Letter from the Editor
Welcome to Youth Media Reporter’s third web issue in 2008. The articles in Volume 2: Issue 3 focus on ways the field can better serve queer youth and focus on hip-hop as a media tool.
Contributors from Reel Grrls, Twin Cities Youth Media Network, Bay Area Video Coalition, New York University, Aang Serian Community Studio (Tanzania) and filmmaker Byron Hurt of Beyond Beats & Rhymes suggest that the field:
• Support queer youth and their inventive approaches to making media and eradicating homophobia;
• Amplify the impact of youth produced media by extending projects beyond production;
• Consider the dangers of claiming a utopian answer to a population’s need for voice;
• Learn how Tanzanian youth use Hip-Hop to inform their communities of HIV/AIDS and become part of the solution;
• Review cases of how Hip-Hop is used in schools, using alternative media is a more effective approach to learning;
• Understand how Hip-Hop can be used critically to inform and lead youth, from the anti-sexist approach of Byron Hurt, filmmaker of the award-winning documentary Beyond Beats & Rhymes; and,
• Recognize Hip-Hop as an important youth media tool that affords urban youth cultural and personal expression.
See our podcasts and vodcast for further insights from practitioners at REACH LA, Radio Arte, and Hook Productions.
This marks the mid-way point in our web-release issues this year, a great time to subscribe to our annual print journal and reserve your copy. If you would like an electronic version of the YMR print journal—that is free only this year—we have uploaded a PDF version onto the site. We encourage the wide dissemination of the PDF to be used as an important resource covering leading youth media pedagogies and practices. We look forward to your subscription for next year’s print journal.
Upcoming topics: Issue 4 (release date: August 15) will contain eight intellectual and scholarly peer-reviewed articles researching the field and Issue 5 (release date: October 15) will contain six articles on youth media and electoral politics leading up to the Presidential election.
We are always interested in new writers. Please see our writing guideline packet in the “write for YMR” section of the site or contact me to receive a word doc version. We’d love to work with you on producing a high quality article for publication in YMR.
Warmly,
Ingrid Hu Dahl
Editor, Youth Media Reporter