Author: Kendra Hurley

The Young People’s Media Network, a blog for news and views concerning international youth media, recommends this clearinghouse of information for anyone drafting (or considering drafting) a project proposal.

Since 1988, high school—but not college—administrators have had the right to regulate (and censor) student publications. Last week, without explanation, the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from college journalists seeking freedom to run their newspapers without such regulation. Freedom of press advocates fear that some college administrators may view the high court’s decision as a “green light to censor student papers,” reports the First Amendment Center in conjunction with the Associated Press, but Mark Goodman of the Student Press Law Center considers the decision to be most threatening to small campus groups.
“The real fear is that the small student organization who wishes to bring in a controversial speaker or show an unpopular film will be silenced,” said Goodman. “Those student organizations will feel the impact more than the mainstream student media.”

Current TV, Al Gore’s experimental outlet for audience-created content, can be viewed only by cable customers paying premium prices for digital programming, the San Francisco Weekly reports. “We stay in touch with what our customers want, and right now I would say [Current] is definitely a niche channel,” said one cable company executive.
But some suspect the cable companies’ lukewarm reception is really payback for when Gore, as a U.S. senator, helped push an act that cost the cable industry millions of dollars by restricting how cable operators charge consumers.

“Seventy-six percent of schools without newspapers were urban or rural schools, those most likely to have high concentrations of poor students and students of color,” the Columbia Journalism Review reports. The divide was apparent at this year’s annual Fall National High School Journalism Convention, which brought together thousands of teens who work on school newspapers, magazines, radio and television stations, literary journals, and yearbooks.

Continue reading The Haves and Have-Nots of High School Journalism

On January 31, when Time Warner youth media grantees convened in one of the multimedia giant’s glass-walled conference rooms, practitioners pondered one of the most persistent and challenging requests from funders—to provide proof that their programs work.
The conference was monitored by the Educational Development Center (EDC), which has been researching how youth media programs evaluate their impact. Youth media practitioners in attendance shared frustrations about the demands for evaluations (few would expect football coaches to provide such proof, pointed out one attendee), as well as practical tips for carrying them out.
Anthony Streit of EDC advised organizations to clearly identify the programs’ intended outcomes before designing evaluations. And just as young reporters can elicit the type of candid quotes from peers that often elude adult journalists, young people can also conduct insightful peer evaluations.

The demand for program evaluations can be frustrating (few would expect football coaches to provide them).

Directors who had previously worked with EDC to develop program evaluations concurred that the process was “complicated” and “time-consuming,” but ultimately worthwhile. “It’s really interesting when you start looking through this lens, and what it’s telling us about impact,” said one.
Another talked about forming reality-TV-inspired “Truth Booths,” where teens in her video workshop could privately tell the camera what they really thought about the program.
Because finding effective systems of evaluation—and, preferably, ones that appeal to funders—was still a trial-and-error process for most at the conference, it’s important to recognize that the broader youth work field has also grappled with this challenge. Practitioners can look to programs, conferences, and publications outside youth media, as well, for further ideas about demonstrating program effectiveness. Youth Today, for instance, has a regular column on program evaluation. The February issue alone features two articles on the subject.
One of these articles covers a recent conference hosted by the Partnership for After-School Education that sounds surprisingly similar to the Time Warner meeting. Participants there debated how to reconcile the need for accountability with the often murky and difficult-to-measure goals of youth work, like helping young people make better decisions. “Develop short- and long-term indicators to show that young people are on the right path,” as Jane Quinn summarized that conference’s overriding theme. “But resist the urge to abandon the values that undergird our work.”
An inspiring article from an earlier Youth Today issue profiles the Phoenix Academy of Los Angeles, a residential substance-abuse treatment program for teens, which partners with research teams for program evaluations. The collaborations, according to the article, “have yielded mutually beneficial gold-standard evaluations, boosted Phoenix Academy’s quality improvement plan and garnered good publicity—delivering a lot of evaluation bang for relatively few of the academy’s bucks.”
When I edited a magazine written by teens in foster care, I fantasized about this type of venture. I wanted to enlist a researcher to conduct a longitudinal study comparing a group of writers who participated in the magazine’s summer writing workshop to a group who applied but, at random, weren’t admitted. I imagined it would be kind of like the “Seven Up!” documentaries, which tracked down a group of British school kids every seven years. In my study, researchers would check in with the participants every year or so, looking for patterns among the two groups.
While this idea may be a bit far-fetched, learning about the Phoenix House collaboration makes partnering with researchers—who might even fund program studies—a feasible idea. And I’ve since learned that at least one youth media group has already accomplished this. Dr. Catherine Sanderson studied the audience of Sex, Etc., concluding in the Journal of Adolescent Research that young people who read the newsletter showed marked increases in responsible sexual attitudes.
It may be a long time before many programs have the means to conduct such rigorous research. For now, as we continue experimenting to find the right balance of surveys, studies, and youth-led evaluations, it’s worth borrowing ideas and inspiration from the outside, as well.

Continue reading Lifting the Burden of Proof

When a social justice organization joins the nonprofit sector, argues Andrea del Moral in LiP Magazine, it “must mimic corporate structure, entrench itself in government regulations and pander to foundations.” While this arrangement has provided some organizers stable work “with the corporate benefits of salaries, health care and retirement plans,” says del Moral, it has cost them the possibilty for true change.

About one in five kids between the ages of 12 and 17 keeps a blog, and twice as many read them. Blogs can lead to cyber-bullying and raise concerns about about a young person’s safety, reports The Christian Science Monitor, but there are also plenty of positive, educational ways for young people to use them. While students experiment with what to disclose and what to keep to themselves, schools struggle to find the line between protecting students posting (or being posted about) online and censoring them.

“Chronic poverty in rural areas, and urban areas for that matter, represents long-term neglect and lack of investment—a lack of investment in people as well as communities,” the PEN Weekly Newsblast summarized a recent interview with Cynthia Duncan, author of Worlds Apart: Why Poverty Persists in Rural America. The interview was conducted by Frontline, which recently aired the documentary Country Boys, about two young men growing up in rural Appalachia.
“We know the investments in kids’ early education, youth’s engagement, stability of parents’ work and income make a difference,” said Duncan in the interview. So does “figuring out ways to expose people, especially kids, to another way of doing things and another set of aspirations for themselves that may be the root of starting a turnaround…I found that in both Appalachia and the Delta, the kids who made it were those who had mentors who believed in them, that when a young girl or boy would get special attention from a coach or teacher or an aunt or an uncle, it could make a big difference in the kind of decisions that he or she made going forward.”

The 40-year-old Cooperative Institutional Research Project Freshman Survey found that entering college freshman show a “distinctive and widespread” commitment to social justice and civic responsibility, USA Today reports. Researchers attribute this to the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia and Hurricane Katrina. “Last year’s natural disasters impacted these freshmen in a significant way,” said the survey’s director.
“These new data should encourage educators to redouble their efforts to create new connections between academic study and challenges in larger society,” advised the head of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Successful schools are built on the conviction that when adults care, students will achieve more, the American School Board Journal reports. A new study in the Journal of Adolescent Health provides hard evidence. The University of Chicago News Office reports that the research showed that having a teacher who students believe cares is associated with reduced antisocial behavior—like drug use and sexual risk—among teens.