Category: 2006

“Human beings have always had a capacity to attend to several things at once,” reports a Time Magazine cover story (subscription or day pass required). But “the phenomenon has reached a kind of warp speed in the era of Web-enabled computers.”
According to one study, a whopping 82 percent of kids are online by the seventh grade. The Kaiser Family Foundation discovered last year that “media multitasking” had kids packing 8.5 hours of media watching into a mere 6.5 hours a day.
How is all this affecting teens?
For one, Time reports, teens have become especially adept at synthesizing and manipulating information, particularly visual data and images. But they have less tolerance for ambiguity, and little mental downtime to relax and reflect, which have some social scientists concerned.

Last spring the Bay Area UPN affiliate asked Uth TV, a new youth media company that I helped start, to produce twelve half-hour shows in a little over three months. Given that we had just opened our doors, this was both a huge opportunity and a challenge. Uth TV’s goal is to be the leading outlet for the nation’s youth voice, and we knew this could be a critical first step in establishing our bona fides.
We wanted people to find our shows compelling. We hoped that when they discovered the programs were put together entirely by young people under 20 years old, they would be blown away. In order for this to happen, we needed to create a professional atmosphere for the youth crews and to hold them to high standards. We figured if we held the bar high enough, they might struggle a bit but eventually find ways to jump over it.
We chose to work with youth media groups with a reputation for holding teens to exceedingly high standards, including Youth Sounds, also in the Bay Area, which has created a supportive yet demanding environment for its young producers. (Youth Sounds recently merged with the Bay Area Video Coalition.)
We assembled a team of youth crews and told them their shows could reach millions of Bay Area residents. We paid our youth staff well, and offered them support and editorial guidance. We never told them what they should or should not include in a piece, but we asked critical questions that forced them to think through their decisions.
At the end of the summer, we delivered all twelve episodes on time and under budget. The youth staff took tremendous pride in the work, and although I’m a bit biased, I thought the final product was excellent. It confirmed my belief that under the right circumstances, youth-made media can consistently be of top-notch quality.
But too often, it’s not.
When it comes to youth media, high-quality content can sometimes seem like the exception. As programming director for Uth TV, I watch a lot of youth-produced media, and frequently I’ll see a piece that has great intentions but poor execution. It’s hard to find fault when a young person is pouring out her heart and soul, using video to find her voice.
However, I’m usually left with a profound feeling of “what coulda been.” If only the young media maker had been asked to critically look at the piece (or have her peers offer constructive criticism), she would have realized that it required her to re-record the voiceover track, or shoot some more b-roll, or find a better way to construct the narrative. But instead, it’s left where it is, which is often the difference between a powerful and well-constructed piece and one that is, well, just okay.

Are we allowing youth to get by with mediocre work? Are we giving them enough freedom to experiment with storytelling techniques?

