Category: 2005

While arts programs nationwide suffer due to pressures from the No Child Left Behind Act, the New York Times (access fee required) has detected an unusual trend toward increasingly extravagant (and costly) high school plays. For an Indiana school featured in the article “Supersizing the School Play,” theater has brought the impoverished surrounding community “a measure of pride, comparable only to that generated by the sports teams.”
The article also celebrates the teaching behind the shows that transforms students into “serious, confident, and even daring” apprentices. One drama teacher, for instance, “relates to his students in the slightly fierce, slightly indulgent way most good teachers do. He does what he can to keep even the most marginalized of them on board.”

Seventeen-year-old high school journalist David McSwane wanted to see how far Army recruiters were willing to go during war to get one more soldier, CBS News reports. So McSwane approached a recruiter in Golden, Colorado, posing as a high school dropout with a drug problem who wanted to enlist. The recruiter encouraged McSwane to create a fake high school diploma online and to purchase a “detoxification kit.”

A Political Overview

For a comprehensive overview of the preferred music and culture of many young media makers, Youth Media Reporter contributing writer Ken Ikeda (see “The ‘Rescue’ Dilemma”) recommends Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (St. Martin’s Press).
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop explores the racial and economic divide that fuels hip-hop and, not coincidentally, much of American-made youth media. Though Chang does not speak directly about it, many of his observations on hip-hop (arguably a form of youth media in itself) also hold true for the field’s recent developments—like the melding of art with activism. Readers can ruminate on just how influential hip-hop has been to youth media’s current boom.

Marketing Advice

Open Society Institute media officer Amy Weil recently talked with Youth Media Reporter about leveraging publicity for young people’s work. For more marketing advice catered to nonprofits with an activist bend, Weil recommends SPIN Works!: A Media Guidebook for Communicating Values and Shaping Opinion. Filled with clear directives on how to write a compelling press release, pick a spokesperson, pitch a story to reporters, and create a media plan, SPIN Works! is “the soup to nuts of basic media do’s and don’ts,” says Weil, adding, “it’s a very easy read, easy to understand.”

Teaching Inspiration

Youth Communication editor Nora McCarthy recently wrote about her work guiding teens in foster care through the writing process. When she herself needs teaching inspiration, McCarthy turns to Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America’s Educationally Underprepared (Penguin Books). The book tells how “one intense teacher’s believing in Rose turns him from a disaffected, uninterested teenager into a curious college student, and ultimately a passionate teacher,” says McCarthy. Most of Lives on the Boundary examines how Rose learned to reach out to other young people unaware of their ability to learn. “And he’s not grandiose about it,” says McCarthy, with admiration. “He’s just so tender about his students. It validated my belief that to be successful at this work you need to treat every student as a puzzle that if you work hard enough you can understand. Besides that there’s no one way to treat your students, except with a certain fierceness that you and they can do something great together because you trust them.”

Continue reading What’s on Your Bookshelf?

In her first story for Represent, a magazine by and for teens in foster care that I edit, Natasha Santos wrote with a charming blend of sassiness, introspection, and insecurity. Her story described not having friends to sit with during junior high school lunch.
“In the cafeteria, Natasha sees the different groups at their tables, talking away,” Natasha wrote using the third person to describe herself. “Natasha stands there thinking, ‘Where do I sit?’ The problem is Natasha can’t conform. ‘Can’t or won’t?’ her brain asks. Sometimes it makes her feel really low to be an alien to everyone around her. It gets hard to remember who she is: A young woman, not a rebel, but not a follower either. She’s Natasha, and that won’t change.”
That story showcased Natasha’s strength and survivor instinct. She turned a depressing and isolating experience into a funny, knowing article where she depicted herself as an iconoclast rather than a loser.
But in early drafts of her next story, tough and sassy Natasha was gone. “This story is going to be about love,” she told me, and named the story on the computer “love.doc.” In fact, the story was about whether Natasha had ever truly been loved by her drug-addicted mother or by her vindictive foster mom, who required Natasha to eat only from her own plate and spoon, so she would not contaminate the family’s kitchenware. The draft was a dreary catalogue of abuses, ending with the conclusion that she definitely had not been loved.
I felt unsure how to handle her story. Like all of us in youth media, I know that satisfying personal stories, whether conveyed through radio, film, or writing, must go beyond simply ranting or rehashing painful experiences. I believe those writing for a teen audience have a responsibility to show how teens take charge of their lives, even if they’ve taken only the smallest steps. I also consider it my job to help writers recognize their strengths and to acknowledge that strength in their stories.
Evidence of my writers’ resiliency is usually not hard to find. Writing a personal essay about a taboo subject like abuse is in itself an act of taking charge and resisting victimization. When a writer’s instinct is to dwell on the pain of an event, I push her to shift the focus of the story to show instead how she handled that pain. Reframing a story to more heavily stress a young person’s strengths and abilities affects not only their stories, but their self perceptions.

