Category: 2005

September 11. The tsunami in Asia. Now Hurricane Katrina. “With the Internet and 24-hour TV, you just see all these problems,” said one college freshman in the New York Times (subscription required). “They’re everywhere.” According to the Times, a surge of social activism among young people has resulted from the combination of global tragedy, its high visibility, and—if those are insufficient catalysts—the desire to impress college gatekeepers.

Last June, the Neighborhood Story Project published five books by teenagers documenting life before Hurricane Katrina in inner-city New Orleans, including the Ninth and Sixth Wards. The books feature interviews and photographs of the writers’ families and neighbors, as well as personal stories, such as how residents in a public housing complex became one young writer’s surrogate family once her mother, who struggled with drugs, passed away.
The books were an instant local hit last summer, selling 2,000 copies at New Orleans bookstores, corner stores, and block parties. A print run of 4,000 more copies was scheduled when Katrina struck, and all existing books-for-sale disappeared in the storm and ensuing flood.
Soft Skull Press, a Brooklyn-based independent book publisher, quickly got involved, agreeing to help raise money for another print run. Via an email interview, Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash talked with Youth Media Reporter about his collaboration with the project and how the books can help contribute to New Orleans’s reconstruction.

Why did Soft Skull decide to get involved with the Neighborhood Story Project after Hurricane Katrina?

In effect, those books show you who was flooded.
In the reporting being done about the hurricane, people mostly hear either about the collapse of civic order (whomever you might blame—federal government or local, or poverty, or what have you). Or they hear about the physical devastation of Katrina. But a crucial and too often overlooked element, especially when thinking about what is to come is: What are the social networks of people in the Sixth and Ninth Wards? How do you rebuild using the knowledge of the people who actually live there?
The Neighborhood Story Project books are ethnographies of the blocks. They tell you about the people. And when thinking about reconstructing the city there’s a danger both from laissez-faire conservatives (who say, “give them tax credits and school vouchers”) and from liberal urbanists (who say, “here’s a massive plan for fixing the whole shebang”) that the people will be ignored in the process. These books are documents of the people.

The neighborhood books have sold well in New Orleans. Do you think residents outside of the city will be interested in them?

People want to learn about the world in which they live. This is especially the case when it’s a world that is insufficiently documented. That’s why they’ve sold in NOLA.
In the rest of the country, it will be much harder. The books in and of themselves are valuable—a couple of them are awfully strong—but there would ordinarily be a perception that these books speak only to New Orleans, and under ordinary circumstances it would have been rather difficult for a publisher to overcome that perception, given how reliant any publisher is on booksellers and the media to get the word out to consumers.
(A publisher is just one little part of things, and we operate at the mercy of other sectors, and we talk, talk, ’til we’re blue in the face about how important the content of books might be, but if folks don’t believe us, that’s that.)
But because of what happened in NOLA, we believe interest will be higher, and that’s what gives these books a shot at a national audience. Perversely.
But really, fundamentally, no one in publishing knows why some books are hits and others aren’t. Sometimes a connection is made, and we have explanations ex post facto, but really we’re just blind people grasping elephants.

The neighborhood books appear on Soft Skull’s homepage. How are sales going so far?

No idea. Way too early to tell!

Is this the first youth media project Soft Skull has gotten involved in?

A whole chunk of our books overlap in some fashion with youth media. You look at the totality of our list, and there are a gazillion different actual and potential overlaps: Bomb the Suburbs, No More Prisons, Hey Kidz, Buy This Book, Please Feed Me, Life and Limb, Zine Yearbook, How to Get Stupid White Men Out of Office, That’s Revolting, Get Your War On, Classified, You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive, all books that we’ve published or are about to publish.

What is your arrangement with the project?

This is being done as a benefit, so we are structuring the deal whereby the neighborhood project is getting an enormous proportion of the revenues from the sales, a proportion that would ordinarily be impossible for Soft Skull to survive on, but morally that’s what is necessary under the circumstances.
The Neighborhood Story Project plans to use proceeds to help refugee high school students document the stories of life in the Astrodome.

How did you hear about the neighborhood project?

Well there’s a long a complicated back-story to that. Abram Himelstein, one of the neighborhood project’s two founding schoolteachers, was known in the indie publishing world because of his popular, self-published book Tales of a Punk Rock Nothing. Plus two of our staff knew him even better. Plus one of those two folks had actually moved down to NOLA and was working for Soft Skull from a home office.

How has the experience of working with them been so far? Any future plans with the organization?

Oh I love them, I’m really proud to have the opportunity to help. I hope I can keep doing so.

