4th Annual NYC Grassroots Media Conference: Media and Movements Beyond Borders will occur on Saturday February 24th, 2007 at New School University 10 AM – 7 PM (65 Fifth Avenue at 13th Street). This year, the NYC Grassroots Media Conference seeks to ask: What are the common threads inherent in our global struggles for social change and how does the media contribute to our understanding of the root causes of injustices faced by world communities? Visit the conference home page here.
Category: 2007
Idealist.org: Can you Imagine a Better World?
Can you Imagine a Better World? is an initiative of Idealist.org that will launch a series of start-up meetings areound the world the week of February 5-11, 2007. The project derives from three main points:
1. All over the world there are many people who share similar values, dreams, and challenges.
2. With all the tools we have now, we can communicate like never before.
3. If all of us had more opportunities to connect and work together, online and face-to-face, in neighborhoods, villages, schools, and workplaces, the world would be a different place.
How different? Go to the idealist.org project page to find out.
Voices of Youth: Report
Youth Version of the Report of the Expert Group Meeting on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination and Violence Against the Girl Child just released a report entitled, “Stop discrimination and violence against girls: you have the power to do something.” Log on to Voices of Youth to review the report and fill out the questionnaire.
MySpace & YouTube
It was my mother who always said “sometimes you have to work within a corporate giant to plant the seed for change.” So, how does an innovative and web based site YouTube, now owned by the corporate giant Google, warrant spaces for social change? How can YouTube continue to be a free expressive site for personal video if owned by a corporate giant expecting to make a profit?
Looking at YouTube’s fellow internet comrade MySpace might give us some insight. MySpace has been an extremely powerful tool to connect all kinds of people: bands, politicians, volunteers, and friends, but especially youth. It has become the place for creating a visual counterpart to on-line identities. On a daily basis, youth invest several hours creating and updating their profiles, adding technically advanced features to their accounts, and chatting with their virtual community of friends—all for free. Young people develop a sense of ownership of their MySpace world and it is powerful.
When in dialogue with youth about the fact that News Corporation, owner of Fox broadcasting channels and other major media outlets, owns and operates MySpace, many youth frown upon the news. Nevertheless, this does not stop them from using MySpace as an accessible tool of connecting, researching, and mobilizing their communities. There is reason to be critical and cautious about corporate owned operations. If MySpace (or YouTube) does not continue to demonstrate success through profit, its owners can shut it down or require a costly user fee. Furthermore, if material on these sites runs counter to some of the corporation’s beliefs or philosophies, can these corporations start to sensor or edit material? Possibly. But for now, MySpace still facilitates radical activism and youth connectivity whether News Corporation wants it to or not.
The most recent social networking site bought by a corporation, YouTube, started as a resource for bands, record labels, and the music industry at large. Still operating as a free resource to this audience, YouTube has also attracted youth activists to use videos as sources of political irony, spread opinions, garner activism, and document injustice. For example, young people in attendance at a rock show in Houston, TX, where the band Two Gallants performed, used video features on their cell phones to document an account of police brutality. These clips were uploaded onto YouTube; some were viewed 658,090 times, which sparked a massive electronic discussion on issues raised by the incident and proved the bands’ innocence in a lawsuit.
YouTube, like MySpace, has the ability to connect ideas, opinions, and attitudes by offering users the ability to upload, share, and comment on videos from people all over the world. Much like a virus, the internet can be, in Karen Brooks’ words from the Dallas Morning News “powerful when a video, a photograph, a slogan––or a spoof thereof––catches on and spreads to thousands or hundreds of thousands of home pages and profiles.”
Youth are using YouTube as a tool to create grassroots movements despite the potential downsides of corporate ownership. Though Google now owns and operates YouTube, youth have not stopped using the site’s ability to bolster their activism in new and innovative ways. Until YouTube or MySpace start censoring, editing, or even co-opting the original material posted on these sites, young people will continue using the resources these sites offer despite changes in ownership.