Reframing a story to more heavily stress a young person’s strengths and abilities affects not only their stories, but their self perceptions.

But Natasha seemed insistent that her story was solely about how she’d been victimized. She disregarded questions I wrote in the margins about the caring adoptive home she was now living in, or how she managed to achieve excellent grades despite all she’d been through. Instead, she handed in long drafts that burned with fury. Then one day she saw her story on my desk with the words “Anger Story” penciled on top.
“Why does it say ‘Anger Story’ on mine?” she asked me.
“Oh, just because that’s what it’s about,” I said, not thinking.
“What about anger?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said, “It seems like it’s about how you have all this anger from your past that you don’t know what to do with. And you’re trying to deal with it but you don’t know how.”
Something switched in Natasha during that exchange. She took her story to her computer and began writing. This time, her beaten-down voice was gone. “This is the story of a girl, born in the projects, neglected by her parents and tormented by memories of families she’s no longer a part of. It’s a story that I must tell so that I can move on.” she wrote. That led to a story about Natasha’s quest to acknowledge the pain of her past without succumbing to depression. Shifting the focus of her “love” story in this way helped Natasha reframe her worldview as well. She began to see that her painful sense of rejection as a child did not need to define her, and she could have a more hopeful future.
I was lucky to stumble across a way to help Natasha rethink her story. But, like all editors, I have a few tools that usually do the trick, that can work with young people producing personal stories in just about any medium, whether it be radio, film, or writing.
In most cases, focusing a story on a writer’s strengths is just a matter of being encouraging and asking blunt questions that redirect a writer from detailing what happened to her to explaining what she did in response. When one student said she wanted to write about being raped, I asked, “What do you want the readers to take from your story?”
“I want to let them know to tell someone right away, because I waited four years and I shouldn’t have,” she said. I asked her to begin by describing the day she told her mom, and she wrote a powerful piece about how she began to recover once she asked for help.
Other times I have to actively sniff out evidence of resilience to help my writers see ways they resisted allowing their voices to be silenced. Scrutinizing the grammar and style a young person uses to tell her story often helps me figure out why the writer’s voice seems to go passive or fall flat in certain stories. Every writer has a signature grammatical pattern. Some put “too much tinsel on the tree” by being too descriptive, others hit the reader with their points like a jackhammer.
Often, those grammatical patterns reflect how my writers view themselves and their relation to the world. When writers are uncomfortable or uncertain about what they’re saying, their signature patterns get worse. Flowery prose turns purple.
One of my writers, Pauline, often hides behind adjectives and lots of dreamy metaphors. Sentences that clearly show Pauline taking action can be rare. In early drafts of a personal essay partly about surviving her father’s physical and sexual violence, Pauline seemed to disappear entirely. Very few of her sentences began with “I,” and those that did were often in the passive voice. So many sentences began with “he” that it was as if, even in her retelling the story, her father had succeeded in dominating her.
