Category: 2006

The El Paso online publication Newspaper Tree has published testimonies from students (and a teacher) involved in the April school walkouts over immmigration issues.

New research by Young People Now finds that England’s media has begun depicting youth in a more positive light, but it still has a long way to go. In 2004, about 71 percent of articles about youth were negative. The next year the number had dropped to 57 percent. But for both years, only about 12 percent of stories about youth were classed as “positive.”

Immigration issues transformed Anthony Lemus, a 16-year-old who admits to falling asleep in class, into a charismatic, megaphone-grasping leader who was instrumental at the DC rallies. Other “political issues, such as the Iraq war, have not galvanized him,” he told the Washington Post, “because they do not threaten a single race and don’t seem like things he can change.”
Pacific News Service criticizes the mainstream press for producing too few articles like the one about Lemus, saying the media has failed to give young people due credit for their effective organizing around immigration issues. In Los Angeles, for instance, the thousands of young people who mobilized did so almost entirely through fliers, text messages, and MySpace bulletins.

A new study conducted by the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine “provides some of the first quantitative evidence that training teens about the messages and motivations behind various types of media has the potential to reduce teen smoking,” the Pitt Chronicle reports. A young person’s ability to analyze tobacco ads had a stronger influence on whether or not they smoked, in some cases, than did socioeconomic status, stress, and even parental smoking. “Many of the other factors that influence smoking behaviors are things that we cannot control,” said the study’s lead author. “Media literacy is one of the few areas in which we can actively effect change.”

Continue reading Media Literacy Goes a Long Way, Baby

I was nervous about my upcoming interview for an editor position at the publisher Doubleday Broadway. I wasn’t only concerned about what staff at the corporate publishing group might think of my long dreadlocks—some dyed navy blue—and the piercings I sported on each ear and below my lip. I also worried how they’d perceive my current profession: I worked with teen writers.
Yes, I was a youth media educator. I belonged to that group of talented, conscientious folk who sometimes feel like outcasts from the rest of the adult working world because the scope of what they do often isn’t understood by others. A group who not too many would readily use the term “professional” to describe, maybe because so much of their day looks like they’re just “hanging out” with the kids, even though they’re really transforming lives.
I edited New Youth Connections (NYC), a publication written by and for New York City teens that is distributed in the city’s public high schools and libraries. Whenever I told this to folks at professional meetings or social functions, it was hard for them to grasp just what I did. To be fair, it was hard for me to explain. My job editing New Youth Connections was unique, requiring me not only to develop and edit nonfiction narratives on a tight deadline, but to teach, mentor, and manage the teen staff. (My earrings and blue hair were definitely an asset there.)
I got used to saying the job was like being an editor and a teacher all rolled into one. But even that explanation went only so far. Most people aren’t clear about what an editor actually does, and, alas, because teachers work with a population that routinely gets dismissed or ignored–our children—too often their profession gets diminished as well. On more than one occasion, after explaining my job, I was met with blank stares and then asked, “Well, do you like what you do?”
So I worried how explaining my work would go over at Doubleday, and whether they would understand how my experience working on youth media was relevant to the adult publishing biz. These concerns lingered behind my smile as I met with my interviewer, Doubleday Vice President Janet Hill.
Janet seemed extremely curious about the editing process at NYC, and listened closely as I explained how working with young, developing writers requires a very hands-on process involving multiple drafts, lots of questioning, and intensive line editing. I told her it had taught me to be a consummate diplomat, since young people often need an editor who can offer comments and criticisms without bruising fragile egos. “But of course, I know that’s different in the adult publishing world,” I added, thinking that adult writers wouldn’t need someone to be so tender.
“Actually, it’s the same,” said Janet.
I stood corrected (and slightly embarrassed) as she explained that adult writers often require the same type of encouragement and care with their work as do young ones. It was a relief to hear someone besides me making the connection between my work with teens and the adult writing world.

Adult writers often require the same type of encouragement and care with their work as do young ones.