YouTube offers a new, paradoxical model for youth media activism; it is used as a resource for organizing and civic action, but viewed as a profit driver by its corporate owners. Ultimately, YouTube offers youth a powerful tool in planting the seeds of social change outside and within a corporate domain. As Rep. Rafael Anchia, D-Dallas states in dallasnews.com, “If we could just tap into the ingenuity of young people and the energy they bring to MySpace and translate that energy into civic involvement, then I think you’ve done something powerful.” It looks as though young people have not only tapped, but propelled their ingenuity straight into YouTube and are going to continue to use it in powerful ways, despite recent corporate ownership. And, it is this youth-driven ingenuity that will determine whether Google reaps profit from its users or in fact, ends up supporting a new culture of youth activism that controls, harnesses, and uses YouTube as a device for social change.
Ingrid H. Dahl is the new editor of Youth Media Reporter at AED. She is a founding member of the Willie Mae Rock Camp for Girls, in three rock bands, and has an M.A. degree in Women’s & Gender Studies.
The Ultimate Bookshelf for a Youth Media Educator
Over the past two years educators and administrators working in all mediums of youth media have shared with YMR the books, videos, and reports that have most informed and deepened their work. The following list is a compilation of these recommendations placed into six categories: media reform, youth work, understanding youth media in its academic and socio-political context, media education curricula, media organization, and marketing youth media. Included are links to relevant articles that have appeared on YMR. These recommended resources provide a comprehensive look at youth media, highlights of YMR, and key discussions in the field.
Get Started with Media Reform
• “Speaking for Ourselves: A Youth Assessment of Local News Coverage,” the Youth Media Council
Researched and written by teens, this report explores how the Bay Area media represents (or, really, misrepresents) young people. The report resonates far beyond California, said Christopher Schuepp, who runs Young People’s Media Network. The issue of young people receiving an inordinate amount of negative press, said Schuepp, is an international problem. The report provides tips for encouraging reporters to write positive stories about teens.
• Framing Youth: 10 Myths About the Next Generation, by Mike A. Males
This is another probing look at how the media represents youth. It “challenges the media to look beyond what the policy wonks are offering,” said Donna Myrow of L.A. Youth and “to ask where these statistics and trends are coming from, and why is the discussion almost always focused on teen violence when teens actually commit fewer crimes than adults.”
• Fugitive Culture: Race, Violence, and Youth, by Henry A. Giroux
Not for the faint of heart, this “very academic, very theoretical text takes an unflinching look at how society denies young people their voices,” said Mindy Faber of Faultline Media, “and how that, in turn, affects the policies determining youth’s lives.” Exploring how the media, in particular, casts, and often criminalizes, young people—especially youth of color—the book indirectly makes a case for why young people must make their own media. Youth media practitioners will finish the book motivated to center their work on helping young people see how they are represented in the media, says Faber, “and how they can to reposition themselves and take control of their own images.”
• It’s Not the Media: The Truth About Pop Culture’s Influence on Children, by Karen Sternheimer
“Like most great books, it defies conventional wisdom,” said Mark Goodman of the Student Press Law Center. Presenting a compelling explanation of why media bashing is both unjustified and dangerous, It’s Not the Media, ultimately, defends free expressions for youth journalists and all Americans.
Also see the following YMR articles exploring the youth perspective in the media:
• “Do You Really Want to Be the Talk of the Town?”
What happened when a cable-access youth channel had the lens turned on it by a reporter from the New Yorker.
• “Life During Wartime”
Award-winning radio, video, and articles about the war in Iraq created by young people provided the rarely-heard youth perspective on the war.
• “Conventions Made Unconventional”
Nishat Kurwa, Youth Radio’s news director and international desk editor, talks about how she pitched stories to national outlets and what a youth perspective added to mainstream election coverage.
• “Can Teens Save the Newspaper Business?”
