News is the information you need to have some engaging conversations with someone.
It’s tempting to think that with the new media environment, young people will take it upon themselves to create and share news in ways that are completely separate from “adult” news. Yet, in this chapter, we argue that because youth operate within systems established and largely controlled by adults, it’s important not to lose sight of how the news ecologies that youth create and participate in are inevitably reliant upon and shaped by the news they encounter via adults. Such news comes to young people frequently, although not exclusively, from “legacy” news: those sources that are associated with “old” media such as television, radio, and print journalism and that traditionally encouraged minimal participation in the creation of content.2 Sometimes that news comes to young people in a way that we might say is twice removed – filtered not only through legacy news sources but also through such places as humorous satirical news programs on cable stations like HBO or Comedy Central, YouTube videos, or mentions by celebrities on social media sites, as this chapter will discuss. At other times, news seems to emerge directly from youth themselves, as we will discuss in the chapters that follow. But it almost always comes to them in the form of an informal invitation to conversation, suggested by a friend or acquaintance through a social media site. It thus has a strong social component, regardless of where the story originated. Given that youth often share what comes to them from non-youth sources, we need to better understand the different ways in which adults have conceptualized and provided news that young people consume, and the ways that they have created spaces for the development of youth voice for both the consuming and what Axel Bruns terms as the produsing (producing + using) of news.3
In the previous chapter, this book explored why it is that young people are not very interested in consuming and sharing with their peers the news from legacy media. We identified four themes that are related to this lack of interest: (1) problems of journalistic authority, as many young people are skeptical of the claim that those speaking from a position of journalistic authority represent their interests; (2) problems of the assumed audience for news, as many young people sense a discrepancy between themselves and the imagined audiences of legacy news organizations; (3) problems young people (as well as others) identify with the business models of journalism that structure and limit the US news marketplace, and (4) a dislike of the news storytelling genres that are common to legacy media.
Each of the reasons identified in the last chapter as to why young people are turned off by legacy media is relevant as we consider past journalistic storytelling efforts that have been created and shared for, with, and by young people. Some media specifically designed to reach youth and young adults have embraced experiments with journalistic authority, relying upon youthful news reporters and anchors as well as comedic, celebrity, or sports personalities. Other youth media efforts have experimented with youthful genres of storytelling. Many efforts have emerged in school settings in forms such as weekly or monthly student newspapers or student broadcasts. And other youth-oriented news forms, especially those emerging from established organizations such as public or community radio and television, have targeted age groups more narrowly, recognizing that journalistic storytelling differs greatly between eight- and eighteen-year-olds.
Because targeting youth as a specific audience has been generally viewed as unprofitable “niche” programming, it has long been assumed that youth-oriented news must rely upon funding models that differ from the profit-based business model of legacy news. Such efforts find funding from foundations, social service organizations, schools, and city or regional sources. As we will discuss further in the next chapter, some people assume that the creation of news for youth by youth should somehow emerge spontaneously from youth themselves, which is an exciting model, but one that faces particular challenges of sustainability and scalability that we will discuss. What this chapter will argue is that even though some efforts at youth news have been sustainable in the past due to their reliance on the financial health of the US legacy media, young people have particularly embraced models that encourage the development of youth voice that allows them to understand possible solutions to the problems they identify, so as to work toward those alternatives. In other words, as we will note, the most effective efforts in fostering the voice of high school aged youth have never been as well-funded or as easily sustainable as the programs that are closer to the US commercial media model. Still, it is worth considering what is possible given today’s financial constraints, what is happening within those constraints now, and what is best from the perspective of youth.