We turned the story back around by searching for Pauline. I’d say, “Pauline, I don’t see too much ‘I’ in this section. What were you doing?” It turned out that Pauline fiercely resisted her father and protected her sister. Pauline yelled for her mentally ill mother to intervene. She nudged her grandmother to take her on trips out of the house and encouraged her sister to come along. She spoke up when social workers visited her house.
When we shifted the focus from “what happened to Pauline” to “how Pauline responded,” her story blossomed with “I” and active verbs, and Pauline was able to recognize and appreciate how courageously she had fought for her own well-being.
Natasha’s signature writing style, on the other hand, sometimes veers too far into an angry, know-it-all tone, facilitated by tons of short sentence fragments. Describing a few well-off teens Natasha had interviewed during a field trip we took to a suburban school, Natasha wrote:
“Then there was Jesse and Jessica. The wealthy ones in the group. Jessica lived in the wealthiest community in Norwalk. And Jesse lived in the second wealthiest. Their answers may have been considered standard by someone else. But for me they were useless. Too sheltered and clouded to be of any real substance.”
In the draft, Natasha wanted to convey that she felt only scorn for those naïve suburban teens. In truth, visiting that school in the suburbs had also made her feel jealous and cheated of a tranquil childhood. Her anger shined through those choppy sentences. I needed to help Natasha shift her story from a simplistic “Teens in the suburbs don’t know about life,” to a more thoughtful, “The teens I met in the suburbs seemed more hopeful than the teens in my ghetto neighborhood.” Simply by requiring her to write full sentences, I figured I could draw out a more thoughtful response.
I sat Natasha down with this story, all the fragments underlined. I asked, “Do you know what a fragment is?” She surprised me by saying yes.
“What do you think all these millions of fragments are about?” I asked, and jokingly began to read them out loud in an annoyed, almost snotty voice: “The wealthy ones in the group…Too sheltered and clouded to be of any real substance.”
“You sure want to get your point across!” I said, laughing. Natasha knows herself well, so she began laughing too. I told her that she needed to learn to use fragments only for emphasis, and to choose what to emphasize. Not everything is so important it needs to be highlighted, I explained.
“Ok, ok, I get it,” she told me, and took the paper to her computer. Thirty minutes later she’d smoothed out every fragment, which took a lot of the defensive, snotty tone out of her writing. “I want to leave the last fragment,” she told me, “for emphasis.”
I put her on “Fragment Watch” after that, and the next draft she wrote almost knocked me over: Four paragraphs and not a single fragment. Then I felt pretty stupid. If I’d pointed out those fragments three years ago, when I’d first started working with Natasha, I could’ve saved myself a lot of time!
Or maybe Natasha needed to be ready to correct her own grammar. Since the way a person tells her own story is often so entangled with her worldview, maybe Natasha just needed to grow up before she felt confident enough to turn the volume down.