I would also apply this criticism to the way stories frequently get told in the field. Rarely do I see a youth-produced piece that isn’t a social issue or personal documentary. As someone who started his career as a documentary filmmaker, I have tremendous fondness for the format. However, I also believe that to maintain young people’s interest and feed their creativity, youth need other mediums to express themselves. Youth are pulled in many different directions, with lots of activities—sports, friends, after-school programs, and MySpace, to name a few. If we don’t allow them to tell stories in ways that connect and resonate with their peers, then we’re going to lose out to other competing interests. We’re also going to limit the kind of experimentation that can result in innovative media.
But a growing number of youth media makers are recognizing that it doesn’t have to be this way. High-quality, compelling youth media that pushes the envelope can be the norm, if we expect it.
Before coming to Uth TV, I was executive director of Just Think, a Bay Area youth media nonprofit. The decision to leave Just Think was difficult, but Uth TV represented an opportunity that was too good to pass up. Its focus on producing high-quality media on a for-profit model offered me a chance to explore two central questions that had been on my mind: How do those working in youth media build a culture of expectations that brings out the best in youth creativity? And how do we empower youth to tell stories that move beyond the social issue documentary paradigm?
Restated through a more critical lens: Are those of us in youth media allowing youth to get by with mediocre work, and are we giving them enough freedom to experiment with storytelling techniques?
Encouraging participants to experiment with different forms of making media and an array of narrative concepts is a significant part of how Youth Sounds gets quality work. In addition to documentaries, young people at Youth Sounds are also producing narrative films, flash animations, music CDs, and soon video games. Even when they’re telling nonfiction stories, there’s a level of experimentation and innovation that permeates their work, and it shows in what they produce.
The show that Youth Sounds produced for us this summer, Elements, demonstrates how the envelope can be pushed. Shot against a stark white background, youth look directly into the camera and speak candidly about music and other topics. The editors took footage involving multiple characters and wove it into a coherent and entertaining whole. The end product immediately captures viewers’ attention and keeps it throughout the duration of the short pieces.
Those groups serious about producing high-quality content like this also make a point of identifying high-profile media-distribution outlets. These distributors understand that when media makers know their work is going to be watched by a broad audience, they’re more likely to hold themselves to a higher standard. This summer’s Uth TV shows are a case in point. Because the UPN affiliate has the largest teen audience in the Bay Area, the youth working on the shows knew that they needed to bring their best work to the programs.
The Media That Matters film festival produced by Arts Engine, and the Beyond Borders project by Listen Up! are other good examples. Thanks to a distribution deal with the cable channel IFC, the work of the twelve youth producers for Beyond Borders will potentially be seen by an audience of millions. It shows; the pieces are well-produced and tell compelling stories. For certain, youth media makers received support and guidance from Listen Up! staff to make high-quality pieces. However, because the paricipants knew a lot was being expected of them, they scrambled that much harder.
I believe expecting high standards eventually won’t be just a choice for youth media groups, it will become a necessity. As the national funding climate continues to constrict, foundations and others increasingly look to support groups that are not only engaging youth in innovative and effective ways, but that are also finding ways to expose the work to a broad audience.
And it’s not just funding we need to worry about. Groups that don’t adapt the core principles of organizations like Youth Sounds—creating high-quality youth-produced work that is widely distributed and a diversity of expression that moves beyond the social documentary format—may ultimately lose not only money, but the interest of those they serve.
Above left: Uth TV media makers on set.
Dave Yanofsky is the programming director for Uth TV, a new media company. Before coming to Uth TV, he served as executive director of Just Think, a youth media nonprofit. He also produced and directed the award-winning film Poetic License, broadcast by PBS and accompanied by a national curriculum used in schools across the country.

Continue reading Breaking the Social Documentary Mold

A new computer game developed by professors at the University of Michigan makes an adventure of “getting the story,” the Associated Press (via ABC News) reports. Chasing facts, players face formidable foes like sources, editors, and librarians. Through it all they must keep cool. Overly confrontational questioning prompts sources to shut down, saying, “I don’t like your attitude.”

“As the ‘blogosphere’ continues its rapid expansion,” notes a Chicago Tribune article (via YouthLearn), “more teachers are using Web logs to engage students in the world at large.” In the aricle “educators list their favorite edublogs and note that teachers and students have yet to exploit the new medium to its fullest.” One teacher considers blogs “a powerful learning tool that students gravitate toward, initially, because of their social aspect.”

As the Iranian regime has shut down over 100 magazines and newspapers in the last six years and imprisoned many journalists, young Iranians “have turned to the Internet to get news and information—and to discuss their society,” reports Salon.com (must watch a short advertisement for access). Blogs sprouting from Iran, where seventy percent of the population is under 30, provide insight into “the tension bubbling up in the ordinary hearts of Iran’s predominantly young population.” Some believe these young bloggers “represent a new, nonviolent breed of activist,” desperate for “a genuinely accountable society.” Indeed, blogging in Iran can come with consequences—in 2003, Iran’s became “the first regime known to imprison a blogger.”

