Author: Kendra Hurley

“Have we crossed some historical divide, where online fundraising has suddenly become more important than traditional direct mail?” asks a recent white paper by development firm Craver, Matthews, Smith & Company. Using an online survey of 2,333 American adults, the researchers explore who gives online and to what causes. “Online giving in pure dollar terms is still the tail on the dog,” the study concludes. “But boy is the tail wagging!” Those who do give via the Internet, the report found, are likely to give more on average and are more loyal donors.

The Political Is Personal

We editors at Youth Communication meet regularly to discuss aspects of our work—how to focus a story quickly, when to challenge teen writers and when to follow their lead. Though we rarely talk about readings that aren’t students’ work, one particularly fruitful conversation resulted when we read an excerpt from Jonathan Kozol’s Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America.
In it, Kozol lays bare the disparity between money spent on kids and their teachers in suburban schools, versus those in inner cities. He argues that segregation is thriving in American urban public schools, and not by accident.
Because the book examines the same public schools many Youth Comunication writers attend, we discussed how teens might explore the same questions Kozol raises from a personal angle. This led to a broader conversation about how to guide teens to explore connections between their lives and larger policy issues like education.

The Shoulders We Stand On

Another New York City learning group frequently discusses readings that illuminate the educational theory behind their daily practice. The writings of Paulo Freire, one of the most influential thinkers about late-20th century education, proved to be particularly relevant, said Steven Goodman, study group participant and director of the Educational Video Center.
Freire, the Brazilian author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Continuum Books), believed learning occurred best through the give and take of dialogue, as well as through action with the intent to build community. Known for his saying “reading the word is reading the world,” Freire could be considered a precursor of the youth and grassroots media movements, committed to giving the typically voiceless a voice to transform society.

The Rollercoaster of Adolescence

Staff at the paper L.A. Youth consult with Dr. Leonard Simon about the emotional issues facing their students. Initial meetings about specific issues troubling their young writers eventually gave way to more general discussions of adolescence. Soon Simon assigned staff the slim but seminal account of teen turmoil: J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye.
Though most staff had already read it as teens themselves, a fresh look through a psychologist-facilitated discussion helped them see it anew. “It really spells out a lot of the struggles and problems of adolescence,” said Simon. “I don’t know they had thought about all its implications before.”
For a considerably more theoretical perspective on what it means to be a teen, Simon recommended reading Eric Erikson, the psychologist who coined the phrase “identity crisis.” His writing is standard fare for psychologists, said Simon, admitting, “I’m a little old-fashioned in that area.”

Want to start your own learning group? Steven Goodman of Educational Video Center tells how.

Continue reading What They’re Reading (and Talking About)

“Mixed among the stories about long lines in the school cafeteria and student government news, the best high school journalists take on the big stories, too,” writes Wendy Wallace, director of the Poynter high school journalism project, on Poynteronline. “See how the nation’s high school journalists covered Katrina and its effects on people’s lives and how the story resonates with young people nationwide.”
Wallace’s article links to a Ball State University publication for journalism educators that explores high schools’ coverage of Katrina, including an online gallery of student reporting on the storm and its aftermath.
Students “didn’t just recap what the big news outlets were telling them,” a graduate assistant in the journalism department at Ball State told Wallace. “They went out and found the local angle and showed how an event hundreds or thousands of miles away can impact them.”

With a September cover story in its Style Section, the New York Times made official what those working with young people have long sensed: aided by the Internet and motivated by September 11, the tsunami in Aisa, and Hurricane Katrina, youth activism is on the rise. What Kids Can Do, a website which scans newspapers daily for stories of young people making a difference, has proof. Highlights from its 2005 archive include a section of 16 stories about young people using media and the arts to impact their communities and beyond.

Youth media and arts groups have long had mental health professionals on call for referrals in emergencies, like when a young person discloses she’s planning to hurt herself. But recently a number of groups have begun consulting with therapists regularly, as part of staff development.
These therapists provide ongoing guidance and support to staff, who often have no formal training in mental health issues. They reassure them when they’re on the right track and help them understand the psychological issues their young participants grapple with. Ultimately, many educators themselves learn to work more therapeutically, especially with young people developing personal narratives about trauma.
Dr. Leonard Simon recently spoke with Youth Media Reporter about his work as a mental health consultant for the teen-written paper L.A. Youth. He also provided guidelines for when a youth worker should take a step away from daily tasks to reflect.

