Category: 2005

The more time children spend watching TV, the poorer their grades, three studies recently concluded, according to Reuters. On the other hand, state anti-tobacco ads may really be preventing teens from smoking, research published in the journal Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine suggests.
A recent review of research into the impact of sex in the media on young people reveals that little examination has been done on the topic, according to the Medical Institute for Sexual Health. Given that today’s young people are exposed to more sexual imagery in the media than ever before, a New York Times piece on current independent films providing refreshingly realistic glimpses of teen sexuality is especially timely.

Avoiding the “usual Powerpoint slides and a longwinded speech,” the keynote speaker at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) found “a whole new way to tell the story of education and youth media,” observes the Digital Divide Network. Deneen Frazier-Bowen “pulled an Anna Deveare Smith and performed a series of characters to help paint a portrait of what it’s like for today’s kids to be growing up as digital natives.” DDN offers free podcasts of the performance, too.

Youth Media Reporter asked funders whether their decision to support an organization is influenced by knowing that the group’s work has been picked up by a mainstream media outlet. The short answer? A resounding “yes.” The funders YMR contacted want to see youth media distributed as widely as possible. “We are invested in youth media’s reach and impact on the broader public,” explained Jee Kim of the Surdna Foundation.
Mark Hallett, senior program officer of the McCormick Tribune Foundation journalism program, agreed. “It’s a shame we don’t hear the views of this generation as often as we should,” said Hallett. “It’s wonderful to find groups who are finding ways to get the word out to as broad an audience as possible.”
But these views might primarily reflect the perspectives of national or regional funders, explained Christopher Shearer, director of grantmaking at the National Geographic Education Foundation. Many of the locally based foundations fund youth media primarily for what Shearer calls “local engagement” outcomes, such as keeping kids in a safe place after school or helping them build skills that can lead to jobs. It’s the national or regional funders, like National Geographic’s Education Foundation (and most of the funders who the YMR contacted for this article), who are more likely to look for “other desired outcomes on which the decision to award a grant rests,” said Shearer.
These outcomes could include raising the awareness of why youth should participate in policymaking, or demonstrating the importance of including diverse voices in the media. In these cases, if a youth media organization receives pickup by a mainstream news outlet, “they are more likely to communicate the foundation’s goals along with their media product,” said Shearer. “In a sense, these organizations are providing additional leverage by reaching the general public.”
Youth media groups focused specifically on community engagement might want to look closer to home for funding. But as all foundations “increasingly stress measurement and leverage,” said Sherarer, “pickup by mainstream media afford a youth media organization a competitive edge in the grants application process—as well as a greater role in growing the youth media field to the point that mainstream media itself might adopt and institutionalize the concept.”
“Knowing that community-based youth media organizations are working to add more authentic voices to the discussion is bound to impress a funder,” agreed Alyce Myatt, former media program officer for the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and currently a consultant to the independent media and philanthropic communities agrees. “But it’s important to include information on the work printed or broadcast so that the funder can gauge the value of the content.”

Continue reading What They’re Thinking

A recent New York Times article on Radio Rookies (registration required) gives a concise overview of how a youth media project initially designed to help teenage participants can develop a life of its own. Since its founding as a “do-gooder” project, Radio Rookies‘ stories have become a staple on NPR affiliate WNYC and have received national attention on NPR. They provide listeners “a glimpse into people they may run across on the subway every day but never have a relationship with,” WNYC’s vice president of programming said. And the impact doesn’t end there—Radio Rookies helps the station attract young listeners, and because the stories are told by their peers, teenaged students respond enthusiastically to them in the classroom.

A U.S. appeals court recently ruled that a controversial 1988 Supreme Court decision allowing high schools to restrict the free speech rights of student newspapers may apply to public colleges and universities as well, Inside Higher Ed reports. “This decision gives college administrators ammunition to argue that many traditionally independent student activities are subject to school censorship,” said Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center. “I fear it’s just a matter of time before a university prohibits a student group from bringing an unpopular speaker to campus or showing a controversial film.”

Diana Coryat has worked as a documentary filmmaker, media educator, television producer, and youth development consultant. Fourteen years ago she co-founded the Global Action Project (GAP), which teaches video production to New York City teens. Coryat is currently completing a master’s thesis exploring the contributions of youth media to critical pedagogy. (“Just as youth media is ghettoized in the media world,” she says, “it is often ghettoized in cultural media studies.”)

Youth Media Reporter has been running a series of articles exploring partnerships between youth media and professional outlets. In this interview, Coryat warns of the drawbacks to these arrangements.

What are GAP’s main goals?

One is for young people to use media for creative expression and as an exploration of their identities and their communities and the world. That includes using their media as a social action tool to bring change in the world. The other piece is to bring young people’s voices and perspectives into the public sphere and the media, which are areas where they’re sorely lacking.