Christopher Schuepp, who looks like a blonde surfer and hails from Germany, was living in Krygyzstan, in Central Asia, when he discovered the impact journalism produced by young people can have in a developing country. He was working for the American non-governmental organization Internews Network, helping local journalists set up radio stations and start newspapers in the former republic of the Soviet Union, when the United Nation’s Children’s Fund (commonly known as UNICEF, for whom I also consult) said they wanted to fund a youth radio station in the region. Schuepp agreed to help set it up and train the young journalists. “Batken, the city in the South of Kyrgyzstan, where we set up the station, got independent news and quality entertainment for the first time ever through this station,” remembers Schuepp. “Young people, old people—everybody loved the station. That was the first time I really saw what a huge difference young people can make by using the media.”
Schuepp knew that media projects like the one at Internews were becoming increasingly common abroad, partly due to the 1999 Oslo Challenge, the call to action documented at the 10th anniversary of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. The Challenge asks countries to ensure, among other things, that young people participate in media production, as a way of protecting their rights. So when Schuepp left Internews to run Young People’s Media Network (YPMN), a UNICEF youth media service in the Central and Eastern Europe and the Commonwealth of Independent States, he started a listserv to spark discussion and collaboration among the growing number of youth media makers in the region.
Though initially the “Youthful Media” listserv focused on Europe and Central Asia, it quickly grew to attract participants from around the globe. In the four years since its launch, Youthful Media has grown to 600 members who share information daily. It remains part of YPMN, where Schuepp continues to moderate it, and receives funding from United Nations agencies, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) and local groups.
While American youth media organizations have struggled getting similar electronic dialogues going, Youthful Media is very active—about two or three members post notices daily. The posts, most which are in English, range from articles on recent research and trends related to young people and the media; to calls for entries for film festivals, media projects, and papers for academic conferences; to straightforward press releases about youth media projects. Some posts parallel discussions common to North American youth media makers—a group in Ireland recently announced its efforts to address the stereotyping of youth in its media. But others reveal that youth media abroad—a local radio show in Liberia, a school newspaper from Kosovo, or a children’s video in China—often plays a different role internationally than it does in the United States, especially in countries where press freedoms are curtailed, access to information is limited, and human rights are violated.
War and conflict play a particularly significant role in shaping the international youth media movement. According to a November post on the Youthful Media listserv, in the last decade alone, two million children have died as the result of war. Another four million children have been disabled, according to the post, and hundreds of thousands serve as child soldiers. About half of all refugees worldwide are under 18, resulting in approximately 25 million children who, as a result of war, have been displaced from their homes.
In some of the African countries mired in conflict, radio has traditionally been used to incite violence. In Rwanda, ruthless leaders used the broadcast system the Rwandan Libre des Mille Collines to urge countrymen to take part in the 1994 genocide. A guidebook recently linked to on Youthful Media listserv, “Youth Radio for Peacebuilding,” walks youth media makers in Africa—where at least 120,000 children are in armed forces, according to the guide—through the steps of reclaiming the airways for peace. The guide details how to produce youth radio programming that will engage armed young people and help foster peace in the region. Its chapters include titles like, “Who is your Target Audience?,” “Inter-generational Partnerships,” and “Rights and Responsibilities.”
Young journalists in conflict-ridden Liberia are already on the air, challenging and questioning their government’s actions that deny children their basic rights, like the right to attend school. The young broadcasters of Kids Talk, a youth media initiative that runs its shows over West Africa’s Star Radio, appeal to the government to lift school fees and advocate to free Liberian children from the cycle of poverty and violence caused by the country’s ongoing conflict. The show’s youth journalists have also interviewed government officials, and with the clarity of youth. They even asked the Liberian Head of State Minister of Defense Chairman Gyude Bryant, why he was booed by the crowds, something a Liberian journalist might hesitate to do.
Covering issues the local press may be reluctant to vocalize signifies much youth media abroad. “It is always easier for children to report on some issues that might be ‘sensitive’ for adult reporters, because children ‘can get away with more,'” says Schuepp. Still, although the U.N.’s Rights of the Child officially gave children the right to information and expression, says Schuepp, “it’s not realistic to expect children to have the right to information in a country where even adults don’t have that right.”
When tackling controversial subjects in areas with political upheaval, youth media educators must take extra precautions to make sure they are not putting young journalists in dangerous positions. To that end, Schuepp casts YPMN in non-threatening terms—he calls it a “creativity project”—and has its coverage include relatively benign subjects, like arts and health. Using tactics like this, says Schuepp, “even in a restrictive environment you can work with kids and media without getting in trouble with the government.”
Ultimately, says Schuepp, the youth media projects that have the most impact in helping countries heal from conflict and move toward peace are the ones that focus their efforts locally, like the one recently described on Youthful Media listserv in Bosnia-Hertzogovenia, where radio and television stations in the public service are now required by law to produce programming in ethnic minority languages, but none have. At the Media Plan Institute of Sarajevo, youth journalists recently recorded the first radio programming in Roma ever.
It’s the lessons learned through local initiative like this one that ultimately fuel dialogue in the larger international youth media field. “The stronger the local communities of young media makers are,” says Schuepp, “the better the exchange through the international network, everywhere.”
Maya Dollarhide is a freelance writer and has worked for the past several years as a consultant for the United Nations Children’s Fund.
Above left: At a workshop in Maldives, Christopher Schuepp looks on as participant Vishal Mohamed from Malé films a scene for an anti-drugs video. View the resulting one-minute film here: http://www.theoneminutesjr.org.

