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.
Recommended reading from Bay Area educators recently featured in Youth Media Reporter.