Category: 2006

The recently launched site MediaSnackers provides blog entries, links, and interviews with experts about how young people around the globe consume and create media.

A digital photography class at the International Center for Photography helps girls who have been in trouble with the law gain “a measure of control of their difficult lives,” the New York Times reports. “Art therapy has been used for years to try to give troubled youth a different perspective on their lives, and photography has long aided that process by lowering the barriers to entry: no need to know how to draw or paint, just a willingness to pick up a camera and try. But digital photography is now offering the added power of immediacy, instantaneous images that are proving especially effective for groups of girls like those in the program, mostly black and Hispanic, who struggle as much as or perhaps more than teenage boys with how they are viewed by society.”

When staff at the nonprofit YouthNoise decided to revamp their website as a social networking tool for activist-minded youth, they knew they would need a lot more money, and fast. Raising funds piecemeal was far from ideal—it would take resources away from launching the new site, and would slow the process at a time when social networking sites for youth, like MySpace and Facebook, were all the rage. So the investment group Omidyar stepped up, helping them devise a plan to secure funding upfront and in one swoop. In a pioneering move, Omidyar drew from a strategy more common to start-up businesses, applying a venture capital approach to funding the nonprofit.
In a style typical at for-profits, Omidyar, along with the Surdna Foundation, pitched YouthNoise’s new initiative to a group of corporations and foundations interested in social investment. It paid off—YouthNoise raised over $1.5 million in their first round. Five-hundred thousand of that went to the organization upfront, said Vince Stehle, program officer of nonprofit sector support at Surdna, and YouthNoise is slated to receive increments of the remaining one million dollars as they reach additional fundraising benchmarks.
The money has allowed YouthNoise to hire staff who can spend their time and resources working on the new initiative, instead of continuing to fundraise the old-fashioned way—tweaking grant proposals and meeting with foundations and corporations year-round. “Most nonprofits are funded differently than for-profits, and live hand-to-mouth without the capital to sustain growth,” explained Omidyar investment manager Dena Jones Trujillo in a press release. “By funding YouthNoise like a venture deal through a formal round, and conducting the same amount of due diligence, the consortium of investors is providing YouthNoise with the upfront resources to be self-sufficient.” For YouthNoise, self-sufficiency means eventually generating enough money to cover operating costs through channels such as finding corporate sponsors, or selling products over the web.
Staff at YouthNoise believe their latest fundraising approach is a viable protocol for other non-profits looking to secure money upfront to grow. Stehle from Surdna agrees. He has seen this “syndicate strategy” work for a number of nonprofits, including Guidestar, Network for Good, and Volunteer Match. “It’s a growing trend for a handful of select nonprofits that need expansion capital,” said Stehle.
Not only is it more efficient for an organization to pitch multiple foundations simultaneously, said Stehle, it also creates a “healthy dynamic” whereby the nonprofit has the opportunity to lay out their plans and make their case to a group of funders rather than responding to several different funders’ own plans “and having each funder say ‘this is our strategy, what can you do for us?’”
And funders tend to be more comfortable investing in a new and costly initiative when they’re not going it alone. “From the funders’ perspective, if we see each other getting in we can all join together and know our strategy isn’t going to be orphaned if we don’t complete the round,” explained Stehle, calling it “a strength in numbers” approach.
But Stehle as well as YouthNoise CEO Ginger Thompson acknowledge that it is not going to be the right approach for every organization, project, or funder. Thompson said this approach to fundraising works best for nonprofits that already have a proven track record and are planning to launch a new initiative. It is not useful for simply maintaining a program.
It also works best for organizations who reach many young people, as groups investing large sums of money to help nonprofits grow expect the organizations to eventually become self-sufficient, often through generating what’s known as “sustainable revenue,” whether it be through selling T-shirts on the web, or through corporate sponsorships. If a group wants to grow larger they need to be able to prove they have the capacity to stay larger, explained Stehle. It is no accident that the other nonprofits Stehle has helped use the “syndicate strategy approach” successfully—Guidestar, Network for Good, and Volunteer Match—are, like Youth Noise, “consumer-facing online enterprises,” that have the potential to reach large numbers of web surfers.
Thompson is nudging YouthNoise toward self-sufficiency by pitching the 113,000 teens who are members on the YouthNoise site as a valuable resource for businesses wanting to better understand youth or interact with them, or to partner with young people interested in activism. Instead of asking for handouts from groups investing in the site, explained Thompson, YouthNoise is researching ways in which they can benefit companies interested in social investing. The nonprofit has already partnered with Virgin Mobile to help raise awareness of homeless teens. For groups like Virgin Mobile, says Thompson, YouthNoise presents an opportunity to touch millions of young people who are eager to engage in social causes. It also helps young people associate the partnering companies with hip social responsibility, an affiliation that is becoming increasingly attractive to youth, nonprofits, and businesses alike.