Continue reading Where Youth Media is the Media

A 2005 Kaiser Family Foundation survey found that young people spend over six hours per day with media, yet only 6 percent of respondents reported watching the news. According to the Sacramento Bee (here via the Newstribune.com), getting youth interested in the news “is widely seen as the biggest challenge” to the media industry today.
Others consider it a challenge to democracy as well: “How do you hold the government and its leaders accountable if you don’t follow the news?” wonders one former CNN producer.
Young people say they feel talked down to by mainstream media, but one college professor sees things differently: “They totally don’t care,” he says.
Ellin O’Leary of Youth Radio in Berkeley sheds considerably more optimistic light: “Young people are less interested in ‘the news,’ but remain extremely interested in information,” she says. “They’re coming up through a tremendous information revolution. They’re mixing media and formats.”

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.”

Entry 1: Teacher’s Helper

My job isn’t one you’d normally associate with “youth media.” I don’t work with kids and I don’t raise money. I do make sure the teen-written paper L.A. Youth stays connected to the people and places it needs to; that Donna, our executive director, can find organizations to support us; that teachers using our magazine in class feel welcome to call; that teens wanting to write for us can.
The summer after I graduated from college I moved back to Los Angeles feeling a little lost. I remembered how when I’d interned at L.A. Youth as an undergrad I’d liked it. In a city as large and scattered as Los Angeles, it was nice to be part of a community that brings together people with different lifestyles and from different neighborhoods. So when Donna offered me a fulltime position as administrative director, I was grateful.
Teachers comprise a major part of that diverse L.A. community, so helping them is a big part of my job. Just today I talked to one in Indio, California, who works with juvenile offenders. He came across our teachers’ guides online and wants to use the teens’ stories about incarceration with his students.
Before working here, I didn’t realize how many teachers scour the web for lesson plans. Like the teacher today, many stumble across ours through Google searches. Some call saying how much of an impact the stories have had on their classes.
But other teachers tell me they are too busy covering all the state-required material in class to add L.A. Youth to the curriculum. They can only distribute it as a silent reading option. So I’m heartened when I get calls like one that came in today—a high school English teacher wants to increase her subscription from 40 to 120 copies. “They are wonderful to use with our kids in detention,” she says. “When given the option, they always take a copy, and I think it really keeps them from getting into any further mischief, if you know what I mean.”
I tell her I do, and then file her feedback in my “L.A. Youth Praise Folder,” which I show to other teachers who are considering subscribing.

Entry 2: Breaking News—We Make Headlines!