How important is it for GAP to work with professional media outlets?

Although one of GAP’s visions is for young people’s media and stories and perspectives to be in the mainstream media, it’s definitely not our top priority. We’re more looking for the young people to be empowered by the process, such as working with peers and investigating an issue. And what we value most in the process is face-to-face contact. We want the media to be a springboard for dialogue, so our priority is to screen work in venues where there is a possibility for dialogue, like at community centers or schools.

We regularly have our work on Free Speech TV and Manhattan Neighborhood Network and I think it’s great, but you often get less feedback about the work when it airs on TV than when the teens meet with an audience. People watching television usually don’t talk about what they are viewing. We’re trying to get young people standing up in front of an audience and talking about the issues they’re working on and their work as artists. We find that the impact is greater for them personally when they meet their audience, and the impact for the audience is also greater.

When young people work with mainstream outlets, it can limit their creativity.

Also, when young people work with mainstream outlets, it can limit their own creativity. Usually there’s a format the mainstream outlet wants a young person’s media to conform to. They might say, “We can take a two-minute video and it has to look this particular way.” I’ve heard of work where a mainstream outlet has commissioned a piece to be produced by a youth, but ultimately the adult producers are the ones with the vision. When it’s completed they might say, “Oh, wow, this is youth produced,” even though they’ve manipulated every part of it.

We think there are times when a young person can learn from working with an outlet’s requirements and vision. At an advanced stage working with professionals can be really important. We have internships for our more advanced students at different production companies, and they definitely benefit from this. But our main goal is to train the young people we work with as artists and activists, to cultivate their own creative expression and voice. That is really important in terms of their growth.

How do you decide when to work with a professional outlet?

Mainstream outlets have contacted GAP, but what they often want from us is something that fits how they envision young people. For example, they often want material that “sells,” like stories about gangs or violence, or stories in which young people reveal their struggles with food or drug addictions. They’ve actually called us and said, “Do you have a young person we can highlight who was homeless and is now making videos?” They’re really trying to fit young people into their own stereotypes of teens. Our young people’s work often doesn’t fit with these programming interests, and we won’t work with people who see young people that way.

What’s the advantage of working with professional outlets?

The best thing is the recognition and visibility it gives us, and exposing audiences to young people’s perspective.

Any advice to other organizations considering working with media outlets?

It’s important to understand how the media is going to be used and to know that with a lot of outlets you do not have the final say over how it turns out. So find out ahead of time how much editorial control you will have, if any. And remember, it takes a lot of time to work with media outlets and you still have an obligation to the young people you’re working with to help develop their skills and talents, as well as their confidence in themselves.

Above left: Diana Coryat (right) with GAP co-founder Susan Siegel.

Continue reading Counterpoint: On Media Partnerships

Exemplary teaching and youth work are mutually inclusive, and both need venues for recognition, says the executive director of the Forum for Youth Investment in a Youth Today column.

The Youth Media Council, dedicated to improving news coverage of youth, partnered with the Youth Justice Project, which helps formerly incarcerated youth become advocates for social change, to monitor a Northern California newspaper to evaluate the fairness and accuracy of its stories about young people. Their findings and recommendations provide a local look at a national problem: stories about youth tend to focus on crime, and youths themselves are rarely quoted.

Censorship at high schools seems to be growing, and not just in the journalism departments. School administrators at one D.C.-area high school recently denied a teen his diploma because he wore a braided bolo beneath his purple graduation gown. The tie, a quiet tribute to the student’s Native American heritage, was too thin, administrators at his high school declared, according to the Washington Post. Meanwhile, opponents of education about homosexuality or acceptance of gay people are launching an attack on student activities related to those issues, the New York Times reports.
Might these events be related to a trend recently observed in the Christian Science Monitor? Worried that schools are becoming breeding grounds for liberal indoctrination, the paper reported, conservative activists are attempting to limit what teachers may discuss in class.

As an editor for Represent, a magazine written by teens in foster care, I sometimes felt besieged by requests from reporters looking to interview them. For a while Represent had no set policy for handling these requests, and I deliberated, sometimes painstakingly, over each one.
One of the organization’s goals, I knew, was to get teen voices heard as often as possible. Having writers quoted in stories was certainly one way to do that. On the other hand, Represent writers come to the organization to tell their stories in their own words, not to have their views interpreted for them by yet another adult. So each time a request arrived I went through the same consuming process of weighing the pros and cons to decide how to respond.
Staff at most youth media organizations find themselves in this position at one time or another. Reporters often want young people quoted in their stories but don’t know where to find them. In the best of worlds, making young people available for interviews is a good way to secure publicity for your organization while helping to get teens better represented in the press.
At Represent, a few reporters who interviewed our staff carefully quoted the young people in thoughtful, analytic stories that went a long way toward helping the public understand life in the system. In particular, an Associated Press article (here via CentreDaily.com) on some of our writers who’d once been labeled “crack babies” ended up in over 50 papers, attracting publicity for us while exposing the damage caused by labelling kids.
But there’s no guarantee that you’ll like what the reporter writes, that your organization will be credited in the story, or that the interviews themselves won’t cause problems with the young people you work with.

