch a story to the magazine directly. If they liked his pitch, Miguel could write it on assignment.
Miguel looked at me with an exasperation I understood. We both knew that his writing an article independently would likely be impossible. Sure, Miguel was one of the star writers at Represent, but he was also one of the trickiest kids I’d worked with. Some of Miguel’s stories took him eight months to write, and I spent much of that time coaching him through them. For every 10 minutes Miguel sat at his computer working, he spent 30 doing something he wasn’t supposed to—interrupting the other teens at computers, arguing loudly on the phone with the staff at his group home, hopping outside for cigarette breaks. Miguel required constant nagging and attention. My boss often remarked that each teen-written story we developed cost the organization $2,500, when he included staff salaries, overhead, and equipment. By that estimation, I thought Miguel’s stories must be twice as expensive. But they were worth it.
His personal narratives gave unusually intimate views of struggling with mental illness, homelessness, and life in the foster care system. He also wrote first-person stories about more topical issues, like struggling with obesity, or bullying, from the perspective of the bully. Some of his stories had been picked up by listservs or other alternative publications, but often it seemed unfortunate that his work didn’t find a wider audience in the mainstream media.
I knew why. As the editor at the conference had said, mainstream glossies and most large newspapers rarely reprint stories. They want original work. It makes their publication look better, and it gives them more control over content. But traditional newsrooms are not set up to provide the ongoing support many young writers require. Unless the mainstream press rethinks their reprint policy, or considers collaborating with professionals already working with teens, it’s unlikely that a voice like Miguel’s will appear in the publications read by most of the country.
The last few months have brought a flurry of articles about print media’s losing battle to attract young readers. Now is an opportune time for the mainstream press to explore how the radio industry, online publications, and some innovative local newspapers have already begun adding the youth voice to their usual fare.
While many news outlets are losing young audiences, the newspaper industry is doing so at an especially alarming clip. Less than a fifth of 18-to-34-year-olds rank newspapers as their primary source of news, a recent study by the Carnegie Corporation found, and 12% of the young people surveyed said they “never” read a paper to get news. More significant, the average age of newspaper readers is 53, according to the Los Angeles Times. Studies show that teens aren’t uninterested in the world: 44% of young adults surveyed visited a web news portal every day, according to the Carnegie study, and another 44% of online Americans aged 18-29 read blogs often, the Economist reported in April.

Young people who are used to blogging, podcasting, and citizen journalism—where just about everyone is a potential reporter—”don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important.”

Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corporation, one of the world’s largest media companies, suggested to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in April that newspapers have lost young readers in part because they have not sufficiently adapted to reaching them. Teens, twenty-somethings, and even thirty-somethings who are used to blogging, podcasting, and citizen journalism—where just about everyone is a potential reporter—“don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important,” the Economist quoted Murdoch, “and they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.” And Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. told the Washington City Paper that research shows teens are “suspicious of adults trying to produce something that is of particular interest to them.”
As a Nieman Reports study found last year, readers want to be part of the news dialogue, and young people in particular like attitude and strong beliefs mixed with their news. These qualities—spunk and analysis, news interpreted by a peer instead of an expert—abound in the radio spots, articles, and videos created by teens. And there’s some proof that young people really do respond to this type of media. One study indicated that while the traditional newspaper industry steadily loses young readers, youth (as well as ethnic) media was “all the rage in 2004,” Journalism.org reported. Circulation of youth and ethnic media papers had risen steadily over the previous four years and was expected to continue growing.
Understanding the appeal and importance of adding a youth voice to its mix, the radio industry has pioneered partnerships with youth media organizations. National Public Radio and its local affiliates regularly run spots produced by young people at organizations like Blunt Radio in Maine, Radio Rookies in New York City, Radio Arte in Chicago, and Youth Radio in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Public Radio Exchange, which lets public and community radio find and air work from other stations, has recently launched Generation PRX, which connects youth-made radio to stations nationwide.
Some online publications and news services have also taken admirable measures to spotlight teen-written material. Alternet houses the youth-written WireTap. Scripps Howard News Service wires stories produced at Children’s PressLine, and Pacific News Service posts articles from its many teen-written publications alongside those by adults. Many glossy teen magazines have also produced blogs to get the voices of actual teens on their sites.
But in the print industry, collaborations between youth media and the mainstream press are comparatively rare. (To be fair, dozens of local newspapers have begun producing their own youth-written pages with mixed results. Not surprisingly, the best of these are overseen by adult editors who work full-time on the pages and manage, in person, a teen staff.) But few magazines and few larger newspapers—for which circulation figures have dropped most dramatically—regularly run teen-written stories. Yet, asks Barbara Allen, editor of the Tulsa World’s teen-written pages, “what better way to draw in a demographic than to draw in the people you want to reach and let them do the writing themselves?”
The First National EXPO of Ethnic Media on June 9, 2005, at Columbia University in New York City, represents one key opportunity to begin conversations between youth media organizations and mainstream publications. The EXPO’s “Media By Young America” segment provides a rare occasion when members of the youth media field come together to share ideas, find commonalities, argue over the nuances of the work, and showcase the kind of media teens can produce. It could be an important opportunity for editors of mainstream print publications to see how other media outlets have benefited from bringing in a youth voice, and how it could help print publications appeal to a young audience.
In his April speech, Rupert Murdoch implied that newspaper editors must find new ways to lure back young readers. No one knows yet what that will entail, but if they come to the EXPO, they may glimpse the future.
Above left: The First National EXPO of Ethnic Media, New York City, 2005.

Continue reading Can Teens Save the Newspaper Business?