Radio and online journalism have embraced youth media. Print publications need to get with the program.
• “Courting the ‘Other’ Media”
From infatuation to going steady, partnering with professional news outlets can be tricky. Here are examples of successful relationships between youth- and adult-made media.
On Working with Young People
• Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America’s Educationally Underprepared, by Mike Rose
This is the story of how “one intense teacher’s” attention turned the author from a disaffected, uninterested teenager into a curious college student, and ultimately a passionate teacher,” said Youth Communication editor Nora McCarthy. Most of Lives on the Boundary examines how Rose learned to reach out to other young people unaware of their ability to learn. “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,” said McCarthy.
For more help, inspiration, and food-for-thought on working with young people, also see YMR articles:
• “Forget Hip-Hop—Get YCC”
Young people connect to adults who respect youth culture. Just make sure to take out the commercial.
• “The Slightly Sentimental Diary of a Rookie Media Teacher and His Trial-by-Fire Training”
Cameras with teens behind them are dangerous weapons.
• “Flipping the Script”
Should youth-made media involve adult meddling? An editor considers challenging young people’s stories integral to her job.
• “The ‘Rescue’ Dilemma”
The winner of this year’s Best Documentary Oscar raises ethical questions for those in the youth media field.
• “Social Work 101”
How to guide young people through painful, personal narratives.
Putting Youth Media in Context
• Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, by Jeff Chang
Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop, recommended by Ken Ikeda of Youth Sounds, 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.
• Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, by Jonathan Kozol
Kozol lays bare the disparity between money spent on kids and their teachers in suburban schools, versus those in inner cities. He argues that segregation is thriving in American urban public schools, and not by accident.
• Pedagogy of the Oppressed, by Paulo Freire
Known for coining “reading the word is reading the world,” the Brazilian author Freire is a forefather of the youth and grassroots media movements. Committed to giving the typically voiceless a voice to transform society, Freire is also one of the most influential thinkers about late-20th century education. He believed learning occurred best through the give and take of dialogue, as well as through action with the intent to build community.
• Literacy in a Digital World: Teaching and Learning in the Age of Education, by Kathleen Tyner
Literacy in a Digital World, takes the pulse of media literacy in the context of new and emerging communication technologies and assesses the multiple literacies in evidence in the 1990s: print, computer, informational, critical and media literacy. The book contextualizes arguments regarding the educational applications of computers and multimedia.
• Teaching Youth Media: A Critical Guide to Literacy, Video Production, & Social Change, by Steve Goodman
Both Tyner’s and Goodman’s works “illustrate the importance of a multi-literate society and the need to have a strong media education movement in this country,” said Denise Gaberman, who helps New York City schools bring media education into classrooms.
Shaping Media Education Curricula
• The Teaching for Understanding Guide, by Tina Blythe and Associates
The Bay Area-based Streetside Stories uses this guide to teach teachers how to develop media education curricula that meets the educational standards required in California. This guide shows educators in any state how to “define what is important for them to teach, and then to teach it so students can understand it,” said Linda Johnson, of Streetside Stories.
• “Flipping the Script,” by Just Think
Flipping the Script is packed with detailed lesson plans and activities that can be incorporated into most youth media programs. This curriculum and its 30-page guidebook help educators use hip-hop to engage young people in thinking critically about the media.
• Center for Digital Storytelling’s website
This site is rich in resources to develop short media projects in classrooms. Denise Gaberman, who helps New York City schools bring media education to the classroom, finds it especially useful for teaching media to students and teachers who are “strapped for resources and time, have limited media making expertise, and don’t have the professional video or digital equipment at their fingertips,” she wrote in an email.
• Merchants of Cool: A Report on the Creators & Marketers of Popular Culture for Teenagers, by Frontline
This video looks carefully at how creators and sellers of popular culture have made teenagers the “hottest consumer demographic in America,” according to Frontline. Dave Yanofsky of UthTV uses this video to fuel group discussions about youth culture, advertising, and media literacy. “Teens can use it to gain insight into how they often end up walking around with a huge bulls eye on their backs when it comes to advertising and the creation of ‘cool,’” said Yanofsky.
