Category: 2006

Each summer, thousands of New York City teens contribute to their communities through activism and organizing that frequently involves media projects, the Gotham Gazette reports. A young activist fighting to keep a power plant out of his neighborhood helped produce a film about local pollution that screened at the United Nations. And a group of young women working with Arab Women Activists in the Arts and Media (AWAAM) are developing radio spots about issues facing Arab women in their community.

“Young people are extremely aware of what goes on in their community and often they don’t have a means to really propose solutions to problems that are affecting them,” said a program officer from North Star Fund, which is helping fund AWAAM’s youth program. North Star Fund considers nurturing young activists to be an investment in the city’s future.

Over 12 years ago, when I first started Phillips Community Television (PCTV), I would drive around South Minneapolis in the old car my grandfather had bequeathed me, picking up teenaged participants and taking them to our “program space” located in the dark and dusty projection room of a former porno theater. Later I would take the kids home. At the time, most were girls. They would lean out the window and shout things at people as we drove by. I never thought there was anything wrong with this.
Once when I dropped off a participant, her aunt, who was her guardian, got confused by what she saw—a young skinny white guy driving an old beat-up Buick with a gaggle of teenaged Native American girls hanging out the back seat windows and being silly. Worried, the aunt checked with the school where I worked to make sure I was, indeed, a teacher and that the after-school program I ran was legitimate. The school assured her and for many years I continued the afternoon cruises to and from the program space in my grandpa’s old car.
Eventually, PCTV grew up. We moved out of the former porn theater and into an office space. We leased a van. We formed a board of directors and got nonprofit status. We drew up proper permission forms for the parents of the youth participants to sign. Now, there are four of us working here, and I would say we are much more professional, but still trying to hold on to that same early spirit of playfulness.
Recently, as evidence of our maturity, we completed an ambitious two-year study that allowed us to understand the impact PCTV has on its youth participants. The intensive, qualitative assessment was carried out by Janet Madzey-Akale of Full Circle: Youth Development Program Planning and Evaluation, located here in Minneapolis. Janet has 20 years experience in the youth development field.
To help Janet conduct the study, we first identified what kind of youth development outcomes we wanted to measure. At PCTV, we divided the overall impact on participants into two distinct categories: one personal (we called it “positive character development”), and the other social (“civic engagement”).
To measure these outcomes, Janet interviewed dozens of youth participants and all of our staff. She chose five youth to be “case-studies.” She interviewed not only those teens, but also their parents, staff at the schools they attended, and other adults in the young people’s lives.
Janet eventually issued a report that broke down just how the program works for youth. That report has helped us at PCTV better understand our program’s impact, and what we learned can be applied to many youth media programs. It can help guide groups who are just setting up shop or organizations who want to improve their already up-and-running programs, or conduct their own evaluations. It can also help explain how youth media works to funders. The comprehensive evaluation report is on our website, but here are the highlights, a few bite-sized nuggets of what we learned about how youth media benefits teens, and how to magnify its impact.

Teens Join Programs for Fun

Most PCTV youth, we discovered, join the organization because they want to be on TV, they hope to become more tech-savvy, or they’re looking for something fun to do with their friends. In short, they want to have fun. So emphasizing the “fun” and social aspects of your program is a great way to recruit youth.

Keep Teens Engaged (and Enrolled) with New Challenges

We found that the longer our youth stay in our program, the greater the program impacts them, so it makes sense to encourage the teens to stick around. But we don’t have to be only about fun to get teens to stay. PCTV youth said they typically stick around because of the opportunities we give them to explore their interests, be productive, and engage in meaningful work with other young people in a safe environment. Hands-on training that enhances their skills and allows them to explore themselves and their interests increases their confidence and keeps them engaged.
So if you’re having problems retaining youth, make sure your participants are getting ample opportunities to learn about new and unfamiliar media. Assist them in finding their own individual “niche” in the program. For instance, the youth who takes an interest in editing might become “the editor.” The one who likes to write scripts and be on camera might find her niche as “the host” or the “director.”