How did you begin working with L.A. Youth?

They began a program working with foster teens and brought me in specifically to consult with them about the kids in that program. It was clear to them that a lot of these kids had serious emotional problems. The kids would speak with them about things ranging from suicidal attempts or ideation, to violence, anorexia, cutting. What the staff needed was someone with experience in that area who could provide them with a perspective on the problems and how to deal with them. I had run a crises clinic in family court for a couple of years so I had experience with adolescents with those kinds of issues.
When I first began meeting with the staff, we met monthly. They needed to sort out how serious different problems were. They needed ways to determine when it was appropriate to seek some kind of intervention or in the lesser, more common instances, when they just needed to have some sort of perspective or understanding of these problems to deal with them better.
Basically, when a young person talked to them about an issue, they wanted to know when to be scared—when it was appropriate to call in services—and when not to be.
Sometimes it was also trying to evaluate and point out to them when a kid had a serious mental illness, such as schizophrenia, and then make some suggestions for how to deal with the youth, while always recognizing that they aren’t themselves therapists.
But what eventually happened is we began speaking a lot about general problems of adolescence, the kind of standard crises and difficulties that most all adolescents experience.

Determining “when to be scared and when not to” is a common struggle for youth media educators. Are there guidelines for this?

When staff has a sense that “this is too much,” or that a situation is getting out of hand, I think it would be good to bring in some kind of consultation.
Also, if the staff’s emotions start feeling extreme to them they have to ask, “What’s going on here?” If you start getting angry at a young person or the facility there may be good reasons for it, but you also have to ask yourself, “Well, why am I so angry? What am I picking up? What am I responding to? What’s making me feel this way and what’s the trigger for it?” You should wonder about any extreme emotion that takes away from doing the job properly, including if you start feeling distanced or detached from the work, like, “I don’t care whether this story gets done.”
In the beginning, L.A. Youth staff would tend to be very nervous about problems the foster youth brought up. Understandably, if a kid was talking about suicide, they didn’t know when to take it seriously and call in for help and when to accept the fact that the person was talking about another time in their life when they felt suicidal and that didn’t necessarily mean they were suicidal at that moment.
One of the biggest things for me to do was to help the L.A. Youth staff trust their own instincts that they didn’t have to be afraid of bringing up a subject that was potentially disturbing to a youth, they didn’t have to be afraid of inquiring into something if a kid was already mentioning it.

One of the biggest things for me to do was to help the staff trust that they didn’t have to be afraid of bringing up a subject.

I let them know it was OK to try to be reasonably open about these subjects with the young people. That doesn’t mean to necessarily push the young person to talk more than they want to, but if a staff asked someone about their suicidal feelings it didn’t mean they were pressing them to jump off a bridge, that there was in fact a benefit to talking about it.

When you’re working with teens who are really struggling, it can be difficult to know how far to extend yourself and when you’re getting overly involved. Did this come up with L.A. Youth?

One instance was where the writer had been working on a piece for close to a year, and I had gone over the piece and it wasn’t quite finished, but it was very close. The writer had a lot of difficulty finishing it and I realized that she couldn’t do it, that she wasn’t organized mentally to finish it and couldn’t really get over some kind of hump. I encouraged the editor to be very active and fill in the gap, in a way, and I think any editor would do that. Editors always make specific suggestions and edits to make up for the deficits of the writers, and I would encourage the staff to do that.
They were a little leery about that. They were afraid that the writer would feel that she lost control of the piece, but she turned out to be grateful. You’re dealing with kids that do have real problems, and if you can help then over some kind of block or inability to help them accomplish their goal and learn that can really help.
These same kinds of problems can occur with any editor-writer relationship. That’s a complicated relationship to begin with. But there’s something about this situation—working with young people–where you also want the relationship to be clinically useful to the youth. It’s not just getting the story published, you also want it to have some sort of beneficial effect on the writer.