It seems ethically questionable to ask young people to divulge personal details about their lives to a stranger who promptly disappears once the story goes to press.

One reporter whom I helped fairly extensively while editing Represent ended up taking a position on child welfare that I found offensive. Another time, a TV show’s search for the right kid to interview spawned competition among my writers as they jockeyed to get on prime time, disrupting the newsroom’s normally congenial feel. And it almost always seemed ethically questionable to me to ask young people to divulge personal, often difficult details about their lives to a stranger who promptly disappears once the story goes to press.
To get an idea of how others in the field handle this tricky terrain, I talked with a handful of staff at other youth media organizations. Many of the newer organizations, I found, seem content treating requests from reporters on a case-by-case basis. But as an organization grows, requests come rolling in, especially if a group is working with a particular population that reporters have difficulty accessing, like kids in foster care or teens caught up in the juvenile justice system. At this juncture, most organizations find it helpful to form a few guidelines to fall back on when a reporter calls.
Having a clear mission helps many organizations determine how to respond to media requests. Like Youth Radio, a number of groups aim to ensure that young people are “the ones telling the story themselves, as a reporter,” explains Youth Radio news director and international desk editor Nishat Kurwa. With this in mind, staff at Youth Radio generally decline requests from reporters wanting to interview teens, though they do make young people available to speak on panels or to be interviewed as reporters themselves. “For the most part, we let them be in that outlet, telling that story instead of an adult,” says Kurwa.
Pacific News Service shares the view that teens should not be mere sources, but should be telling the stories themselves. Pacific News Service posts teen-written stories on its wire service alongside those written by adults, where other outlets can pick them up.
Children’s PressLine maintains a healthy sense of competition with more traditional news outlets. Executive Director Katina Paron expects reporters knocking on her organization’s door to acknowledge that the organization is set up to work with young people in a way that is more respectful and comprehensive than a reporter’s usual “hit-and-run” approach to getting quotes from teens. When a reporter requests an interview, Paron suggests that her own young reporters do the interview for them. Though reporters usually decline this offer, Paron allows them to interview her young people only if they identify them as journalists for Children’s PressLine.
Laura McCargar, executive director of Youth Rights Media, considers it “a win anytime we have a young person quoted in any form of mainstream press.” The organization’s mission views youth-made media as a tool for organizing and generating social change. “One of the bigger, systemic things that we’re looking at is ways in which young people have opportunities to contribute to mainstream dialogue and discourse,” explains McCargar.
All of the organizations I talked with take measures to protect young people who speak with reporters. Steve Goodman, executive director of the Educational Video Center describes his staff’s attitude toward the press as “skeptical” and “a protective one with our students.” An EVC staff member is usually present when reporters interview teens, says Goodman, though reporters who have earned the staff’s trust do get greater access.
Ken Ikeda of Youth Sounds never gives out information on youth directly, no matter how well his organization knows a reporter. McCargar at Youth Rights Media extensively prepares her teens for each interview, and Ginger Thompson, executive director of Youth Noise, requires all young people interviewed from the site’s advisory board to have parental permission. Donna Myrow of the teen-written newspaper LA Youth requires reporters to submit interview requests in writing for the teens to read.
At Represent, we eventually formed some rough guidelines for handling reporters’ requests. We decided to almost always say “no” to requests from journalism students, who frequently called. We figured that if a teen was going to open up to a reporter, we needed a guarantee that the story was going to be widely distributed. If a reporter wanted to write about the writer’s work at the magazine, we usually said yes. We also generally granted interviews if the reporter was from a news source that we trusted and felt could have a large impact, whether or not the story mentioned our magazine. Otherwise, we politely explained that it was not the mission of the magazine to make our young people available to reporters and instead encouraged them to quote liberally from the magazine.
Often I’d fax the journalists teen-written articles on the subjects they were researching, and a handful of reporters did quote from those stories. This thrilled me—the reporter got a teen voice in the story while still respecting the teens’ right to carefully choose their own words, and both the teens and the organization received proper credit. It seemed like the best of all worlds. After all, building support for an organization, as well as for the youth media field, means not only pushing to get young voices heard, but making sure youth media’s contributions receive due recognition.

Continue reading When a Reporter Calls