Author: Kendra Hurley

Increasingly, teens are no longer satisfied to “let a bunch of middle-aged people tell [them] what it’s like to be an American teen,” reports the L.A. Times (registration required). “That attitude is spreading as more teenage writers storm the barricades of publishing, starting with the YA category but by no means ending there.”

Student protesters in France are fighting a policy that would allow young workers to be fired without cause. U.S. media coverage has been largely unsympathetic to the young activists, and Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting puzzles over why.

Federal regulation requires radio stations to serve local communities in return for airwaves. A group of young activists and musicians in California say the media giant Clear Channel is shirking this responsibility, resulting in monotonous programming (for anyone without an Ipod) and neglected communities. The Youth Media Council challenged two Bay Area Clear Channel affiliates with petitions to deny future licensing on the grounds that the station “did not serve their local communities and did not provide adequate access to their public records,” Wiretap reports.

Local Insight into an International Problem

Last week Christopher Schuepp, who recently spoke to YMR about the international youth media movement, accompanied a group of young Albanian TV journalists to Macedonia. When the teens walked into a high school in Skopje, everyone “terribly booed,” says Schuepp. Why? One week earlier the local media had wrongly vilified the young journalists.
The issue of young people receiving an inordinate amount of negative press is an international problem, says Schuepp. “Similar things are happening in France right now,” he notes. “The students and young people demonstrating against the unfair new job regulations are simply portrayed as ‘troublemakers’” by the Agence France Press.
To help combat youth stereotyping in the media, Schuepp recommends reading “Speaking for Ourselves: A Youth Assessment of Local News Coverage.”
“It gives great background information and in-depth data on one of the main issues that is wrong with the media today: the negative portrayal of young people,” says Schuepp. “I think the conclusions and recommendations in ‘Speaking for Ourselves’ should be sent to the Agence France Press immediately. And actually to all practicing journalists around the globe.”

Giving Up on Cool: A Media Literacy Tool

Dave Yanofsky of Uth TV, who recently wrote about quality in youth media, recommends Frontline’s film Merchants of Cool: A Report on the Creators & Marketers of Popular Culture for Teenagers. The video takes a close look at how creators and sellers of popular culture have made teenagers the “hottest consumer demographic in America,” according to Frontline. It explores questions relevant to media literacy such as: Are the creators of cool “simply reflecting teen desires or have they begun to manufacture those desires in a bid to secure this lucrative market? And have they gone too far in their attempts to reach the hearts—and wallets—of America’s youth?”
Yanofsky, who used to head the media literacy organization Just Think, has found that the video provides ample fuel for a group discussion “about youth culture, advertising, and media literacy. Teens can use it to gain insight into how they often end up walking around with a huge bulls eye on their backs when it comes to advertising and the creation of ‘cool.’”

Evaluating Program Impact

Youth programs work is an eternal request of funders, yet evaluating youth media program impact is still a trial-and-error process, YMR recently reported. Tony Streit of the Educational Development Center (EDC) says that might soon change, thanks to the Center’s ongoing research around youth media program evaluation.
On April 17, EDC’s YouthLearn will launch an update to their website that will provide a look inside their work with Time Warner–funded youth media programs. EDC assisted Time Warner grantees in building capacity to conduct effective program evaluations. The new section has easy-to-follow strategies, evaluation models, and tools for youth media programs looking to measure impact. EDC’s research on self-assessment methods common to the field is also available.

Continue reading What They’re Reading (and Watching)

“We are currently in the midst of an explosion of video and filmmaking by young people,” Youth Media Distribution (YMDI) reports. “Giving these young filmmakers the tools they need to get their artistic work out to the public is essential.” YMDI does just that with lessons for youth media educators that guide students through the earliest stages of film planning to distributing their work. Lessons are intended to be used with individual students who already have some training in filmmaking or videography—they do not include basic filming or editing techniques, for instance.

“Human beings have always had a capacity to attend to several things at once,” reports a Time Magazine cover story (subscription or day pass required). But “the phenomenon has reached a kind of warp speed in the era of Web-enabled computers.”
According to one study, a whopping 82 percent of kids are online by the seventh grade. The Kaiser Family Foundation discovered last year that “media multitasking” had kids packing 8.5 hours of media watching into a mere 6.5 hours a day.
How is all this affecting teens?
For one, Time reports, teens have become especially adept at synthesizing and manipulating information, particularly visual data and images. But they have less tolerance for ambiguity, and little mental downtime to relax and reflect, which have some social scientists concerned.

A new computer game developed by professors at the University of Michigan makes an adventure of “getting the story,” the Associated Press (via ABC News) reports. Chasing facts, players face formidable foes like sources, editors, and librarians. Through it all they must keep cool. Overly confrontational questioning prompts sources to shut down, saying, “I don’t like your attitude.”

“As the ‘blogosphere’ continues its rapid expansion,” notes a Chicago Tribune article (via YouthLearn), “more teachers are using Web logs to engage students in the world at large.” In the aricle “educators list their favorite edublogs and note that teachers and students have yet to exploit the new medium to its fullest.” One teacher considers blogs “a powerful learning tool that students gravitate toward, initially, because of their social aspect.”

As the Iranian regime has shut down over 100 magazines and newspapers in the last six years and imprisoned many journalists, young Iranians “have turned to the Internet to get news and information—and to discuss their society,” reports Salon.com (must watch a short advertisement for access). Blogs sprouting from Iran, where seventy percent of the population is under 30, provide insight into “the tension bubbling up in the ordinary hearts of Iran’s predominantly young population.” Some believe these young bloggers “represent a new, nonviolent breed of activist,” desperate for “a genuinely accountable society.” Indeed, blogging in Iran can come with consequences—in 2003, Iran’s became “the first regime known to imprison a blogger.”

A 2005 Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that young people spend over six hours per day with media, yet only 6 percent of respondents reported watching the news. According to the Sacramento Bee (here via the Newstribune.com), getting youth interested in the news “is widely seen as the biggest challenge” to the media industry today.
Others consider it a challenge to democracy as well: “How do you hold the government and its leaders accountable if you don’t follow the news?” wonders one former CNN producer.
Young people say they feel talked down to by mainstream media, but one college professor sees things differently: “They totally don’t care,” he says.
Ellin O’Leary of Youth Radio in Berkeley sheds considerably more optimistic light: “Young people are less interested in ‘the news,’ but remain extremely interested in information,” she says. “They’re coming up through a tremendous information revolution. They’re mixing media and formats.”