What’s the best way for youth media groups to approach independent publishers?

Email the publisher. That’s where you can start.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Given the questions you’re asking, probably what’s necessary is a conference. We know that the Right—both Christian and secular—has been networking and conferencing, logrolling, quite frankly for 30 years, and progressives should start doing that. Think tanks, policy institutes, grassroots organizations, web and print media, publishers, should all be meeting, ideally with funding from the kinds of organizations who are throwing money at Democratic Party candidates, since a tiny percentage of that money could do wonders for developing more robust approaches to progressive ideas in the coming decade and beyond.
Above left: Palmyra Street, by Jana Dennis, published by the Neighborhood Story Project, 2005.

Continue reading Eyes of the Hurricane

Because of the secretive nature of illicit drug use, there is usually a lag between the appearance of a new drug trend and public information about it. After studying 26 different European magazines for youth, the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) recently concluded that media read by youth “constitutes a useful and low-cost source of information for monitoring and understanding drug trends among defined readerships by reflecting lifestyles that reveal much about young people’s drug behaviour and attitudes that official statistics do not reveal.”
Furthermore, the study found, “Youth magazines studied were more likely than mainstream magazines to cover both the risks and benefits of cannabis and ecstasy use. In contrast, they adopted more proscriptive approaches to heroin and crack.”

In Bakersfield, California, three student editors are suing their school’s superintendent for pulling the plug on an issue of their newspaper that explored the topic of gay teenagers, reported the Monterey Herald. As more student journalists express interest in writing about gay and lesbian topics, censorship in school newspapers appears to be on the rise, said Mark Goodman of the Student Press Law Center. It’s striking that such censorship is occurring in California, one of only six states granting student journalists the same freedom of speech as professional journalists. “Without a question, it’s fair to say the students are more comfortable with the topic than administrators,” said Goodman.

Excerpting Jonathan Kozol’s new book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, a Harper’s Magazine September cover story (here via Mindfully.org) makes the case that segregation is thriving in American urban public schools, and not by accident.
Kozol also lays bare the economic disparity of money spent on kids and their teachers in suburban schools compared to those in inner cities. Explaining how she and her classmates understood the racial segregation of their neighborhood and schools, one Harlem teenager told the author, “It’s as if you have been put in a garage where, if they don’t have room for something but aren’t sure if they should throw it out, they put it there where they don’t need to think of it again.”
Kozol’s findings are all the more poignant in light of debates over where to school the 372,000 displaced children of Hurricane Katrina. Supported by the Bush administration, a number of states want to teach them in shelters, despite a landmark federal law banning the educational segregation of homeless children, reports theWall Street Journal.

Not long ago, many of us working in youth media did not consider ourselves part of a field. And, really, why would we? Opportunities to share practices and collaborate with others working on teen-produced media were few and far between. Conferences tended to lump us together based on our means of communication—print, radio, film, the web—not on how or with whom we worked.
Foundations did not earmark funding specifically for youth media, isolating organizations further. Competing for grants, many groups felt pressured to package themselves in the categories funders sought—as either activist-oriented or artistic, focused on product or process, or preoccupied with distribution or education reform.
But as foundations like the Open Society Institute and that of Time Warner have recognized and funded youth media as a field, grantees at resulting conferences have begun to see far more similarities in our philosophies, missions, and approaches to our work than previously imagined.
Since then, youth media as a topic in and of itself began making the agenda at related conferences, like last June’s Ethnic Media Expo as well as Scholarship in the Digital Age, hosted last year by the Institute for Multimedia Literacy.
These opportunities have led to a new phase of reflection. Educators have begun thinking and planning on a macro level, placing a premium on not just continuing the work of helping teens make media, but reflecting on that work—on codifying practices and evaluating impacts, on determining where youth media fits and diverges from the many fields and movements it borrows from and builds upon—such as alternative education, narrative therapy, and independent media.
“There’s an obvious thirst for dialogue, for tools, for sharing best practices among people working to support youth media,” said Rachel Alterman Wallack, executive director of the Atlanta-based youth publication VOX, at the Ethnic Media Expo.
The new premium on reflection is apparent in the many conferences and collaborations that have emerged over the last five years, in new and unprecedented opportunities for practitioners to develop professionally, and in the increase in research and writing about the field. Recent conferences, collaborations, and venues for professional development include:
– A collaboration between the Educational Video Center and the Education Development Center’s YouthLearn Initiative to create new resources for the field, including a peer network linking youth media educators to each other.
– The National Alliance for Media Art’s and Culture’s Youth Media Leadership Institute, where 20 educators from around the country received fellowships to convene in Oregon where they set goals for leading and advancing the field.