For more reading on media education, see YMR articles:
• “Too Cool for School”
How youth media can keep struggling teens engaged.
• “The Youth Media Nonprofit as Classroom”
A pioneering movement in higher education organizes curricula around the theory and practice of youth media.
Building a Strong Youth Media Organization
• Educational Development Center’s YouthLearn website
The Educational Development Center helped Time Warner grantees in build capacity to conduct effective program evaluations. This site details that work with easy-to-follow strategies, evaluation models, and tools for youth media programs looking to measure impact. EDC’s research on self-assessment methods common to the field is also available.
• Urban Sanctuaries: Neighborhood Organizations in the Lives and Futures of Inner-City Youth, by Milbrey McLaughlin, Merita Irby, and Juliet Langman.
Drawing from a five-year study of six unidentified inner-city youth programs in the Northeast, the Midwest, and the Southeast, the authors of this book examine strategies that visionaries at urban youth organizations use to make their programs thrive, despite significant challenges. “It’s over 10 years old now but still a good read,” wrote John Gwinn of Phillips Community Television in an email.
For more information on strengthening youth media groups, including professional development, see YMR articles:
• “A Growth Opportunity”
A Phillips Community Television staff member shares what they’ve learned about how youth media benefits teens, and how to magnify its impact.
• “Lifting the Burden of Proof”
Finding effective means of evaluation—and, preferably, ones that appeal to funders—is still a trial-and-error process for most youth programs.
• “Getting Evaluated—and Noticed”
How to build evidence of impact on a tight budget.
• “Cultivating a Field”
Youth media practitioners teach better when they have regular opportunities to learn from each other. Steven Goodman explains that can happen.
• “Coffee, Colleagues, and Collaborative Learning”
Youth media organizations can revolutionize their craft by running their own study groups.
• “On the Couch”
A growing number of youth media and arts groups consult regularly with mental health professionals. A youth publication’s shrink-on-call explains how he has helped the editors trust their instincts.
• “Time to Reflect”
Youth media has become a bona fide field with its own practices, philosophies, and goals.
How to Get Youth Media Seen and Heard
• 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,” said Open Society Institute media officer Amy Weil, “it’s a very easy read, easy to understand.”
Also see YMR articles:
• “Prime Time”
Leveraging the Press to Help Youth Media Make a Difference
• “Getting Discovered”
Mindy Faber looks at what works and what doesn’t in youth media distribution, and how the Internet can change everything.
• “Strength in Numbers”
How curating youth media around themes amplifies its impact—for both audience and media makers.
Rules of Attraction
You can count on youth media websites to be packed with powerful, teen-produced content. But while a lot of time and effort goes into creating those radio snippets, videos, and articles, few youth media nonprofits have the budget to put as much energy into making their site’s design appeal to teens. Others hire web specialists who may not be experts in teen design. As a result, some youth media groups’ websites are more alluring to adults than to their target audience. This is a missed opportunity—no matter how strong the content, a website that is not designed with youth in mind will fail to attract teen visitors, according to a new study by the Nielsen Norman Group (NNG).
“Teens pay more attention to web design than do adults,” NNG concludes in Teenagers on the Web: 60 Usability Guidelines for Creating Compelling Websites for Teens. Researchers studied 38 adolescents from a range of socioeconomic backgrounds (46 percent came from households with an income of less than $30,000) as they performed tasks on the web (like trying to find information on Marie Curie).
Some of the findings may sound obvious to those working with teens, such as the “discovery” that young people crave venues to express themselves. Other conclusions challenge typical teen stereotypes, like the misconception that today’s youth are techno-geniuses in need of constant visual and aural stimulation. (Actually, teens prefer simple design schemes and may be less adept at finding information on the web than adults, the study found.)