Any other advice for educators working with young people to make media?

The major thing is to trust that this kind of activity is very helpful to any young person. It’s very common among adolescents to want to write to get their experiences out, and I think it’s a very positive thing for them as well. It really helps a person to come to terms with their own experiences and emotions.
Above left: Consulting with Dr. Simon has informed L.A. Youth editor Amanda Riddle’s work with Amanda Cavonoff and other members of the paper’s teen staff.

Continue reading On the Couch

“After a decade of the Internet revolutionizing the way people communicate and spend their leisure time, a growing number of consumers are going further—creating entertainment and other media ‘content’ on their own,” The Wall Street Journal recently reported in its introduction to a series of articles exploring “Do It Yourself” media. “Cable networks, radio stations—even advertisers—are embracing such ‘user-generated content’ and serving it up, hoping to appeal to new and younger audiences that are impatient with standard media fare.”
The first story in this series explores Current TV, the new cable channel founded by Al Gore that features videos submitted by viewers as well as its staff.
Current’s aim, explained Mediaweek, which also recently featured the channel, is to create a network “through which young people could exchange and contribute views on current events and other issues they find important.”
“Our concept is ‘what’s going on for young adults,’ and what’s going on is as broad as our audience defines it,” explained Current’s president of programming to Mediaweek. “It’s their careers, their relationships, their spiritual lives [told] in their voice and from their point of view.”
It is not yet clear how advertisers will ultimately receive the station.

The Iowa-based Quad-City Times and Lee Enterprises pulled the plug on the print version of Your Mom, the local, much-publicized, teen-written publication. On YPulse, former Your Mom editor Hillary Rhodes reflects on her experience running the publication and the decision to cease printing it.
“For me, it’s a black spot on the grand experiment of youth journalism,” writes Rhodes, who now works for asap, the Associated Press’ new service targeting young people. “Not that Your Mom—weekly, 16-page, quarter tab—was an exceptional exhibition of flawless teen reportage, but it was trying…to reach large numbers of young readers, and to introduce them to the idea that newspapers play an important role in a community. What this decision proves to me, first, is that all this well-intentioned babble about ‘investment in future readers’ translates to ‘investment in winning youth-oriented advertising.’” Rhodes goes on to describe youth journalism as “one giant experiment, like trying to cure cancer.”
YPulse notes several other youth-produced pages that have recently been pulled from local newspapers.

The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town section recently featured War News Radio, a weekly half-hour show broadcast on the Swarthmore College campus station and podcast over the web. Aiming to “rediscover the voices of real people” in Iraq, the War News team conducts phone interviews with Iraqis. One Iraqi doctor, who said his daughter had been shot by U.S. soldiers, described the mood at checkpoints. “Everybody feels terrified; everything around is horrible,” he said, “and you expect that you may be killed at any minute.” The show draws as many as three thousand listeners a day.

For an audience of over 1,500 people who paid him over hundreds of thousands of dollars, one teenager sold images of his body on the Internet. His story is part of a larger trend, the New York Times contends. “Minors, often under the online tutelage of adults, are opening for-pay pornography sites featuring their own images sent onto the Internet by inexpensive Webcams,” reports the Times. “And they perform from the privacy of home, while parents are nearby, beyond their children’s closed bedroom doors.”

On July 7, 2005, the day of the London bombings, the BBC received a deluge of photos, videos, and emails from eyewitnesses to the attacks. Though not from professional journalists, much of the citizen-submitted media was of high quality, and the BBC incorporated it into its own reporting. It even set up instant diaries for specific citizen journalists to tell their stories.
Since then, the citizen journalism movement—also known as “we media” or “participatory journalism,” in which ordinary citizens report on their communities via blogs, cameraphones, video, and the web—has received heightened attention. News organizations eager to embrace “we media” are trying to figure out how best to do that while remaining accountable to the citizen-submitted information they run. Participatory journalism activists have become increasingly concerned that the movement may actually not be participatory enough, accessible only to those wealthy enough to own the latest technology.

Practitioners could leverage the hype surrounding “we media” as a chance to publicize youth-made media as well as our educational methods. It could also lead to new sources of funding.