Program Success Comes in Many Forms

Through measuring “positive character development” and “civic engagement,” we learned that youth media programs often provide unexpected benefits for its participants. For instance, many of the youth we interviewed said a main perk they got from the program had little to do with learning about media production or technology. They felt their self-image had improved.
One staff at an alternative school we work with noted that when youth experience success they continue to seek it out. Knowing this allowed us to understand the link between our program and academic achievement. For example, one PCTV participant who attends a mainstream public high school described how she used to feel and act “stupid” at school because no one there had faith in her. After a year of participating almost daily at PCTV, she realized how much she had to contribute.

Youth Media Programs Are Great at Building Self-Confidence

We found that once young people have an initial positive experience, like the girl who used to think of herself as “stupid,” it builds their confidence. That can have a ripple effect in their lives.
We also found in our study that when young people are praised for their efforts, they are likely to have more confidence about what they can achieve.
Receiving positive public exposure, something that most youth media programs provide, is often the ultimate confidence builder for youth. Several PCTV youth spoke about how great it made them feel when someone who had seen them on TV complimented them on their work. One participant who heard people on her school bus saying they had seen her on TV remembered, “I got, like, this big, huge grin on my face.”

Youth Media Programs Can Build Community Connections

Finally, through our research we confirmed what we’d already sensed: it is important to contextualize the work our students do as part of a larger initiative, something we call “public work.”
Through meaningful work, where young people are not just receiving a service, but contributing something, young people begin to discover a sense of purpose. They begin to understand how they can share their interests and views, and how their messages can influence others. Being involved in issues they care about changes their perspective on the world and their role in it.
When producing something that is of importance to them, young people begin to feel a sense of obligation. When a young person’s message is aired publicly, it makes them accountable for their words and actions.
Through doing “public work,” young people also begin experiencing community in new ways—they begin to sense different connections to school, to see new job possibilities for themselves, and to have a wider sense of their education goals. They forge relationships with new people and experience media exposure and recognition. Doing so, they open new doors to future possibilities.
These increased community opportunities present a starting point for youth to become further engaged in the community. Technical training and media arts production opportunities within a community-based program are the catalyst for all this.
John Gwinn is PCTV Executive Director. He adapted this article from the 2005 PCTV evaluation report written by Janet Madzey-Akale of Full Circle: Youth Development Program Planning & Evaluation.

Continue reading A Growth Opportunity

A new study by the Newspaper Association of America Foundation finds that content by and for teens strongly impacts a newspaper’s ability to attract young readers and keep them as they age. About 30 percent of teens surveyed (presumably who read newspapers with youth pages) said that it was teen-written content that drew them to the paper, according to a press release. About 220 newspapers nationwide produce youth-written content, most which is writen by teens working with a newspaper editor. Other youth content in newspapers comes from syndicated services.

The House of Representatives endorsed a bill preventing Internet users at schools and libraries from using social networking sites and chat rooms. “This unnecessary and overly broad legislation will hinder students’ ability to engage in distance learning and block library computer users from accessing a wide array of essential Internet applications including instant messaging, email, wikis and blogs,” said American Library Association president Leslie Burger, LibraryJournal.com reported.

“According to young professionals working in fields in which fluency in the dialects and habits of teenagers is paramount, hanging out with high schoolers is cool, and sometimes even professionally advantageous,” the New York Times reports. “Often these teenagers are known as ‘the intern.’…While they get college-résumé-boosting work experience, not to mention entree into clubs and parties, their employers get around-the-clock muses and ambassadors to youth culture.” The employers praise teens for bringing “authenticity” and energy to the office, but struggle with boundaries: Is it OK to let a teen drive your car? How much is a teen a friend, how much an employee?