L.A. Youth recently covered fights at L.A.’s Jefferson High School. The fights were fueled by racial tension, which plagues many local schools. An editor here works with a group of students at Jefferson, so we had almost immediate access to the story.
Two reporters from the L.A. Times asked to use some of our quotes in an article. These requests occur frequently enough without materializing into anything that we usually don’t think much about it. But this past weekend the L.A. Times ran an article with quotes from a student’s testimony we had published!
Since it provides such a good example of how a teen paper can impact the mainstream media, I mailed the article to the people and groups who have invested money in us.

Entry 3: Holding On

Today the place is buzzing with teens and phone calls. Even though my office is set apart from the editors, I always find it easier to work when I hear kids goofing off in the next room.
A 13-year-old calls from San Diego saying she wants to submit a story. She says she’s been in foster care for a year and a half, and a social worker gave her the flyer for our program just before she moved from Los Angeles to San Diego, where she now lives with extended family.
I am often surprised and moved by how young people manage to hold onto information that is somehow significant to them—like that flyer—even when their lives are so chaotic.

Entry 4: Pockets of Community

Today I talk with a parent of a Korean student who was referred to L.A. Youth by a friend. Libby, our managing editor, tells me that L.A. Youth has unintentionally created a “Korean network” in which one family tells another about the paper—providing us with a constant stream of kids from that community.
Often little unexpected pockets of community like this send us writers for stretches of time. A teacher might urge students to write for us, and provide us with a steady stream of reporters. But when that teacher retires, we lose our connection to that school, sometimes for years.
Our office community itself is more predictable. Most of the adult staff have been around a while, and we always have a handful of regular writers. Part of what makes us such a tight bunch are our monthly staff lunches. Sometimes we have theme potlucks. Today the theme is “peanuts.” Our dishes include: peanut noodles (my contribution), peanut butter soup, eggplant with peanut sauce and peanut butter cookies. The kids in the office stop in to sample the food and we discuss everything—politics, food, bad pop music, growing up in American versus growing up in Japan, and TV.

Entry 5: Transatlantic Teens

A sluggish day. Three kids who were supposed to show up didn’t, so everyone feels stranded. I respond to mail from someone who taught in Kosovo. I tell her it would be great to get some short articles from Kosovo teens about their life and goals. We’ve already established a kind of “global news reporting” collaboration with youth publications in Uganda, Mongolia, and Great Britain. We’ve found that kids in other countries are quite eager to learn about teens in L.A., and L.A. teens are interested in international youth.
There just aren’t many outlets for teens wanting to learn about their counterparts in other countries, so we hope this global exchange will get them engaged with the wider world.

Entry 6: Giving Thanks

When I open the office, the phone rings the second I turn off the answering machine. I’m used to this, since many of our teachers are early-bird callers. The only time they have to themselves is right before school.
When I pick up the phone a voice like my grandmother’s warbles from the other end of the line. “Hello dear, I’m just calling to confirm my subscription for next year.”
“Of course, thank you for calling. Can I get your name, please?”
She gives me her name and I look her up in our database. I learn that she’s a Sunday school teacher who heads the youth ministry group at her church. She’s also the local superintendent of all the Sunday schools in her area.
Because we run a lot of matter-of-fact articles related to sex, we don’t often hear from teachers at religious schools or church groups. Sometimes they subscribe, but promptly cancel when we publish an article they find controversial, like the story we published in May about a girl’s visit to Planned Parenthood, or the March feature about a girl with two moms. But things seem to be changing. This year, none of the parochial schools and religious organizations receiving the paper have cancelled, and a local all-boys Catholic school has begun subscribing.
I tell the Sunday school teacher that she’s all set to get a large bundle of 185 copies in September.
“Thank you dear. I appreciate it and my children really enjoy it.”
I thank her in return, impressed, as I so often am, by how teachers and young people from every background manage to embrace the paper. When I’m struggling with a broken copier or a glitch in my computer, it’s nice to get calls like these, reminders how much my work matters.
After two years at L.A. Youth, Monika Verma recently took a position at Levine Greenberg Literary Agency in New York. She is confident that all the connections she made and the skills she learned (including cooking) at the paper will help her in this new phase of her life.
Want to journal about your work in youth media? Write Kendra Hurley at editor@youthmediareporter.org.

Continue reading A Dispatch from the Field