– The formation of the New York City Learning Network, a group of film educators who meet monthly to discuss their work and topics such as critical literacy.
Research and writing about youth media include:
– The Education Development Center’s YouthLearn Initiative’s ongoing research into how youth media programs evaluate their impact.
– The film Born into Brothels, about a youth media project in India, which won the Oscar for best documentary this year. The film reflects a growing trend in media produced by youth media educators that explores their line of work, often placing it in an academic context.
– The intensified push by a number of individual organizations to better understand, evaluate, research, and codify their work. Berkeley-based Youth Radio has an in-house researcher who helps staff and youth develop, document, and evaluate learning at the program. L.A. Youth, Youth Radio, and Youth Communication have mental health professionals on-call for managing and understanding the emotional issues of the job. At Youth Communication, where I work, staff has recently undertaken an effort to define our practice through documenting our work—practices, strategies, philosophies and lessons—in an ever-growing manual.
Over the next several months, Youth Media Reporter will run articles that look closely at the different types of reflection happening in the field, as well as what youth media groups and educators are gaining from it and whether it is likely to bring more money to the field.
Of course, most of a youth media professional’s day is spent not in reflection, but raising funds, working with teens, and putting out a product. But it’s the moments when we do get glimpses of the bigger picture—the conferences, collaborations, time to view the work of colleagues—which can sometimes be unexpectedly exhilarating, leading to new ways of thinking and planning for how this line of work can continue to grow and evolve. (In this sense, feeling part of something larger than one’s own organization can help prevent burnout and quick turnover at nonprofits.)
The relaunched Youth Media Reporter, now six months old, is itself part of this new phase of introspection, and the comment page of some articles—like Ken Ikeda’s review of Born into Brothels—make apparent how ready youth media educators are to engage in dialogue about their work. My hope is that all youth media educators can help make it the most useful tool possible for reflecting on their practice and sharing ideas and tools by sending feedback and ideas.
Kendra Hurley, editor of Youth Media Reporter, can be reached at editor@youthmediareporter.com.
Above left: Youth media educators discuss ways to evaluate their organizations at a 2005 conference hosted by the Time Warner Foundation.

Continue reading Time to Reflect

How did media depictions affect our understanding of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath? Whose stories were told, and whose biases were represented? The Alliance for a Media Literate America is offering educators a free, downloadable media literacy guide to help young people better understand the disaster and how the media covered it.

Last April, 20 youth media leaders convened in the foothills of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains to participate in the Youth Media Leadership Institute (YMLI), part of the National Alliance for Media Arts and Culture‘s Youth Media Initiative. For five days, they discussed their work and strategized. “I felt connected to my peers and more ready than ever to help move forward toward our collective goals,” wrote YMLI delegate Cynthia Carrion, outreach coordinator of Manhattan Neighborhood Network, in an article for the MediaRights website.
Carrion interviewed other youth media leaders about what they took from their week in Oregon, ways they’ve collaborated with other youth media organizations since then, where they hope to see the field be in five years, and what the challenges will be getting there. “I felt as if I walked into YMLI as an indivdual and left feeling part of the youth media community,” said Andrea Isabel Quijada, director of educational programs at the New Mexico Media Literacy Project.

Last year, two New Orleans high school teachers began the Neighborhood Story Project, which enables local, predominantly African-American students to write about their lives. Since then the project has published five books of personal stories, such as how residents in a downtown Lafitte public housing complex became one young writer’s surrogate family after her mother, who struggled with drugs, passed away, the Associated Press (via USA Today) reported.
The books sold 2,000 copies at local bookstores, corner stores, and block parties. A print run of 4,000 more copies was slated to go when Hurricane Katrina struck, and all existing books-for-sale disappeared in the storm and ensuing flood. Soft Skull Press is helping raise money to print more books. The Neighborhood Story Project plans to use proceeds to help refugee high school students document the stories of life in the Astrodome, the blog Galleycat noted.
If you are working on youth media related to Hurricane Katrina, please contact Youth Media Reporter at editor@youthmediareporter.org.

Two recent publications provide an intimate view of teens surviving war and just surviving adolescence. Last Sunday, the Washington Post ran the first of a three-part series excerpting a 14-year-old Baghdad girl’s diary, which details her family’s daily struggle to survive war.
In conjunction with the cover story “Being Thirteen,” Time magazine published a collection of 13 essays by and about 13-year-olds. Topics include anxieties over grades, peer pressure, sports, friendship, family, diversity, and hope.