In a recent Youth Media Reporter article, Dave Yanofsky of Uth TV argued that much youth media could be more innovative and of higher quality. Yanofsky believes that organizations will have an easier time creating compelling media that “pushes the envelope” if they find high-profile outlets to distribute their work. When young producers know their programs will reach a wide audience, he reasons, they push themselves harder to create top-notch media.
As someone who has curated numerous compilations of youth-produced video, I do not share Yanofsky’s belief that there is a dearth of high-quality media in the field. I have seen an abundance. I do, however, share his desire to get more audiences exposed to youth-produced media. Having spent much of my career working to that end, I’ve learned that connecting with “high-profile media outlets” is not the best way to go. Distribution through the local and grassroots sector has often proved to be a more effective strategy for helping the field accomplish its goals and reach a wider audience. And now, in 2006, the Internet presents unprecedented opportunities for distribution that we must carefully consider.
When it comes to distribution, youth media suffers from many of the same obstacles that have prevented American independent film and video from achieving broader dissemination—namely, the commercial monopolization of the film and television industries and lack of a large-scale viable public television system, despite massive and continuous advocacy efforts by leaders in the field. Yet unlike independent media, we remain without a solid infrastructure. We don’t have a range of distributors, a broad base of foundations, exhibitors, programmers, educators, and institutions that collude to build and sustain a viable distribution system. Without this infrastructure, distributing even the highest-quality youth media is and has always been extremely difficult.
In 2001, I conducted a national survey of youth media organizations for Video Machete. These groups confirmed what we suspected—there is far more work that is distributable than their organizational and financial capacity allows. Consequently, much youth-produced media never finds a home in the world beyond the organization where it was produced.
And curators of youth media projects have few clear ways to stay abreast of work being produced in the field. As a curator myself, I cannot call up multiple distributors to order preview titles of the most compelling new works. After calling MediaRights and ListenUp!—the two main groups that solicit youth video—I must phone and email over a hundred groups, individual teachers, and high school media programs around the country.
Our survey confirmed another important fact: getting media picked up by high-profile, national distributors is not always the goal of youth media educators, nor should it be. The adults collaborating with youth producers are not compelled by a singular objective of broad distribution. They help youth produce media for many reasons, including to help young people grow as individuals, to teach them skills, to foster dialogue and create ways for both virtual and in-person communities to learn about and engage with the authentic and too often neglected perspectives of young people.
Despite these varying goals, I have found that most youth media practitioners are united by a pervasive sense of purpose—the desire to help young people create media that make audiences stand up, pay attention, witness young people’s talents, acknowledge their strengths, and listen to their views. We see that when youth become actively engaged in their communities while collaborating with peers who share their concerns, they learn to see themselves as change agents, not marginalized members of what social theorist Henry Giroux calls the “fugitive culture.”

When youth become actively engaged in their communities while collaborating with peers, they learn to see themselves as change agents.