Continue reading Capital Gain

Whether it’s a manual for organizing a poetry slam or a lesson on teaching the Industrial Revolution through documentary photography, a new website, teacherspayteachers.com, lets educators sell their teaching material online, Ebay style, the Associated Press reports (here via CNN.com).

“According to the federal No Child Left Behind Act, students should be technology literate by the time they complete eighth grade,” the Public Education Network Weekly Newsblast summarizes an article in Government Technology.
But not every child has equal access to technology. “Often, schools in affluent neighborhoods offer students a richer technology experience than schools in poorer districts. Moreover, a technology gap exists—and some say continues to grow—between America’s middle and lower classes. Many observers believe technology can improve learning—but only if it is correctly deployed and thoroughly understood…A successful, technology-rich school must integrate technology into the curricula,” not just in students’ weekly trips to a school’s computer lab.

The following article originally appeared on Poynteronline.
Writing for the Garfield High School newspaper in California was the first step on Leo Wolinsky‘s path to becoming managing editor of the Los Angeles Times.
“I didn’t realize I would end up as a journalist,” Wolinsky said. “But it absolutely contributed to my development as a professional. You need it. It gives you a real-life version of a newsroom.”
So it grieved Wolinsky that he recently had to eliminate the Times‘ popular “Saturday at the Times” high school mentoring program and its annual newswriting awards ceremony. The move saved $200,000, a small portion of the budget cuts that the parent Tribune Company needed Wolinsky to make in meeting Wall Street’s profit demands.
In December, the Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa, killed the print version of its one-year-old teen tabloid Your Mom. (The publication is still available online, though, at YourMomOnline.com.) In January, The Hartford Courant, another Tribune Co. paper, ended its 15-year-old urban youth journalism project, MetroBridge. [Editor’s note: The author of this article served as the editor of MetroBridge during the 2003-04 school year.] And on April 4, The Tennessean in Nashville published the final edition of its eight-year-old Newspapers In Education effort for high schools, Teenessean.
Some newspapers run thriving teen programs, but the number of student initiatives at professional newspapers likely is declining, said Sandy Woodcock of the Newspaper Association of America Foundation.
“It is very troubling because it demonstrates that newspapers are not making a commitment to groom readers from cradle to grave,” said Woodcock, director of the Youth Editorial Alliance for the NAA Foundation.
In a 2002 American Society of Newspaper Editors survey, editors at 37 percent of newspapers said they sponsor teen pages. The survey identified 217 teen publications, and since less than half of the nation’s newspapers participated in the survey, the actual number is higher. But the number isn’t growing, Woodcock said.
“There is slow growth in young reader products, but not in the teen market,” Woodcock said.
Some teen programs are thriving, like the one at the Detroit Free Press, run in part by recruiting and development editor Joe Grimm. The Ford Motor Company and other local corporations began co-sponsoring the program in 1985 in response to city education budget cuts that ended high school newspapers.
The Free Press supports about 300 student journalists annually. At each of 15 high schools, news staffs of 20 students publish one full page of news six times a year. The pages run in Free Press editions that go to schools through the Newspaper in Education program.
Grimm said that one of his favorite parts of the program is the annual awards ceremony. At this year’s May 8 banquet, the Free Press honored the best high school journalist at each school, Ford gave a $24,000 college scholarship to one promising young journalist and $4,500 in savings bonds for essays about safe driving.
“In Detroit, it is tough to recruit people, so we want to grow our own,” Grimm said. One former student in the program left a reporting gig at The New York Times to become an editorial writer at the Free Press, he said.