This chapter considers some of the precursors to today’s emergent practices of what we are terming connective journalism. As we noted in Chapter 1, we use the phrase connective journalism to refer to the ways in which young people draw upon the connective capacities of social media platforms and, sometimes, on the classic concepts underlying journalism (such as watchdogging or “gatewatching”) to speak and be heard among the communities that matter to them.4 Whereas traditional journalism is associated with the practices of building an accurate story, connective journalism is associated with the practices of building a collective and individual identity: practices that are reinforced in the telling of a story by and for a particular group of people. But, as we will see in this chapter, the identities built through connective journalism practices are not constituted in relation to a generic “youth audience” that responds consistently to a set of youth-oriented stories. Rather, in the new media context, we need to think differently about how young people are constituted into a “we” through ethical callings and moral imaginings mobilized through various forms of media, including narrative and humor, as Jeffrey P. Jones has argued.5 Collective identities, or the sense of “we,” emerges as media texts elicit feelings and as young people respond to issues through their emotions. As we will discuss, this means that when efforts to support or create youth-oriented news assume a homogeneous youth audience, they are likely to encounter problems. And, as we will note, this also means that young people are likely to continue to draw upon a wide array of information sources that reinforce, inform, or edify who they see themselves as being and becoming. This may mean that they’re less likely to encounter information that disrupts or challenges them in ways that daily journalism might, which is an “echo chamber” or “filter bubble” concern related to news consumption practices of people of all ages in the new media environment.6 But in this chapter, we focus on the information and journalistic storytelling that does come into focus for youth, whether through the intentional efforts of adults or through the serendipitous sharing that occurs on YouTube channels and other social media platforms.
We focus on youthful practices of news consumption and news sharing because, as we noted in the introductory chapter, we view connective journalism practices as a key precursor to connective action, a phrase that Bennett and Segerberg have introduced to describe crowd-enabled networks through which people participate in political activities.7 Before people can choose to personalize their connection with certain issues, they have to become aware of the problem or issue in the first place. Connective journalism is part of this process, we argue, as young people become informed and as they collectively “gatewatch” those in power and begin to assimilate, assemble, and share evidence that challenges the certainty, routine, and efficiency of the communicative processes of those in power.
In a few (mostly isolated) cases, young people rely upon institutionalized sources for news that might be termed youth media, civic media, citizen journalism, or alternative media, as this chapter will discuss. But for the most part, young people rely on social media, on interpersonal relationships, and on news sources that were designed for older audiences rather than for them. For most youth, rather than coming to them directly from institutionalized sources, news tends to come to them second hand or via hearsay from their peers and family members, as a 2015 American Press Institute study found.8 Traditional journalism outlets are often the original source of the topics discussed, but items arrive in the young person’s news, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter feed, or in other forms of interaction after sometimes passing through a variety of filters that might include school discussions, corporate websites such as Buzzfeed, Reddit, or Fusion that aggregate and discuss news, late night television shows, including adult-oriented animated series such as South Park, or commentary produced or passed along from one’s peers. Young people also find out about topics of concern through a variety of sources that are at the outer reaches of journalism and include forms of expression such as art, graffiti, slam poetry, performance, and hip-hop. These forms are thus part of what we will term a broader youth news ecology, following Mizuko Ito and her colleagues’ use of the term “ecology” to refer to the ways in which communication media constitute the environments in which young people live and learn.9
There is a long tradition of efforts, both formal and informal, through which current events and issues have been made more accessible for young people. This chapter will discuss three different approaches to the production of youth news: (1) news efforts produced specifically for youth by adults, (2) news efforts produced by adults for young adults but for which high school youth are a substantial secondary audience, and (3) news produced by and for youth. We will also discuss the outer reaches of news – forms of narrative and popular expression that introduce young people to current issues and concerns – acknowledging that most of these fall into the category of media produced by adults for young adults. Each of these approaches contributes to the news ecology that youth encounter today across an array of media platforms.