When their work is received by audiences who pay attention, youth begin to understand that their views can be taken seriously. They begin to see themselves as people who belong in the public sphere.
With this goal in mind, the final media product and its public exhibition take on a heightened level of importance. But this does not mean that the best audiences are the broadest audiences–the kind achieved through high-profile media outlets. Having their media viewed by their own communities often helps youth witness the power of their ideas more effectively than if their work appears on, say, The Learning Channel. Such grassroots forms of distribution have also been some of the more successful methods of disseminating youth media.
One young person I know, Zach Webb, produced an experimental, personal video documentary about institutional racism at his high school. Initially the video, “All I See Is What I Know,” screened before dozens of members of his small rural, county in Kentucky. Although the video explored a controversial subject, it helped to generate a thoughtful community discussion. As more people began seeing and talking about the video, the governor of the state got word and requested his own copy. The governor was so affected by what he saw that he created a task force on minority school achievement with the directive to be “inclusive of youth experiences and views.”
Webb became the first teen in the history of the state to be appointed to a governor-formed educational task force. Eventually, a regional chapter of the National Center for Community Justice distributed his tape to hundreds of African–American churches, civil rights groups and multicultural education organizations. This is one of many examples of youth media that has not only altered attitudes, but impacted public policy. And in this case, it occurred on a regional, grassroots, community-based level.
Now the Internet is providing even more possibilities for distribution that won’t come from a “high-profile,” top-down approach. YouTube currently streams an astounding 30 million videos to millions of users worldwide. Admittedly, much of its content is crude, amateurish home-made movies, but a system that rates videos by how often they’re viewed lets the most popular of the bunch bubble to the surface. And it is young people who create a large portion of the media on dozens of new sites streaming video, including Google Video, America Online’s In2TV, and Clash TV.
I am not suggesting that youth media should be randomly uploaded to profit-motivated media streaming sites like these. Youth media is most powerful when it is curated, contextualized or framed according to the diverse themes and issues that it conveys. (And this has proven true in other genres of youth media, as well, including print.) It is also most effective when it resonates with specific concerns of the community where it was created, as did Zach Webb’s video.
So instead of continuing to try to partner with high-profile outlets, we should begin exploring how we can take what we already know works in terms of distributing youth media—using grassroots channels, curating the media around themes, identifying communities the media resonates with—and connect it with the power of the Internet. When we speak of distribution, the questions should involve not how to partner with commercial outlets, but rather: How do we connect the power of the Internet with the real needs of youth and their communities to see and hear their stories represented in the media? How can we harness the Internet to increase youth media’s visibility online?
It is crucial to begin exploring these questions immediately, because whatever this field has failed to create in the past, now is an unparalleled opportunity to build for the future.
Mindy Faber served as director of distribution at Chicago’s Video Machete, where she facilitated video workshops for immigrant youth and curated youth media compilations for national distribution. In addition, she taught full-time media arts at Evanston High School for three years where many of her students produced award-winning programs, several of which aired on national television. Faber currently operates Faultline Media Services, a consulting firm dedicated to improving the quality of media arts education through training in best practices, curriculum design, and participatory evaluation.
Above left: Mindy Faber at work with a youth producer.

Continue reading Getting Discovered

Last fall, Harvard Family Research Project (HFRP) held the After School Evaluation Symposium in Washington, D.C., with over 100 researchers, evaluators, policymakers, and practitioners attending, according to a recent post on the YouthLearn listserv. The two-day meeting aimed to strengthen links between research, practice, and policy in the after-school arena. Key themes and resources from the conference, as well as an overview of the after-school field, are now available on HFRP’s website.

The following article originally appeared on AlterNet’s WireTap on June 24, 2006.
It might never occur to an average news reader to venture over to a local college campus and pick up one of the free indy papers strewn around libraries and student centers. But if they’re hungry for vital, original reporting, it wouldn’t be a bad idea. As mergers and budget cuts squeeze local papers ever tighter, indy campus reporting has an increasing role in documenting local news.
Taking their cues from alternative weeklies like the Village Voice and the San Francisco Bay Guardian, feisty indy student papers explore the connections between local economies, politics, social trends and campus life. This year’s winners of the 2006 Campus Independent Journalism Awards (CIJA) present the mature forefront of these papers and zines.
Both the official and indy papers usually receive funding through the allocations of student governments (though the budgets of independent papers are dwarfed by those of mainstream dailies and weeklies, which traditionally hire and pay their student staff). The real distinctions between independent-spirited campus papers and the official newspaper — that is, the publication recognized by the campus administration as the official paper or record — are those of mission, coverage, style and tone.
“It’s not a matter of being better than the campus daily, or their being better than us,” explains Kay Steiger, editor-in-chief of the University of Minnesota’s the Wake, which won for Best Independent Campus Publication of the Year (with a budget over $10,000). “We have a whole week to plan and carry out stories in-depth, so that means we cover a different kind of story and have a different kind of responsibility as reporters and editors. Someone has to cover the meeting of the board of regents; that’s important. But we look elsewhere for stories.”
Looking elsewhere has meant investigating issues like racial tensions between a growing Somali immigrant population in St. Paul, Minn., and students, or profiling the work and lives of local graffiti artists.
Occasional crossover of reporters from mainstream college dailies to alternative publications where they can find the time and freedom to work on stories they care about is not uncommon. Many journalists see working at the official paper as a prerequisite for entry into journalism school or a position at a mainstream newspaper.
“If you’re working at the daily, you’re there because you want to go to j-school or you want to get an internship at a paper when you graduate. You don’t do it for kicks,” noted Michael Hagos, illustrations editor at University of Virginia’s Declaration and winner for best artwork/cartoon. “No one’s at the Dec because it’s a chore they’re doing for their resume. Everyone’s doing it for the love of great journalism.”
Though that may be so, many past winners of the CIJ Awards have found careers in the independent press at publications like Salon.com, The Nation and Mother Jones.