I got the job and have been working at Doubleday for the last three years. Now when I tell people what I do, that I’m a book editor, I get immediate respect, recognition, or at least intrigue. It’s nice to feel that razzle-dazzle smile from folks, yet it also bothers me a bit. It bothers me that I didn’t get it when I worked with teens, yet my skills as an editor were primarily honed by my work with kids.
My teen writers’ ability varied wildly. Some of their early drafts were clear, precise, and organized. Others lacked any sort of cohesiveness or focus, requiring me to really work with them and delve deeply to figure out what the story they wanted to tell truly was. (And yes, I did sometimes rant in confidence to my fellow adult editors about certain stories—“What exactly is this supposed to be about?!?”) Because of NYC’s emphasis on printing only stories that were in the best, most nuanced shape possible, students sometimes wrote eight, nine, ten successive drafts before their stories ran. This could take months.
It was with those teen writers and the accompanying lengthy editing process that I developed a lasting patience that has proven critical in my current job overseeing books that take at least a year to see to fruition. Working with my young writers I also developed the ability to deeply scrutinize manuscripts that lacked focus and set them on track. One manuscript I worked on recently has chapters with too many ideas presented in a hodgepodge structure. My training in how to edit youth played a large role in helping me see past the manuscript’s tangents to what each chapter should and can be. It has also helped me come up with strategies on how to get a very talented writer to focus.
Two of my other adult writers (one being Professor Heather Neff, whose novel about alcoholism, Haarlem, hit the shelves last year) have told me that I’ve given their novels the closest read out of anyone who has read their work. Again, I attribute much of this to my experience working with youth.
And I’ve found that adults appreciate having an editor give them suggestions and feedback in a clear, comprehensive way, something essential to editing teens.
Some of you editors and producers reading this might be ultimately left asking that tell-tale question of a media maker: “Well, what is this story really about?” It’s my hope that folks wanting to leave the media world to work with young people won’t be scared that it will stall or sideswipe their career. I did just that. I left a newspaper editing job to work at New Youth Connections, and far from stalling my work as an editor, it got me jumpstarted.
I also hope that youth media workers who want to explore pastures outside of the youth work world can feel fortified knowing that there are indeed people in traditional media circles, like Janet, who understand what we do, and get that the skills we acquire working with teens are applicable to the processes involved in the adult media world. It’s an understanding that can hopefully help to bridge the gap between two worlds that can, at times, feel unnecessarily far apart.
Clarence A. Haynes is an associate editor at Doubleday Broadway books and works on various titles for the African American imprint Harlem Moon. He is also a freelancer who’s written for various publications, including Newsday, The Source and Publishers Weekly. He lives in Brooklyn and, though he’s no longer a full-time youth worker, still loves the kids.
Above left: Clarence Haynes in his days of of youth media and blue dreadlocks.

Continue reading A Teen’s Editor in an Adult World

In an effort to attract more young readers and give youth a forum for their views, a British paper brought on 14-year-old Eshe Nelson to write a monthly column. Her very first article, in which Nelson protested the use of costly ID cards for youth to ride buses, had a significant impact. Days after the article was published, HoldtheFrontPage reports, the bus company “performed a u-turn and said it was going back to the drawing board.”

“Educational bloggers are finding their blogs blocked by school districts because they are talking about important, yet controversial educational issues” like MySp@ce, reports Digital Divide Network, which changed the “a” to “@” so not to be filtered by Texas school districts. “Important educational blogs…are getting censored arbitrarily because they are trying to raise awareness of sites like MySp@ce, encouraging critical examinations by educators and a greater emphasis on media literacy. To engage in a constructive debate about sites like this, you have to mention them. And preferably link to them. And these acts are getting bloggers banned by schools.”