We argue in this chapter that news produced by adults for youth has tended to begin from what Nico Carpentier calls a “minimalist” approach to participation.10 Such efforts have viewed young people from a developmental citizenship perspective that, as we discussed in Chapter 1, assumes that young people need to be protected and assisted as they prepare for adulthood, which is when they will be called upon to participate more fully in the political life of society. Following this protectionist approach to young people, many broadcast and print journalistic efforts designed by adults for youth have only minimally invited youth to participate in the life of society, primarily as audience members. After exploring a few examples of this approach to news created by adults for youth, we will then consider the news that youth consume that is produced for young adults, which positions high school aged youth at the periphery (even as high schoolers themselves may opt for greater participation as they share the critiques and social commentary of such programming with their peers through social media). These sources of news become important in the connective journalistic practices of young people as they “gatewatch” how problems are constituted in communication and then share evidence of problems with peers as part of their processes of creating performances of self-identification through social media. Finally, the chapter will consider the precursors to today’s youthful “produsers” of news, which we view as falling into two categories. The first includes programs like high school journalism that have encouraged young people to be creators of news, but that are often controlled by adults through both the setting of the school and through various court cases that have limited student press rights. The second precursor to today’s youthful “produsers” of news can be traced to a small but significant subset of efforts oriented toward fostering youth voice through the development of media competency/literacy. Some of these efforts have emerged spontaneously among youth themselves over the years. Yet, there are also traditions of adult involvement in creating spaces for the development of youth voice that have emerged among parents in formal and informal educational settings, as well as in critical youth media literacy and production efforts based in schools or after-school youth programs, as we will discuss. Many of these approaches have grown out of a critical approach to citizenship that challenges some of the more deficit-oriented assumptions of the developmental citizenship model that views young people only as “someday” citizens or as citizens in the making. Such critical approaches to youth citizenship have charted a way of thinking about the relationship between media consumption, production, and maximal youth participation in the life of society.
News for Youth (from Adults)
Today, there are very few outlets that consistently strive to offer young people an age-appropriate review and interpretation of politics and current events, save youth sports news and the weekly children’s insert that still comes with some daily newspapers. Perhaps the most outstanding example of a commitment to current event news created by adults for youth was the award-winning program Nick News with Linda Ellerbee on Nickelodeon, which was designed for children between the ages of eight and thirteen. The program aired on cable television in the United States every Sunday evening from 1992 until 2015 and was supported by advertising and subsidized by Nickelodeon. In 1993 through 1996, it also aired on the CBS network on Saturday evenings and continued to air on many CBS affiliates until 1999. The program received two Peabody awards recognizing its commitment to the public through its excellence in quality, one in 1992 and another in 1994.11 It drew its largest audience with a 2002 program, “Nick News Special Edition: My Family is Different,” which highlighted children discussing issues of child abuse, sexual harassment, and hate crimes. This program openly featured lesbian parent and comedian Rosie O’Donnell as well as members of conservative families that opposed same sex marriage.12 Other special programs focused on fracking, living with a terminal illness, and school discipline.13 In some ways, this program shared common ground with the commitments and orientation of the long-running Danish Broadcasting Service’s News For Children and the UK program Wise Up! which aired on Channel 4 between 1995 and 2000, the latter of which was also recognized by the Peabody awards.14
Channel One News similarly began as a broadcast entity in 1990 and continues to be available as a digital content provider today.15 In its early years, its programming was made available in US public schools through a unique and controversial funding model in which schools were provided with satellite receivers and televisions in exchange for the promise that they would record and then air the daily advertising-sponsored program in classrooms. Although professionally produced, Channel One invited young people to report, produce, direct, and design one week’s worth of programming each year during a Student Producer Week. Like Nick News and Wise Up!, Channel One News has been the recipient of numerous awards, and some research demonstrated that students with access to Channel One may have experienced some benefits in relation to current events knowledge.16 However, unlike the other productions, this effort received continual criticism for product marketing and corporate-heavy content paired with a sensationalistic and lightweight approach to current events, as well as for its contribution to the incursion of commercialism into school settings.17
Children’s Express was another interesting model that aimed to incorporate young people into the newsmaking process. Established by former Wall Street lawyer Robert Clampitt and former opera singer Dorriet Kavanaugh, in 1975,18 this not-for-profit effort – which took place in the New York City area and then in Salem, Massachusetts, Washington, DC, Oakland, California, and several other major cities from 1975 to 1999 – teamed young people aged eight to eighteen with professional journalists. Professional journalists served as mentors, offering guidance while young people researched and conducted interviews, and together with the journalists wrote stories of interest to young as well as older audiences.