Substance with style

The drive to report creatively carries over into the design and layout choices at indy publications. Brown’s College Hill Independent, winner for best design/layout, uses a mixture of grids and open fields that conveys a sense of freedom and play. “The daily has a more formal, text-heavy appearance that’s consistent with what they do. We have purposefully built in space for experimentation,” explains editor Ben Mercer. “The designers make choices for each issue, and the editors live with it.”
Yale’s beautifully designed Environmental Leadership Magazine [PDF], winner for Best Independent Publication of the Year (with a budget under $10,000), aims to do nothing less than use design to reinvent environmentalism. “The idea with ELM was to use design to carry a message about environmentalism: that they can be one and the same.”
At its best, the freedom to innovate with style, tone and topic makes for storytelling that’s unapologetically impressionistic, yet deeply researched and rigorously fact-checked. Megan Murry, a staff writer for Ithaca College’s Buzzsaw Haircut, produced a remarkably nuanced look at her small town’s Republican mayor for her winning article [PDF]in the GLBT coverage category.
Murry begins by examining her own family’s prejudices against liberals. She springboards from her presumptions about their small-mindedness to an investigation of her traditional, conservative town’s unexpected defense of their gay Republican mayor against anti-gay activists. Murry discovers that in a town so small that the mayor knows the names of many of his constituents, distinctions between Republican and Democrat, red state and blue state, Christian conservative and gay rights activist can blur. Murry’s work is an example of precisely the kind of counter-intuitive story that students are willing to cover and national indy publications might miss.
Playfulness in design and story topic choices can also leave these often openly progressive publications open to allegations of bias and a lack of objectivity. Every left-leaning publication, whether on campus or not, will face the issue of how to present political leanings fairly and even-handedly. But for publications that also emphasize investigative reporting, the issue can be stickier.
Student publications walk a particularly fine line. They invite submissions from the entire campus and, while editors offer coaching and critiques, most writers aren’t trained journalists. The tone of indy student papers is also often sarcastic and snarky, even absurdist at times. Humor is used to make political points and first-person reporting is rampant.
“The question of objectivity is one we wrestle with,” says Steiger. “We certainly have the op-ed pages, where opinions are plain. But investigative reporting is different. We don’t push reporters to find particular conclusions, and we don’t accept stories from people who are too close to an issue.” That said, Steiger believes that there’s no denying that the choices editors make about which stories to assign, whether about local tax cuts, a homeless shelter, or racism at the local police department, are informed by a progressive, muckraking spirit. “To some degree, investigative reporting itself — just going out and finding out what’s going on at a local level — can be seen that way,” says Steiger.

Public watchdogs

At a more concrete level, alternative publications function as public watchdogs, monitoring university officials, activist groups, student governments, local institutions, and even other campus papers. In his story “More Than Misquoted,” Dartmouth Free Press reporter, Carlos Mejia, uncovered practices of repeated stonewalling of activists, misleading headlines and even inserting lines into letters to the editor to make writers appear less creditable at the competing daily paper, the Dartmouth.
Ironically, the Dartmouth Free Press finds itself more accountable to a student government than the Dartmouth, which is not technically affiliated with the college. “We pride ourselves on the quality of our editing and fact checking,” says Mejia. “Each story is edited at least three times and we confirm our sources and have a fact checking process in place.” Mejia echoed the sentiments of many editors of alternative campus publications, who feel that to some degree they must adhere to a higher standard of accuracy.
Articles like Murry’s and Mejia’s point to what experts on alternative media see as larger implications of alternative campus publications. John Hochheimer, who is the founding coordinator of Ithaca’s journalism program, has long regarded experience in independent journalism as a backbone of an education that leads to full civic participation.
“How do we define mainstream media? How do we define alternative media?” asks Hochheimer. “Mainstream media is entrenched in institutionalized power, while alternative media questions that power and the structures that support it.”
Hochheimer treats student participation in alternative media as a means of giving them the skills to question that power. “What I tried to do in founding the journalism program at Ithaca, and what I try do in my classrooms is teach students how to question the world around them, uncover the hidden stories behind what they see and report that information in such a way as to make it relevant to the people reading it.”