“There is slow growth in young reader products, but not in the teen market.” —Sandy Woodcock

While budget is always an issue, Grimm said, the Free Press understands that bigger issues are at stake: supporting the community, building teen readership and creating paid circulation. And, he added, “this is a great way to interest teens and students in journalism careers.”
Grimm said he feels professional journalists owe more support to young journalists.
“It is discouraging how little newspapers do for high school journalists who are involved in free speech issues,” Grimm said.
With American newspapers bemoaning the lack of younger readers, it seems counterintuitive to halt such goodwill efforts, NAA’s Woodcock said.
“The whole idea of these products, it would seem to me, is that they evolved out of a need to build readership, and that is a long-term investment,” she said. “I think it is a real blow to the community to lose these programs.”
Here’s what has happened at three newspapers.
At the Quad-City Times, Your Mom is continuing as an online product, but the newspaper and its owners, Lee Enterprises Inc., couldn’t make the print version work financially. It ceased publication in December, said Andrew Wall, director of human resources at the Quad-City Times and publisher of Your Mom.
Your Mom began as a project spearheaded by a class of grad students at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, said Hillary Rhodes, one of those students. After researching the industry and the audience, the students developed prototypes and included marketing, staffing, budget and editorial concept ideas. The name was a joke in the class, but it stuck. Lee Enterprises liked the concept and hired Rhodes to make it happen.
Within a few months, 10,000 weekly copies were hitting the streets, but the return rates stood at almost 75 percent, Wall said. Yet anecdotal evidence showed Rhodes that the paper was reaching youth, and that the print product was drawing teens to Your Mom‘s Web site.
“There were a lot of positive experiences I had and things I saw that gave me hope,” she said. “For one thing, we trained 50 or 60 local kids to be completely comfortable in their local newspaper’s newsroom. That is important, especially if you are trying to build a committed relationship between young people and their newspaper.”

Professional journalists owe more support to young journalists.

After a year, Rhodes accepted an offer from The Associated Press to work at asap, the wire service’s new youth readership initiative. With ongoing distribution problems, plus the cost of the printing, the Quad-City Times decided to focus on only the online edition a few months later.
The (Nashville) Tennessean announced in February that it was cutting its teen pages and published its last Teenessean in April. Part-time Teenessean advisers Becky Fleenor and Chris Williams both had education degrees and worked directly with students and teachers who received the paper through the NIE program, Fleenor said. Both have since left the paper.
“It is something I truly believed in, and I never minded going out and working for the newspaper,” said Fleenor, who worked there 17 years. “We would do four or five workshops a year for teachers, and they were always so amazed at what they could do, and that is how newspapers gain lifelong customers.”
The Hartford Courant determined in its latest round of budget cuts that print was not the way to reach youth in Hartford, said Vivian Chow, the Courant‘s vice president of human resources and corporate affairs. In January, the Courant cut MetroBridge, which was started in 1992 as a tool to recruit and train minority journalists from Hartford.
“We now have interactive platforms we didn’t have years ago, and for the 18-to-34 demographic, we have online platforms,” Chow said. “We have to make sure we are with the times. The Internet is the way that age group wants news and entertainment. We are not abandoning that demographic, we are just changing the delivery method.”

“We are not abandoning that demographic, we are just changing the delivery method.” —Vivian Chow

“MetroBridge is a program that we cherished,” Courant managing editor Cliff Teutsch said. “We have had to do so much cost cutting in the news department, our staff had shrunk so much, I thought it was something we couldn’t ask our smaller staff to do anymore. We regret it terribly. People on our staff had a real passion for this program. We have had people from MB go all the way through school and come here and be employees. We know the values of these programs, but with so many competing priorities and the need to put reporters on the streets, we couldn’t do both.”
Teutsch would love for MB to come back, but he doesn’t see his newsroom budget increasing, he said. That’s what hurts for Wolinsky at the Los Angeles Times, too.
“I think it is a real blow to the community to lose these programs,” Wolinsky said. “The newsroom shouldn’t be financing it. The burden shouldn’t be on the editorial budget. This is the responsibility of the company at large. We do have a responsibility to educate.”