Some of the report’s conclusions challenge typical teen stereotypes, like the misconception that today’s youth are techno-geniuses in need of constant visual and aural stimulation.
The NNG report translates these findings into clear guidelines for how to make a website work well for teens. For all who design, edit, or facilitate youth websites, NNG’s tips on what attracts teen attention are worth heeding. After all, the web can be a powerful means of getting youth-produced work in the hands (or on the computers) of one of youth media’s primary audiences—teens themselves. Here are some of the guide’s highlights:
Let teens chat and talk. Make sure your site is interactive. Quizzes, polls, message boards, games, or questions asking for feedback allow teens to meet new friends, share ideas, and believe their ideas matter and can make a difference. Interactive websites send that message. (So does giving teens a platform to showcase their own media, come to think of it…)
Make the site easy to use and understand. NNG cites three factors for why young people may not be the techno whiz kids so many people assume they are—teens’ still-developing reading skills, research abilities, and, uh, patience. Whether or not this sounds to you like more teen stereotyping, you’ll probably agree with the study’s resulting tips for web design. To create an effective teen site, NNG says, make everything clear. Provide lots of visible links that change color to show visited areas and clear cross-references with links to related material. Make the “search” box easy to find.
Keep it clean. A common misconception is that teens want loud, glitzy graphics, reports NNG. Actually, teens like a minimalist, clean layout. They prefer a large font (so they can lean back in their chairs while reading), tabulated borders, and need-to-know information only. Jumbled, verbose content is a major turnoff. Nor are teens fond of fancy animation schemes, pop-ups, or annoying sound effects.
Don’t call it a “kids’” or “youth” site. This may be bad news for organizations with the word “youth” in their names, but NNG’s study found that the terms “can be completely misinterpreted by teens.” While the report did not explain what beef, exactly, teens have with the word “youth,” it did relay that teens avoid sites that appear too childlike, and “detest” being called “kids.” The bottom line: teens like being called “teens.”
Use classy colors and cutting-edge design. Think Macs.
Make it fast. Not every teen has high-speed access or a top-notch computer. Slow-running sites and long download times can be annoying, to say the least.
Let teens click for information. Teens prefer to click than to scroll, so limit the scrolling, please.
Intrigued? You can learn (much) more by buying Teenagers on the Web for, gulp, $149. The price may be worth it. The easy-to-follow, 129-page report offers 60 detailed design guidelines along with pictures of exemplary sites and supporting research explaining how and why these tips work for teens. It also provides commonsense advice for how to get teens to articulate their thoughts during studies. (Assure young people that there are no “right” or “wrong” answers—and no intimidating white lab coats, please.) The report can be downloaded from the Nielsen Norman Group website.
As for the study’s conclusion that adults may be able to out-websurf us youth, I have some difficulty believing it. It takes my mom an hour to type and send a paragraph-long email, and she still hasn’t figured out that “Return” is the same as “Enter.” So for NNG’s next study, I propose a nationwide household challenge to determine web proficiency. Losers do the winner’s homework for a week.
Rebecca Staed worked as an intern at Children’s PressLine.
This article originally appeared on YMR as “What Works on the Web for Teens.”
Cultivating a Field
Rebecca Renard, co-director of the Educational Video Center (EVC) documentary workshop, cues up a 10-minute tape of her class preparing to make a documentary. Then she presses “play.”
“Get into your group and brainstorm ideas,” Rebecca says onscreen.
Aureliano, also on the tape, leans forward and says, “I think homelessness is definitely a problem for teenagers.” He adds, “But a lot of times they’re homeless because they don’t want to work.”
“But mostly they get caught up in a system where their family is thrown out of housing and there’s nothing they can do about it,” Shinnel counters. “We need to find out about groups that help build more housing. Maybe we can volunteer for them.”
