Youth communications, or youth media, consists of user-generated media, individually created by or commercially marketed to youth (e.g. MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, etc.) and professionally organized, non-profit youth media programs that intentionally engage youth in learning through the production of literary, artistic and journalistic media. This paper focues on the latter, as an educational field of study and in the broader context of youth communications.
through its unique partnership with mainstream media, boasting regular exposure in The Indianapolis Star.
The field of youth media, a logical result of the youth movement of the 1950s and 1960s, made a stunning cultural debut in the 1970s and 1980s, when the seminal youth-news service Children’s Express made national news, scooped adult journalists, advocated for policy changes, published books on violence and poverty, and created an international youth news network with global posts in Tokyo, London, New Zealand and Australia.
Many programs now exist with the aim of developing and establishing credible platforms for youth voices. Without a healthy youth-media field in our culture, it could be argued that youth would not have a voice and would risk becoming, like the jaguar, a fixed and romanticized representation.
Y-Press, its Indianapolis bureau, retained and expanded upon this successful youth journalism model and also established its credibility and independence
Since Children’s Express’s demise in 2001, the trend in the field of youth media has branched out beyond the journalistic model to embrace increasingly specialized youth-media strategies, such as youth arts or youth advocacy, and toward organizations more targeted toward peer (youth) audiences and niche markets (urban youth, foster youth, etc.).4
Are youth-media organizations currently doing enough to assuage this risk if audiences are primarily narrow or largely consist of other youth? Not exposing youth voices to a wider public, do they run the risk of going the way of the jaguar—silent, remote, needing a ventriloquist?
Without a healthy youth-media field in our culture, it could be argued that youth would not have a voice and would risk becoming, like the jaguar, a fixed and romanticized representation. On the other end of the youth-media spectrum, user-generated media— connected primarily to youth leisure and without emphasis on quality— is quickly becoming ubiquitous in the burgeoning world of networking and multimedia Web sites, such as YouTube, Facebook and MySpace. In this context, youth voice runs the risk of becoming not like the jaguar (silent, remote, needing a ventriloquist) but like the jungle (overpopulated, indecipherable cacophony). Thus, user-generated youth media threatens to outpace and overshadow educationally-generated youth media.
Challenge
Characterized by …
Possible consequence
diversification fragmentation marginalization representation credibility youth-centeredness process vs. product
single media platform/audience parochial or specialized mission narrow or peer-only audiences uneven geographic distribution coexists with user-generated media adult-led missions/organizations process not well articulated
dependent on one technology/audience parochial or non-mainstream audience preaching to the choir; jaguar in the jungle exclusion of diverse voices conflation of youth/youth-made media less critical thinking/leadership focus less focus on inquiry/literacy development
These challenges and possible consequences further threaten to leave youth media: • • • • • • •
not responsive to changing trends and technologies excluded from larger societal dialogue unexposed to adult audiences unfairly concentrated (urban, coastal, not suburban, rural, Midwest) youth competing with lower-caliber productions less youth-centered in approach lacking in basic educational foundation (e.g. literacy, inquiry skills)
here are some of the challenges facing the field of youth media