“This is the responsibility of the company at large. We do have a responsibility to educate.” —Leo Wolinsky

Christine Strudwick-Turner was editorial chairperson of the Los Angeles Times‘ Student Journalism Program for eight years, working with two other staff members. All three left in February when the budget was cut. During her tenure, she helped expand the program to five counties and created a mentoring program for high school journalism advisers.
“It was beyond successful. We were changing lives,” Strudwick-Turner said. “In a time where the profession of journalism is under siege, and many are questioning its relevance, for the next generation we were showing them journalism is relevant.”
The L.A. Times still donates volunteer hours and prints 120,000 monthly copies of L.A. Youth, an independent, not-for-profit monthly print publication written by and for teens since 1988.
Freelance writer Ken Krayeske earned $2 an inch stringing high school sports for The Waterbury (Conn.) Republican-American when he was a 17-year-old high school senior in 1989. His alma mater, Holy Cross High School in Waterbury, shut down its award-winning high school newspaper, The Cross Chronicle, in 2002. Krayeske also edited MetroBridge, the teen newspaper of The Hartford Courant, during the 2003-04 school year.
Copyright © 1995-2006 The Poynter Institute

Continue reading Are Newspapers Failing Young Journalists?

Adobe Systems Incorporated recently launched its new youth media program, Adobe Youth Voices, designed to help underserved youth “develop critical skills necessary to become active and engaged members of their communities,” according to an Adobe press release on the initiative. Adobe has earmarked $10 million in funding for the project over five years, and is donating software and encouraging employee volunteerism. Adobe will support the program in collaboration with Arts Engine, Educational Video Center, iEarn, Listen Up!, and What Kids Can Do. The program will also have a youth advisory board.

Most youth media organizations wanting to reach a diverse group of young people consider, at some point, collaborating with schools. “Let’s face it,” says Kathleen Tyner, who teaches at the University of Texas and helps bring media education to schools, “schools are where the kids are, and the kids are hungry for this.”
But partnering with schools can be tricky. Schools have their own culture and language, which can be difficult to penetrate. Once in the door, maintaining relationships with teachers and administrators is vital to a program’s success, and generally that responsibility falls squarely on the nonprofit. But with know-how and some strategizing, it can be done. The following are tips from youth media groups who have made school partnerships work.

Be Sure It’s for You

Make sure partnering with schools is in line with your organization’s mission and long-term goals. If your mission is to change the representation of youth in the media, it would likely be a better investment to partner with a local media outlet. “If a youth media organization really clarified their goals and purpose, they might decide that they aren’t educators but activists, in which case working with schools might not be for them,” says Tyner.
But if your mission is to get more young people exposed to your curricula or to youth-produced media, working with schools can help.

Identify Who You Want to Work With

Consider starting in an after-school program. These generally have less bureaucracy than do schools, making them more receptive to partnering with nonprofits. And demonstrating your program’s value to teachers and administrators in an after-school setting can be a first step to integrating into the school day.
If your organization’s goal is to reach as many schools as possible, or to bring media-making to underserved schools, consider training teachers. San Francisco-based Streetside Stories, which has worked with schools for 14 years, runs 8 days of classes in about 10 different schools a year. They teach students and teachers alike, so that when they move on to a new school, the teachers continue their work.

Identify What Subject Area You Want to Work In

Figure out how exactly you want to contribute to the school day. “Is it helping a language-arts class videotape spoken-word poetry performances, or helping a social studies class with a video about the Vietnam or Iraq war, or a math class as it captures how many times a wheel rotates per minute?” asks Dave Yanofsky, programming director of UthTV. Yanofksy used to head Just Think, which produces school curricula. “Unless teachers can see and understand exactly what part of their curriculum media production will fit into, it will be a hard sell.”