Nora McCarthy has edited Represent since 2002. She also edited New Youth Connections, a newspaper by and for public high school students in New York City, for three years.

Above left: Represent editor Nora McCarthy and writer Natasha Santos at work.

Continue reading Flipping the Script

The French daily Mon Quotidien isn’t written by kids, but its young editors have a reputation for preferring front-page articles about bears over politics, sometimes to the adult writers’ chagrin. The Christian Science Monitor provides a lively report on “one of the world’s only daily newspapers for children.”

The website Listen Up! lists funding sources, news, jobs, and upcoming events and conferences relevant to the youth media field.

The day may be fast approaching when an employer’s hiring process will include an online name search, reports the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. It’s a good argument for why teens with blogs and other personal websites may need coaching to understand the possible long-term consequences of attaching real names to their creations.

Never underestimate a public figure’s willingness to talk with students: an enterprising fourth grader landed an exclusive interview with Britney Spears for her school paper, reports Defamer. Turns out she’s the daughter of a former Star magazine staff member.

In Australia, a reality show in which kids lived for a week without parents has spawned heated discussion about young people in the media. Comparing the show’s premise to an “abusive parent” who sets young people up for failure and then punishes them for it, The Age bemoaned the negative stereotyping of teens on TV.

But in “The Yoofs Are So Over Talking About Themselves,” in the Sydney Morning Herald (access fee required), a 23-year-old argues that the real problem is not the media’s misrepresentation of “yoof.” It’s that there are too few places for young people to talk about anything other than being young and misrepresented. Young “yoof advocates,” she warns, “only exacerbate the boxed-in perceptions and exotic otherness they sought to combat in the first place, while selling themselves short on what they have to contribute.”

Over two years ago, Barry Bradford and his students at Adlai Stevenson High School in suburban Chicago began making a film that explored the infamous 1964 “Mississippi Burning” murder case, in which three young civil rights workers’ bodies were found on a Mississippi farm. Nearly two dozen members of the Ku Klux Klan were arrested in connection with the slayings, but no one was ever prosecuted.
Bradford and his students interviewed the victims’ families, pored over court trial transcripts, and met with historians and FBI officials involved in the case. They interviewed one of the main murder suspects, minister and reputed Klansman Edgar Ray Killen.
Hoping to see Killen tried for the crime, Bradford’s students joined forces with advocacy groups to help generate a congressional resolution asking federal prosecutors to reopen the case. Last January, Edgar Ray Killen was arrested on murder charges.
“For three teenagers and one teacher to feel that in a small way we affected the course of history is monumental,” Bradford says. But he also claims that he never doubted his students’ work could help lead to Killen’s arrest. “I really believe it was the right time and we had a good strategy,” he says.
A large part of that strategy involved getting media coverage for his students’ work, something Bradford is particularly skilled at. Publicity for another of Bradford’s students’ projects prompted Congress to decleare a “Week of Remembrance” for slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers. Youth Media Reporter interviewed Bradford about his strategies for publicizing student work. We also talked with two other experts on working with the press—Open Society Institute media officer Amy Weil and Youth Rights Media executive director Laura McCargar. The following are their tips.

Find a News Hook

Know why your media matters now and what about it is newsworthy. “A controversy, an anniversary, a report, a human interest angle, a march, a demonstration, a film that no one else has” can help youth media organizations access mainstream media, explains Weil. If you are holding a screening or a press conference, deciding what makes the event newsworthy can make the difference between having only friends and colleagues attend or having news outlets show up, she says.
Last year, when Youth Rights Media screened its documentary about a Connecticut juvenile prison, the facility was already in the news. Connecticut Governor John Rowland’s administration was under investigation for contract corruption, and the Connecticut Juvenile Training School was part of the scandal. Youth Rights Media executive director McCargar seized the opportunity by pitching their documentary as an unprecedented look at life inside the facility, from the inmates’ point of view. Media and government officials attended a screening, eventually prompting Connecticut’s current governor to suggest last month that the prison be closed.
Bradford’s students’ documentary was less topical, but it did coincide with the 40-year anniversary of the “Mississippi Burning” case. As a result, reporters looking for a fresh way to talk about the event and efforts to reopen the case found it in the students’ work. “It was logical that the victims’ family members, and the citizens of Mississippi, would care about the case, but we were not the usual suspects you would expect to work on this,” remembers Bradford.

Have a Clear Goal and Partners to Help You Reach It

Bradford’s student filmmakers wanted the murder case reopened. This clarity of purpose helped guide their project and attract allies to their cause.
Youth Media Rights had a similarly singular vision—they wanted the Connecticut Juvenile Training School closed. In the beginning of the Rowland investigation, recalls McCargar, a few advocates and officials privately agreed that the facility should be shut down, but only the young filmmakers stated it publicly. “Being out there, doing film screenings across the state, and very publicly and adamantly demanding closure created a different kind of accountability,” says McCargar. It also attracted partners who became equally committed to seeing the school shut down.