Rebecca stops the tape and asks the EVC staff where they see the teaching of inquiry practice, a method of having students’ own questions drive learning.
“I think what happened would have been totally different if the young people weren’t in a group but were sitting by themselves,” one colleague says.
“Getting the students to go to a deeper level of questioning, to researching and reading is a real challenge,” says another.
“So, how do we get them to really research their issues? To get in the habit of asking questions and pursuing them further—even when there isn’t one clear answer?”
The Educational Video Center study group often spends mornings over coffee and bagels, reflecting on challenges and grappling with how to better teach their students to be critical thinkers. The staff also meets regularly with other New York-based video youth media groups to learn from other organizations and discuss the critical issues they face.
These forums for professional development were founded on the belief that practitioners most effectively improve their teaching when they have regular opportunities to learn from each other. By engaging each other in ongoing discussions about the theory and practice of their craft, staff develop a critical sensibility. EVC’s study group helps build and sustain a culture of a “learning organization” in the office—a place where staff learning is collaborative, public, nonthreatening, and integral to the daily experience of both students and staff.
Virtually no colleges exist where one can earn a degree or certificate to be a media educator. Perhaps the most common way that media educators learn their craft is through trial and error, and they largely do so in isolation.
The challenge of having no formal training is compounded by comparatively low salaries and the lack of a secure career path, which leads to high rates of turnover and the necessity of training new staff. Groups like EVC’s go a long way toward helping youth media educators improve their teaching and feel supported in their learning. That, in turn, can encourage them to stay at an organization longer.
But many organizations don’t have this kind of staff development, and of those that do, too often the lessons learned in individual sessions never find their way to the outside world, where others can benefit from them. As an emerging field, youth media work is not yet professionalized with a commonly accepted set of best practices and standards for teaching, media production, or organizational management.
Part of the challenge of professionalizing youth media is that the field encompasses such a broad range of organizational models as well as various forms of media. Some programs operate as part of larger community media arts institutions, youth organizing projects, or after-school centers. Others are stand-alone organizations operating independently. Some focus on media literacy or building youth skills in preparation for college or a career. Others focus on media education, the arts, recreation, or using the making of media as a therapeutic tool. Still others are driven by goals of civic engagement and social change.
While we have yet to agree on common standards for teaching, producing, and distributing youth media, progress has been made towards finding common ground. New York City’s youth media film and video community, which meets regularly to discuss their work, is doing a particularly good job at forming opportunities for learning among the many local organizations.
Both EVC and the Global Action Project publish curricula to disseminate their youth media practices and principles to teachers and community youth workers across the country. The Manhattan Neighborhood Network’s Youth Channel offers training modules for local organizations wanting to replicate parts of their program.
Video groups have also collaborated to form the Urban Visionaries Festival in New York City, where local youth media groups put on a festival showcasing their work. And many New York-based organizations have formed networks connecting youth media groups and educators, especially those working in video. These include ListenUp! PSA network and MediaRights.org‘s youth media distribution project.
These are all positive steps that can and should be replicated by organizations working in various media—print, radio, film, and multimedia. However, individual collaborations aren’t enough to truly professionalize the field and exploit to the fullest the creative ideas and energy produced by these and other initiatives.
Towards this end, we need to establish an effective network—on the local, regional, and national levels—that will move the field beyond simply information- and resource-sharing to collective knowledge-building. Such a network would allow administrators and practitioners at the grassroots to help each other make sense of, and apply new knowledge coming out of the field. In turn, they could contribute back to the field their own innovations and lessons learned.
In addition to professional development, networks can address issues that will help build the field, such as effective distribution of media and curriculum, and how to raise money.
Ultimately, if youth media groups formed a national network, we would most likely attract larger grants from private and federal funding agencies than we do as individual organizations. With support from funders who encourage a culture of cooperation rather than competition, a range of cross-organizational initiatives could emerge, such as institutes facilitating intervisitation of each other’s programs, practitioners conducting case studies of their own projects, a collaborative publication containing essays from the field on the theory and practice of youth media, and a traveling youth media festival.