Curiously absent from these discussions is a recognition that the youth media field—arguably the prototype for citizen journalism—has already grappled with these same issues of inclusiveness and accountability and arrived at working solutions. While it’s unfortunate that youth media has been overlooked in discussions surrounding citizen journalism, the publicity now surrounding participatory media also points to opportunities for the field. Youth media practitioners could leverage the hype surrounding “we media,” including the ensuing conferences and writings about the phenomena, as a chance to publicize youth-made media as well as our educational methods. It could also lead to new sources of funding.
At a recent conference on participatory journalism, the Associated Press reported, Farai Chideya, a correspondent for National Public Radio in Los Angeles and founder of Pop and Politics, lamented that without access to technology, many poor people of color may not be able to participate in making and distributing news online.
In an article on the Digital Divide Network, Educational Development Center for Media & Community program director Andy Carvin echoed Chideya’s concern. The media phenomenon will remain “skewed to well-off, well-educated populations as long as disenfranchised groups, such as low-income populations, people of color, and people with disabilities don’t have equal access or the skills to participate,” he wrote.
Youth media practitioners need to join this discussion. To address Chideya and Carvin’s concern, we could point out that for 20 years youth media organizations have found ways to include one of the most disenfranchised groups of people: low-income youth. For example, we can point to projects like The Beat Within, which publishes poetry by young people living in juvenile detention centers in California; Voices in Arizona and Native Lens in Washington, two media groups engaging young people on reservations; and Represent and L.A. Youth, both magazines that work with foster youth.
When news organizations wonder how to collaborate with citizen journalists to get high-quality, first-person angles on news, we should mention longstanding partnerships between youth media groups and news organizations such as that between Scripps Howard News and Children’s PressLine, between National Public Radio and Youth Radio, Voices and the Arizona Daily Star, and the more recent collaboration between the teen-written Sex, Etc. newsletter and MTV.
We should inform news groups and “we media” activists about the media educator model commonly used by many youth nonprofits. This model not only makes media tools available to teens, but also pairs them with educators, often professional journalists who provide young people with training, workshops, and proven practices that help them tell their stories effectively.
If news organizations or citizen journalism activists express concern that this method may not work with adults, the youth media field already has evidence that it does. Pacific News Service‘s youth media projects eventually led to multiple ethnic media projects. Appalshop provides media equipment and training to adults as well as teens living in the Kentucky Appalachians. Represent spawned Rise, a newsletter written by parents who have lost their kids to foster care.
News organizations that adopt the media educator model would no longer need to wait passively for high-quality submissions from citizen journalists. They could send media educators to run workshops in the communities they wish to engage, as Bridges to Understanding does. Bridges, a Seattle-based digital storytelling project, sends trained educators around the world to help youth living in indigenous communities document their lives.
Newspapers might send not only journalists, but also media educators to Iraq and other countries mired in war and civil conflict, where they can guide soldiers and local citizens to tell their stories in their own words. This kind of collaboration between a journalist and citizen occasionally occurs by chance, as with the moving diary of a young girl living in Iraq during the U.S. invasion excerpted in the Washington Post last fall.
But if news organizations were to employ media educators, they could get these types of first-person takes on news intentionally and regularly. Chances are they would also stumble across story angles and leads that could be found no other way. When I edited a magazine written by teens in foster care, I had access to a number of untapped stories I would never have heard of simply because I had sustained, trusting relationships with young people living in the system.
Of course, it may be a ways off before the citizen journalism movement or news organizations begin modeling programs based on youth media groups. But those of us in the field can make it happen much more quickly by actively entering the dialogue surrounding the burgeoning phenomena. By attending conferences and participating in related online discussions, we can make it common knowledge that youth media has an extensive body of knowledge to contribute. Youth media organizations might apply for funding to run workshops helping news groups develop their own systems for acquiring high-quality citizen media, or to teach activists how to engage citizen reporters from a broad range of backgrounds.
These are all issues that the citizen journalism movement is beginning to address and to spend money on. When holding so many solutions, we should not wait to be invited to the discussion.

Continue reading What We Can Teach “We Media”