Incubators of political movements

Right-wing groups have long understood the importance of active conservative papers on college campuses. Groups like the Leadership Institute have for decades funded conservative papers to the tune of tens of millions of dollars annually. Conservative papers also outnumber progressive-leaning papers on campuses. This is in part because progressive papers suffer from lack of funding and thus rise and fall while conservative papers tend to stay stable. Yet most college campuses will always have their independent, progressive papers, especially large state schools and private colleges and universities with substantial endowments. Whether focused on general interests or on particular themes like race or gender, such alternative publications are ubiquitous and powerful. Programs like the Campus Journalism Project and Campus Progress recognize the value of these publications as incubators for future independent journalists, political leaders and community leaders.
The worth of such papers to political movements isn’t hard to fathom. Newspapers coalesce disparate campus activist groups by giving them a forum to discuss local and national political issues, mobilize referendums or protests and call out unethical activity. They reach a wide audience of thought makers and can have a huge role in defining discourse on a college campus. They also give reporters, pundits, muckrakers and occasional partisan hacks a chance to stretch their wings.
Their impact has been palpable, for example, in setting the tone around a recent janitors’ strike at the University of Miami and calling for support of pro-labor policies at University of Wisconsin-Madison, the State University of New York-Buffalo, and Georgetown. And where papers lead, students and administrations often follow.
Editors at Ithaca’s Buzzsaw Haircut have seen articles lead directly to changes in policies about the waste of paper used in on-campus advertising, student organizing around tuition hikes and military recruitment, and better wheelchair access on campus.
Papers also have a unique vantage point from which to see and fill needs on college campuses and to gather students from many different parts of the campus community. For example, editors at the Wake were receiving so many creative writing submissions that they decided to create a new literary supplement, the only literary journal at the University of Minnesota. Editors of Buzzsaw Haircut worked with activists, war veterans and bloggers to organize a series of panels to discuss the war in Iraq. “We forced students to actively engage in a conversation that too many had forgotten, and brought together students from a range of backgrounds and opinions to talk about issues in forums that weren’t polarizing and didn’t simplify the complexities of our current situation,” says editor Kate Sheppard.
As progressives are hailing the rise of a new kind of campus activist, publications are being established as increasingly crucial for creating a centralized forum and identity. Hochheimer also sees them as the perfect place for students who will go on to careers in law, business and nonprofits — in addition to journalism — to learn about community engagement. “And that makes for journalism that’s more than mere stenography,” he adds.
Sara Gruen is the coordinator of the Independent Press Association’s Campus Journalism Project.
© 2006 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

Continue reading Campus Papers Can Save Journalism

An online poll of nearly 750 young people in the United Kingdom conducted by two youth charities found that 80 percent of youth surveyed believed “unfair portrayal in the media led to strained relations with older generation,” the BBC reported. The full report, which reveals that youth feel “demonized” by politicians as well as the media, can be downloaded from UNICEF’s MAGIC News site.

Armenian youth leader Arthur Ghazaryan has launched a newspaper for young people in a northeastern town of the former Soviet state, International Journalists’ Network reports. Ghazaryan also plans to start a youth radio station in Armenia, a country where press freedom remains tenuous. “Right now a new generation is getting educated abroad, and they are coming back to Armenia, and they are bringing a new way of thinking about journalism … more European, more American, more democratic,” said Ghazaryan. “I’m optimistic that everything will change.”