Children’s Express (CE) first came to prominence when one of its thirteen-year-old reporters scooped the news that Walter Mondale would be Jimmy Carter’s running mate as part of its 1976 reporting on the Democratic National Convention.19 Then, after producing a segment about Children’s Express in 1985 that aired on 60 Minutes, CBS News reporter Harry Moses left 60 Minutes to begin the children’s news magazine series CE News Magazine with pilot funds from the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). That program, broadcast on PBS during prime time, gained notoriety when one of its twelve-year-old reporters asked vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle if she should have to bring a baby to term if she were raped by her father, and he replied that he would not recommend an abortion even under those circumstances. The program, including that episode, went on to win an Emmy and a Peabody Award for 1988.20
CE stories were syndicated by United Press International and later they were self-syndicated. The work was taxing. As one thirteen-year-old participant told a reporter for The New York Times: “I’m burned out. Next year I’m going to do less television so I don’t miss so much school.”21 Young television reporters for CE earned as much as $450 a week, although print reporters were not paid at all. The effort was successful in encouraging elementary and junior high students to participate in identifying and exploring youth-specific angles to current events. After Clampitt’s death in 1996, several of the bureaus split off to form separate youth news organizations, including Y-Press in Indianapolis, Children’s Pressline in New York City, and 8–18 Media in Marquette. It may be that such an effort could be revived in other markets with the enthusiasm of retired professional journalists, although increasing financial pressures on public broadcasting, after-school efforts, and on professional journalism remain a dominant concern for funding such an effort.22
Of course, the digital revolution has shaken up the financial models of all legacy media systems. News specifically written or produced for youth audiences was never consistently funded in the United States, and such efforts largely fell by the wayside with the loss in profitability of the commercial media systems in the early 2000s. If at one time some had hoped that a news-for-youth model funded by commercial media would catch on, in today’s financial landscape, those hopes have largely evaporated.
News for Young Adults (with Youth as a Secondary Audience)
Although some of the young people we interviewed had experienced Channel One News earlier in their school environments, most had few recent encounters with or had never heard of the above-mentioned examples of news for youth. When asked how they learned about current events, many, however, mentioned late night television and satirical news shows like The Daily Show or Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, youth-oriented music, and comedic parodies.
Until the 2016 presidential campaign, the term “fake news” as used in popular US lexicon most commonly referred to humorous entertainment television programs that parodied network news, utilizing satire to discuss public affairs. While emphatically stating that they are entertainment rather than “news,” programs such as Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, The Colbert Report (TCR), The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (TDS), and the “Weekend Update” on Saturday Night Live (SNL), have been widely popular among youth, with numerous studies reporting that teens as well as young adults rely on them as sources of news.23 By the fall of 2016, however, popular usage of the term “fake news” more commonly referred to websites, usually coming from an extreme right-wing orientation and often connected with White supremacist groups, that knowingly published sensational false stories, not for the purpose of stimulating public discussion about genuine political issues, but rather for the purpose of generating click-induced advertising revenue or, more darkly, for the purpose of popularizing and legitimizing racist, sexist, homophobic, and fascist positions that have historically been rejected by mainstream news media. While the latter form of fake news and how it is influencing journalism and politics will be discussed in the concluding chapter, the earlier fake news shows, which we will refer to as satirical television “mock news” programs (to avoid confusion with the newer use of the term “fake news”), are examined in the current chapter for what they can tell us about young people and news consumption.