Understand Standards

Schools are under significant pressure to have students master the state standards, or learning benchmarks, on which they are tested. Identify how your lessons coincide with standards in the subject area you wish to work in. When creating curricula, staff at Streetside Stories review the state standards listed on the California Department of Education website. When approaching new schools, executive director Linda Johnson shows teachers and administrators which standards each of their lessons meets. “Schools are under such stress, but you can’t help them if you don’t understand their discourse and their priorities,” explains Johnson.
Johnson advises sticking to state subject standards, as opposed to national standards, as those are the ones schools are held accountable to.

Articulate Your Goals and Values Clearly and Quickly

Those in youth media have seen firsthand what a powerful learning experience making-media can provide, and how engaged teens become when viewing or reading media made by peers. But don’t expect a school administrator to intuit this. When making your pitch for why you should be added to the school’s mix, articulate your goals and how they will help schools meet their own goals, clearly and quickly. “It’s not enough to say that you’re giving students a voice. You need to say what that means and why it’s important,” says Tyner.

Include Lessons for Teachers

Don’t expect teachers to know how to use your media. Make it easy for them by creating lessons to accompany it. “Creating some sort of curriculum that’s either a writing exercise or a discussion is going to highly increase the likelihood that youth media will get used,” says Jill Shenker, who has created curricula for a traveling art exhibit on homophobia produced by the youth media group Free Zone.

Partner Strategically

Shenker recommends that organizations wanting to get media into schools partner with groups related to the substance of that media. “There are all kinds of groups in schools. Many Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) clubs are trying to address all the forms of oppression that affect queer people, whether it be class or race issues,” says Shenker.
Free Zone partnered with the GSA clubs in California schools to distribute its traveling poster project. The GSA clubs at each school often decided where to display the exhibit and how to use it. The approach worked well—Shenker says the exhibit went to about 500 schools. Going to clubs directly instead of the teachers, says Shenker, has an added perk: “it carries on the youth leadership mission of it all.”
Free Zone, like a handful of other youth media groups including Educational Video Center in New York, also partners with national organizations for educators who spread the word about the group’s work at conferences and in education catalogues.

Become Part of the School Culture and Maintain That Partnership

Get to know the school schedule and secretary. Attend teacher meetings and communicate clearly to teachers and administrators what they can expect from you—how often you will be there, and for how long. Keep your promises. “To work successfully in a school an organization needs to not just bring a program, but become part of the school culture and environment,” says Johnson. “They’re really busy environments that can be chaotic. The onus is on you as a nonprofit partner to reach out.”

Devote Ample Staff Time to the Project

Shenker worked on getting the Free Zone project in schools 20 hours a week. Educational Video Center has a staff member devoted to teacher development. Streetside Stories has a staff of nine—about half of whom work full-time, and it’s part of everyone’s job to reach out to schools, says Johnson.
Working with schools takes time. Devote plenty to it.

Document Everything

There is a dearth of information on how making or engaging with youth media helps young people learn, making it that much harder to get lessons learned in the field into schools. To build a body of knowledge, Tyner urges groups working with schools to document everything—challenges and resistance they meet in schools; which methods work in class and which flop; and how media in the classroom affects student-teacher relations, classroom dynamics, and learning experiences.
Conduct student and teacher evaluations, create a report on what you’ve learned, and distribute it to others in the field. You can also use your findings to approach new schools. Ultimately, says Tyner, “Once people see that it really can contribute to the school day, you have a better opportunity to integrate it across the curricula.”
Above left: Streetside Stories staff have been working in Bay Area schools for over a decade.

Continue reading Getting in the School Door…and Staying There

A new study finds that teachers who control a classroom through expressions of disapproval for poor behavior “may have a short-term effect on student behaviors, but praise appears to have a longer-term effect and to be more generally effective at influencing student actions,” the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development reports. “By focusing praise or approval on acceptable academic and social behaviors, teachers may be able to more effectively manage their classrooms.”

The What Kids Can Do website scans newspapers across the country daily to maintain a bulletin of current news highlighting the contributions of teens. Two recent entries spotlight youth media in action: in Oregon, high school students raise awareness of sexual abuse through film, and a New Jersey teen has created a social networking website, MyYearbook.com, to compete with MySpace.com.