Use Interviews to Your Advantage

Never underestimate the willingness of public figures to talk to students. People who might normally be wary of the media will often grant interviews to young people, because they don’t perceive them as a threat.
This is how Bradford’s team scored an interview with murder suspect Killen. That interview in turn helped Bradford’s students gain legitimacy with the press and draw better coverage.
“When the media was trying to assess whether we were worthy of ink or broadcast time, I’d say, ‘Did you know we are the only people in the last 20 years that the alleged murderer gave an interview to?’ ” remembers Bradford. “That caught their attention and made them think, ‘These kids are serious.’ Then we could throw out a few other names of people we interviewed, and they could say, ‘Ok, if the head of the FBI talked to them, these kids must know what they’re doing, they must be important.’”
Interviews are also an effective way to spread word of your organization. Youth Rights Media interviewed the Connecticut child advocate for their documentary. When that advocate discussed the Rowland scandal with the New York Times, she mentioned Youth Rights Media, eventually landing them a story in the Times.

Write a Compelling Press Release

Begin your press release with your news hook, explaining why a reporter should care about your project. Once you’ve gotten some media coverage, use that to your advantage. Save the clips and send them with your next press release. “The media seems to have a mind-set that if somebody has written about you or talked about you already, what you’re doing must be important,” says Bradford. “Media generates more media.”

Be Strategic About Who Gets Your Release, and Follow Up by Phone

One radio station Bradford successfully pitched had a weekly “Kid of the Week” feature. Another time he got a spot on a news station with a primarily African-American audience and where one of the hosts, Bradford says, “is of the age to care about the civil rights movement, and radio shows are always looking for guests.”
In both cases, Bradford considered which reporters and outlets would be most interested in his students’ story. Doing this kind of homework is crucial, says Weil. She recommends carefully reading the paper and listening to the radio to decide which reporters are most likely to be interested in your students’ project.
Once you’ve sent your press release to those reporters, follow up on the phone. Use your news hook to begin your phone relationship. Reference the reporter’s work to show how your story idea relates to other stories they’ve written. While it’s important to be persistent with reporters, says Weil, remember that reporters are busy, so also be brief and patient.

Nurture Relationships with the Press

Weil lets reporters know she’s a resource for them by suggesting potential interviewees to help broaden their stories. Bradford sends thank-you notes to each reporter who covers his students’ work. McCargar makes her young people available to reporters, even if they have no plans to mention Youth Rights Media in their story. As a result, all three have developed trusting relationships with members of the press. McCargar says she now has “a whole other level of access” to the media, including the cell phone numbers of reporters who are invited to Youth Rights Media screenings.

Prepare Teens

McCargar coaches her young people to have three key points. Bradford’s teens developed half-minute spiels that explained the basic facts of the “Mississippi Burning” case.
Train your own teens to articulate their expertise clearly and quickly, to know what message they want to convey during an interview, and to explain why their media is important.
Talk with students about how the media works, and help them decide ahead of time what they want and don’t want to reveal. Warn them that a reporter might interview them several times and never quote them. Let them know that if they explain during an interview that they were wrongly put in a mental facility, for instance, the reporter might mention they were in the facility, omitting that they were falsely diagnosed. Tell teens that if they are uncomfortable with a question like “Why were you incarcerated?” they don’t have to answer.
Make it acceptable for teens to turn down interviews. Don’t give out their home numbers without permission, and always give teens the option of calling the reporters themselves.

Prepare Reporters

McCargar found that reporters who visit Youth Media Rights in person tend to write more sensitively about the teens. McCargar feels this is because viewing her young activists at work helps reporters “get a sense of context.”
Give reporters background information about your organization and working with teens. Let them know that the young people they will interview may be vulnerable or involved in delicate situations.

Identify a Media Expert Who Can Help in a Pinch

Bradford’s cell phone began ringing incessantly the day Killen was arrested. A former journalist who worked at his school took the phone and fielded calls for Bradford that day.
The day after her teens pulled off a successful press conference, McCargar expected to enjoy a morning of long-overdue sleeping in. Instead two national, competing television programs wanted interviews. Weil helped McCargar navigate the situation.
Identify an expert whom you can turn to at a moment’s notice if you need advice handling the media. In other words, if you’ve got an important project and a focused plan for publicizing it, be prepared for the very real possibility that things might become, for a while, pleasantly out-of-hand.
Above left: Three Adlai Stevenson students at the ceremony commemorating the 40th anniversary of the murders in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Continue reading Prime Time