The point is for us to create meaningful ways to share each of our organizations’ accumulated wealth of knowledge and experience, and to build upon the new information and lessons learned.
EVC is laying the groundwork for such a network by working with the Education Development Center’s YouthLearn. With seed funding from the Open Society Institute and the W.K.Kellogg Foundation, we are launching the Youth Media Learning Network. It will engage teachers, youth workers, as well as emerging youth media practitioners in staff development institutes, where they can learn teaching strategies from each other. These institutes will be sponsored in partnership with organizations from intersecting fields such as youth development, civic engagement, journalism, and the arts. The network will also invest in a select group of emerging and mid-career practitioners who will serve as youth media fellows, honing their leadership skills together as a cohort and engaging in intensive projects designed to capture and disseminate promising practices to other interested practitioners and institutions.
Through these various field-building initiatives, a base of shared language, practices, and goals can emerge. Each organization will then become not only a producing and teaching organization, but perhaps more importantly, a learning organization.
Steven Goodman (pictured above left) is the founder and director of the Educational Video Center and author of Teaching Youth Media. “Cultivating a Field” was adapted and updated from a paper commissioned by OSI for a March 2004 convening on youth media.
This updated article originally appeared on YMR as part of a series exploring a new phase of introspection in the youth media field, in which educators have begun placing a premium on reflecting on their work and thinking and planning on a macrolevel.
Teaming Up
Not long ago, many of us working in youth media did not consider ourselves part of a field. And, really, why would we? Opportunities to share practices and collaborate with others working on teen-produced media were few and far between. Conferences tended to lump us together based on our means of communication—print, radio, film, the web—not on how or with whom we worked.
Foundations did not earmark funding specifically for youth media, isolating organizations further. Competing for grants, many groups felt pressured to package themselves in the categories funders sought—as either activist-oriented or artistic, focused on product or process, or preoccupied with distribution or education reform.
But as foundations like the Open Society Institute and that of Time Warner have recognized and funded youth media as a field, grantees at resulting conferences have begun to see far more similarities in our philosophies, missions, and approaches to our work than previously imagined.
Since then, youth media as a topic in and of itself began making the agenda at related conferences. These opportunities have led to a new phase of reflection. Educators have begun thinking and planning on a macro level, placing a premium on not just continuing the work of helping teens make media, but reflecting on that work—on codifying practices and evaluating impacts, on determining where youth media fits and diverges from the many fields and movements it borrows from and builds upon—such as alternative education, narrative therapy, and independent media.
“There’s an obvious thirst for dialogue, for tools, for sharing best practices among people working to support youth media,” said Rachel Alterman Wallack, executive director of the Atlanta-based youth publication VOX.
The new premium on reflection is apparent in the many conferences and collaborations that have emerged over the last several years, in new and unprecedented opportunities for practitioners to develop professionally, and in the increase in research and writing about the field. Conferences, collaborations, and venues for professional development include:
– A collaboration between the Educational Video Center and the Education Development Center’s YouthLearn Initiative to create new resources for the field, including a peer network linking youth media educators to each other.
– The National Alliance for Media Art’s and Culture’s Youth Media Leadership Institute, where 20 educators from around the country received fellowships to convene in Oregon where they set goals for leading and advancing the field.
– The formation of the New York City Learning Network, a group of film educators who meet monthly to discuss their work and topics such as critical literacy.
Research and writing about youth media include:
– The Education Development Center’s YouthLearn Initiative’s ongoing research into how youth media programs evaluate their impact.
– The much talked about film Born into Brothels, about a youth media project in India, won the Oscar for best documentary in 2005. The film reflects a growing trend in media produced by youth media educators that explores their line of work, often placing it in an academic context.