Continue reading Blogging Backlash

Elizabeth Garcia still has a five-year-old copy of the student newspaper from her freshman year at Mission High School in San Francisco. She kept it all this time not because she wrote for it, nor because her name appears in it, but because it was one of the only issues of the paper she remembers ever being printed, and she’d hoped to write for it one day. But by the time Elizabeth was a sophomore, the paper was no more. “Something happened the next year, and it just wasn’t around anymore,” Elizabeth remembers. “They said it had to do with funding, and the paper was pretty good. It was a pretty big part of the school.”
Around the same time, another media movement was picking up steam at Mission. Soon students throughout the school—not just those in the journalism club—were making media. Staff at the small but fairly typical urban school of about 880 students with limited resources and over half its students eligible for free lunch had applied for grants to give their teachers technology training.
Teachers began assigning students projects like creating videos, webpages, and CDs in just about every subject. “There were more computer arts classes in the year after the paper shut down, and more computers in the school,” remembers Elizabeth. “There was always someone recording something. PowerPoint was really big.”
A group of Mission students formed a TV club that videotaped newscasts for their classmates to watch during free period. Their shows covered subjects typically found in student publications, like sports, school events, and club news.
But for Elizabeth, something was lost. She misses how the school paper had tackled serious subjects, like drugs and “rumors going around,” she says. The student-produced TV newscasts aired during free period “didn’t really mention those topics.” They were more about “fun and overall school spirit and cheering on, not what was really going on,” says Elizabeth.
Experts say that nationwide, student media is being transformed by multimedia as the traditional newspaper is fading out. So far media production, a critical part of media literacy, is turning out to be far more democratic than traditional school newspapers—engaging a more diverse range of students than just those enrolled in journalism class. But while advocates of student journalism commend the advent of media production in the classroom, they also share Elizabeth’s concern that these projects may not give students the same opportunity that papers have historically done: a voice to discuss the issues most relevant to them.
Many experts trace the slow death of the school paper back to Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier, the 1988 U.S. Supreme Court decision that gave school administrators the right to censor high school papers, “essentially cutting the legs off of school journalism programs,” says Renee Hobbs, an associate professor of communications at Temple University. Now, over one-quarter of schools recently surveyed by the Knight Foundation do not have school papers, according to a recent article in the Columbia Journalism Review. Forty percent have lost their paper in the last five years, as did Mission. And, like Mission, the majority of those without papers—over three-quarters—were urban or rural schools.
As these are the schools most likely to have high concentrations of poor students and students of color, the Columbia Journalism Review reported, some believe the disappearance of the urban school paper has made it even more difficult for news outlets to improve their low minority-employment rates. About 14 percent of working journalists are minorities.
But as school papers stop their presses, media literacy—the ability to analyze, decode, understand, and produce media—is inadvertently helping fill the void. Just as learning to write is essential to being literate, educators believe that their students need to know how to produce media to be media savvy.
The changes Elizabeth observed at Mission are part of a growing belief among educators nationwide that media literacy is as important to being an informed 21st-century citizen as reading and writing—that it’s a “hard-core basic survival” skill, as media educators, perhaps overstating their case, described it at a 2004 conference hosted by the Institute for Multimedia Literacy.
“Today we are inundated with information and we need media literacy in order to think for ourselves and to not be under the influence of those who are doing the thinking” and making media, explains Michelle Powers, Mission’s library media specialist who helped spearhead the school’s media movement. “Every single student should be learning media literacy.”
The movement to bring media literacy and production education to schools has been slow in the U.S. compared to other countries like Australia, which have long made media education a nuts-and-bolts part of public education. But in early 2002, the notion of media literacy began to catch on in the U.S. when the White House released a policy paper laying out its importance. Around the same time, Mid-continent Research for Education and Learning (McREL), an organization funded by the Department of Education that recommends what students at each grade level should learn, stated that viewing and creating media should be required in language arts.
While it can take a lag time of several years between McRel recommending standards and school districts adopting them, and longer still before schools accommodate this, teachers and administrators have begun to seek ways to bring media production into classrooms, and not just into English class.
A number of educational institutions offer prospective teachers master’s-level courses on how to teach media production. Textbook companies, which study state standards, have been putting out “really comprehensive guides” on teaching media production, says David Considine, professor of instructional technology and media studies at Appalachian University’s school of education.
In Philadelphia, AmeriCorps—the domestic version of the Peace Corps—is sending media specialists into public high schools to provide technical support to students and teachers. And a growing number of youth media nonprofits, which have long worked with young people in after-school settings, are being approached by schools to help bring media production into their classrooms. As school newspapers are “dying out for limitations placed on them,” explains Hobbs, “media literacy is replacing them.”

