Category: Uncategorized

Last winter, a study commissioned by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation found that one in three U.S. high school students say the press ought to be more restricted, and even more say the government should approve newspaper stories before readers see them, USA Today reported.

At the time of the report’s release, David Shaw noted in the Los Angeles Times the disturbing connection between the study’s findings and his observation that “Censorship of high school papers and disciplining of their editors and reporters are at an all-time high.” This climate seems to be continuing–last month a Georgia high school newspaper as well as the school’s journalism class were shut down after the principal criticized the paper for its negative stories and a lack of thorough reporting, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Early last year I attended a conference, hosted by the Time Warner Foundation, for adults who help teens produce their own media. One of the writers I’d worked with, 20-year-old Miguel, came with me. He listened intently when a panel of editors and producers from mainstream media outlets mentioned their desire to appeal to a younger audience. It’s a hot topic, as newspapers and television news have steadily lost young readers and viewers for the last two decades.
Miguel sensed that he might be part of the solution. His articles for Represent, the magazine by teens in foster care, which I edited, were among the most popular with its young readership. Miguel asked how he might get one of his stories reprinted in a glossy publication. One editor politely explained that magazines like hers do not reprint stories—they want original material—but Miguel was welcome to pitch a story to the magazine directly. If they liked his pitch, Miguel could write it on assignment.
Miguel looked at me with an exasperation I understood. We both knew that his writing an article independently would likely be impossible. Sure, Miguel was one of the star writers at Represent, but he was also one of the trickiest kids I’d worked with. Some of Miguel’s stories took him eight months to write, and I spent much of that time coaching him through them. For every 10 minutes Miguel sat at his computer working, he spent 30 doing something he wasn’t supposed to—interrupting the other teens at computers, arguing loudly on the phone with the staff at his group home, hopping outside for cigarette breaks. Miguel required constant nagging and attention. My boss often remarked that each teen-written story we developed cost the organization $2,500, when he included staff salaries, overhead, and equipment. By that estimation, I thought Miguel’s stories must be twice as expensive. But they were worth it.
His personal narratives gave unusually intimate views of struggling with mental illness, homelessness, and life in the foster care system. He also wrote first-person stories about more topical issues, like struggling with obesity, or bullying, from the perspective of the bully. Some of his stories had been picked up by listservs or other alternative publications, but often it seemed unfortunate that his work didn’t find a wider audience in the mainstream media.
I knew why. As the editor at the conference had said, mainstream glossies and most large newspapers rarely reprint stories. They want original work. It makes their publication look better, and it gives them more control over content. But traditional newsrooms are not set up to provide the ongoing support many young writers require. Unless the mainstream press rethinks their reprint policy, or considers collaborating with professionals already working with teens, it’s unlikely that a voice like Miguel’s will appear in the publications read by most of the country.
The last few months have brought a flurry of articles about print media’s losing battle to attract young readers. Now is an opportune time for the mainstream press to explore how the radio industry, online publications, and some innovative local newspapers have already begun adding the youth voice to their usual fare.
While many news outlets are losing young audiences, the newspaper industry is doing so at an especially alarming clip. Less than a fifth of 18-to-34-year-olds rank newspapers as their primary source of news, a recent study by the Carnegie Corporation found, and 12% of the young people surveyed said they “never” read a paper to get news. More significant, the average age of newspaper readers is 53, according to the Los Angeles Times. Studies show that teens aren’t uninterested in the world: 44% of young adults surveyed visited a web news portal every day, according to the Carnegie study, and another 44% of online Americans aged 18-29 read blogs often, the Economist reported in April.

Young people who are used to blogging, podcasting, and citizen journalism—where just about everyone is a potential reporter—”don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important.”

Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corporation, one of the world’s largest media companies, suggested to the American Society of Newspaper Editors in April that newspapers have lost young readers in part because they have not sufficiently adapted to reaching them. Teens, twenty-somethings, and even thirty-somethings who are used to blogging, podcasting, and citizen journalism—where just about everyone is a potential reporter—“don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important,” the Economist quoted Murdoch, “and they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.” And Washington Post Executive Editor Leonard Downie Jr. told the Washington City Paper that research shows teens are “suspicious of adults trying to produce something that is of particular interest to them.”
As a Nieman Reports study found last year, readers want to be part of the news dialogue, and young people in particular like attitude and strong beliefs mixed with their news. These qualities—spunk and analysis, news interpreted by a peer instead of an expert—abound in the radio spots, articles, and videos created by teens. And there’s some proof that young people really do respond to this type of media. One study indicated that while the traditional newspaper industry steadily loses young readers, youth (as well as ethnic) media was “all the rage in 2004,” Journalism.org reported. Circulation of youth and ethnic media papers had risen steadily over the previous four years and was expected to continue growing.
Understanding the appeal and importance of adding a youth voice to its mix, the radio industry has pioneered partnerships with youth media organizations. National Public Radio and its local affiliates regularly run spots produced by young people at organizations like Blunt Radio in Maine, Radio Rookies in New York City, Radio Arte in Chicago, and Youth Radio in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Public Radio Exchange, which lets public and community radio find and air work from other stations, has recently launched Generation PRX, which connects youth-made radio to stations nationwide.
Some online publications and news services have also taken admirable measures to spotlight teen-written material. Alternet houses the youth-written WireTap. Scripps Howard News Service wires stories produced at Children’s PressLine, and Pacific News Service posts articles from its many teen-written publications alongside those by adults. Many glossy teen magazines have also produced blogs to get the voices of actual teens on their sites.
But in the print industry, collaborations between youth media and the mainstream press are comparatively rare. (To be fair, dozens of local newspapers have begun producing their own youth-written pages with mixed results. Not surprisingly, the best of these are overseen by adult editors who work full-time on the pages and manage, in person, a teen staff.) But few magazines and few larger newspapers—for which circulation figures have dropped most dramatically—regularly run teen-written stories. Yet, asks Barbara Allen, editor of the Tulsa World’s teen-written pages, “what better way to draw in a demographic than to draw in the people you want to reach and let them do the writing themselves?”
The First National EXPO of Ethnic Media on June 9, 2005, at Columbia University in New York City, represents one key opportunity to begin conversations between youth media organizations and mainstream publications. The EXPO’s “Media By Young America” segment provides a rare occasion when members of the youth media field come together to share ideas, find commonalities, argue over the nuances of the work, and showcase the kind of media teens can produce. It could be an important opportunity for editors of mainstream print publications to see how other media outlets have benefited from bringing in a youth voice, and how it could help print publications appeal to a young audience.
In his April speech, Rupert Murdoch implied that newspaper editors must find new ways to lure back young readers. No one knows yet what that will entail, but if they come to the EXPO, they may glimpse the future.
Above left: The First National EXPO of Ethnic Media, New York City, 2005.

Continue reading Can Teens Save the Newspaper Business?

A radio station in East Jerusalem broadcasts a show hosted by two girls who explore the fears, dreams, and hopes of both Israeli and Palestinian youth, Worldpress.org reports.

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.