– The intensified push by a number of individual organizations to better understand, evaluate, research, and codify their work. Berkeley-based Youth Radio has an in-house researcher who helps staff and youth develop, document, and evaluate learning at the program. L.A. Youth, Youth Radio, and Youth Communication have mental health professionals on-call for managing and understanding the emotional issues of the job. At Youth Communication, where I work, staff has recently undertaken an effort to define our practice through documenting our work—practices, strategies, philosophies and lessons—in an ever-growing manual.
Most of a youth media professional’s day is spent not in reflection, but raising funds, working with teens, and putting out a product. But it’s the moments when we do get glimpses of the bigger picture—the conferences, collaborations, time to view the work of colleagues—which can sometimes be unexpectedly exhilarating, leading to new ways of thinking and planning for how this line of work can continue to grow and evolve. (In this sense, feeling part of something larger than one’s own organization can help prevent burnout and quick turnover at nonprofits.)
The relaunched Youth Media Reporter is itself part of this new phase of introspection, and the comment page of some articles—like Ken Ikeda’s review of Born into Brothels—make apparent how ready youth media educators are to engage in dialogue about their work. My hope is that all youth media educators can help make it the most useful tool possible for reflecting on their practice and sharing ideas and tools by sending feedback and ideas.
Above left: Youth media educators discuss ways to evaluate their organizations at a 2005 conference hosted by the Time Warner Foundation.
“Teaming Up: Youth media builds its own practices, philosophies, and mission.” was updated from an earlier YMR article entitled, “Time to Reflect“.
next month (february):
“Community partnerships” is a method for practioners/non-profits to link with the University classroom, receive high levels of research for evaluation (or grant writing purposes), and the opportunity to co-teach courses at Universities with students interested in service learning, civic engagement, and community-based research.
letter from the editor (volume 1:issue 1)
Greetings! It is an honor to introduce a new look, home, and editor to Youth Media Reporter (YMR) at the beginning of a New Year.
Originally launched and managed by Open Society Institute, YMR is now housed at the Academy for Educational Development in New York City; specifically AED’s Center for Schools and Communities. AED, an organization that pioneers positive approaches to leadership in youth development and civic engagement, is proud to re-launch YMR. YMR will continue capturing, building, and celebrating the dynamic, thriving field of youth media with a new synergistic approach.
As the new editor of YMR, I welcome youth media professionals, leaders, creators, and activists to the year 2007; a year bound to expand and connect work from the fascinating and multilayered perspectives in the field. From my own diverse background, which includes empowering young women leaders through music, teaching gender studies in academia, promoting youth and media activism, deciphering civic engagement best practices, working in LGBTQ communities, actively performing in bands, and having an interest in pop culture, art history, and design, I am honored to become part of the YMR community.
As editor, my goals are to:
• Increase the visibility of the youth media field and the publication;
• Build the youth media field by providing a space for dialogue and documentation;
• Support the development of the field to become more professional as a national media movement;
• Reach a wider, more diverse audience;
• Share knowledge of youth media across fields such as community and youth organizing, civic education, service-learning, and youth and community development;
• Promote the work produced by and for young people in video, film, television, radio, web, art, and print;
• Celebrate and emphasize the degree that young people and their allies use media to make a difference, ignite creative imagination, and match leadership with voice.
My hope is to build YMR as the publication and intellectual resource for youth media professionals domestically and internationally. YMR is for anyone interested in original reporting, commentary, and articles written by the youth media community. It has always been my belief that spaces to share information, reflect on work done, develop practice, ascertain new approaches and pedagogy, and celebrate youth led social change are ways we make a difference in our communities, our culture, and our lives. YMR is part of harnessing the creation of a new culture that embraces the power of youth media.
Be on the look out for new articles and updates around the 15th of every month. Tell us about your work, your media, and your viewpoint: report from the field and make a difference!
With great holiday warmth,
Ingrid Hu Dahl
Editor, YMR