There are important differences between print journalism and newer forms of media—some positive, some not.

But there are important differences—some positive, some not. Students staffing newspapers generally choose to take journalism as an elective, usually because they are already enthusiastic writers. Media production, on the other hand, is taught in a number of subject areas—not just AP English class, but social studies, history, health—thereby exposing a far wider and more diverse range of students to media skills than those who generally populate a school paper. “Even science and math teachers are now also teaching” media production, says Kathleen Tyner, assistant professor in the Department of Radio, Television, and Film at the University of Texas. “It grows out of the idea of experiential education where you think first and then you do.”
Elizabeth’s younger sister, Lydia, is a case in point. Lydia transferred to Mission High School, where she is now a freshman, only three weeks ago. Already, she says, she’s made a music CD for English class; interviewed classmates about drugs for a Power Point presentation for social studies; and in art, she’s created her own website where she opines about food, fashion, and religion.
But like her sister, Lydia misses having a school paper. Lydia wrote for the paper in middle school and loved it when people told her they’d read her articles. Reading the paper made her feel more like the school was one big community, she says.
Advocates of student journalism say Lydia’s concern is not to be taken lightly. Media production is often, though not always, produced and presented in-class, whereas the student newspaper gives students an opportunity to voice their views to the entire school. Not having this sort of forum, says Mark Goodman, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, is a “diminishment in student voice.”
Not having an audience can also affect the quality of the media produced. The best school papers allow students to do what often comes naturally to teenagers—question authority. Writing with an audience in mind requires they do so in a responsible manner, through solid reporting, fact-checking, and exploring questions of journalistic ethics and etiquette.
Even for school-based multimedia projects not confined to the classroom, Goodman has noticed that many require heavy adult oversight due to the technology involved. Too often, the adults in charge set the agenda, and the students’ voices get lost in the process. “It’s much less likely that you’ll have a student truly serving as an editor of the medium, deciding what issues will be covered. If that is lost it’s a tremendous limitation on really understanding and appreciating what young people are thinking and what’s important to them,” says Goodman.
Hobbs warns that the censorship that is partly responsible for school papers’ disappearance will likely remain an issue with other student-produced media. While many media programs working independently of schools produce probing material, says Hobbs, “In order to export their practices [to schools] you’d have to introduce all sorts of learning experiences for administrators to understand why they don’t have to be afraid of student opinions.”
Powers never envisioned that multimedia production would replace the school paper at Mission. The paper was just more difficult to fund than computers, and, like the Garcia sisters, she feels “it’s a huge problem” that Mission lost it. But she also seems hopeful that Mission is in transition, and the loss of its student publication is temporary, just part of the school’s growing pains. Perhaps one day there will be funding to bring back the school paper. Then, she says, with all the media and design skills Mission students—all of its students—have been learning, the new paper would have the potential to be stronger than ever.
For Goodman, the key question schools like Mission should ask is not in what medium student work is being produced, but whether students truly have a voice and the chance to share it with the larger community. “It’s possible to have a web-based publication or television news program dealing with issues that student editors think are important,” he says. “But if they’re not being operated that way, then there’s truly something missing.”
Above left: Mission High School in San Francisco has all students dabbling in multimedia.

Continue reading Student Media Makeover

A new study has found that young adolescents with a media diet high in sexually oriented material were more likely to have sex. In a climate where schools are increasingly limited in what they can teach about sex, ConsumerAffairs.com reports, mass media seems to have become one of the main places where teens get their cues.

Manhattan Neighborhood Network is fighting legislation that may threaten public access TV. Whether they succeed could have “major implications for the thousands of independent producers, youth groups and community-based organizations that depend on public access as a platform to communicate their points of view—points of view that are too often omitted by mainstream broadcasters,” MediaRights reports.