Young adults were arguably first targeted as a unique audience for a news product in the mid-1970s, with the introduction of Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update, which wove political commentary into humorous late night television monologues. Satirical mock news programming for young adults developed further with the rise of cable television programming in the 1980s through such channels as MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, and Current TV, and more recently in YouTube-delivered channels such as Vice News, and programs featuring youthful microcelebrities such as The Philip DeFranco Show and The Young Turks.24
MTV’s partnership with Rock the Vote and its 2016 partnership with Tumblr and Change.org in its “Elect This” campaign and Robo-Roundtable series (using animation, talking robots, and animated plastic and stuffed animals to discuss political issues) stand out as exemplars in the news for youth area, particularly for the station’s interest in foregrounding innovative genres of delivery and its efforts to encourage youth participation in politics. The channel has sought to reach young people by focusing on election-year issues such as gun legislation, LGBT rights, and climate change, with a big assist from music celebrities.25 In their own pre-election survey of 2016, MTV found that 92 percent of their millennial-aged respondents agreed with the statement, “This election is like a bad reality show.”26 The online hub for “Elect This” featured in-depth information about issues, as well as lists of action steps and resources to enable young people to get connected with those working for the changes they wanted to support.
Political communication scholars Bruce Williams and Michael Delli Carpini have pointed out that due to the collapse of the broadcast “media regime” and the blurring of media storytelling genres, it is no longer possible to distinguish easily between information-centric media and entertainment media. They propose studying instead what they term “politically relevant media,” and satirical television mock news clearly fits into this category.27 Researchers have reacted with varying degrees of approval and concern to the public’s growing reliance for news on shows that are not produced by journalists and that purportedly lack a commitment to professional journalistic norms of objectivity. Yet, according to national studies, viewers of such shows are better informed about national and international affairs than those who rely exclusively on mainstream news outlets. In particular, young adults who watched The Daily Show scored higher on campaign knowledge tests than those who watched network news or read newspapers.28
Scholars have considered satirical television mock news to be “knowledge-enabling” as opposed to merely “informational,” in large part because such programs provide more context that enhances understanding for those new to certain issues or topics.29 As communication researcher Geoffrey Baym has observed, while typical TV news reports the “facts” in rapid succession, switching topics with little or no contextualization, satirical mock news “places its topics in wider contexts, often providing background information and drawing historical linkages of the sort uncommon to television news.”30 Particularly useful for young people who are still learning about the workings of government, the in-depth discussions found on TDS and TCR, in particular, have provided information on institutional processes – such as how a bill becomes law or how the electoral college functions – that are mentioned but rarely explained in mainstream news. Thus, while official news increasingly resembles entertainment genres, various scholars note that satirical mock news provides the type of political communication that promotes public debate.31 These programs also enact the classical watchdog role of journalism by striving, through satire, to hold the powerful accountable for what they say and do.32
Recognizing the hybrid nature of news information in our discursively integrated age, Baym, like Williams and Delli Carpini, urges us to move beyond mutually exclusive dichotomies of “entertainment or information.”33 Similarly, Borden and Tew have argued that since satirical mock news shows are free from the official constraints of gatekeeping and objectivity, they can offer the same kind of authenticity promised by bloggers and other online social media, in terms of drawing attention to lapses of journalistic integrity.34 Jon Stewart’s Socratic questioning technique on The Daily Show, for example, can be understood as “a rhetorical tactic to point out incongruities, inconsistencies and internal contradictions” in the public discourse of politicians and other powerful actors.35 By purposely skewering the authoritative voices that are the hallmark of professional reporters, such shows critique the trivialization of news and superficial reporting that have become commonplace in professional broadcast journalism. They offer audiences a taste of what current events news could be, if stripped of its dependence on the authority of the presenter, focusing instead on the quality of arguments.
Learning from Satirical Television Mock News
Young people told us they often learned about current events for the first time by watching satirical mock news programming. Explaining how she first became aware of the 2008–2010 financial crisis watching SNL, one of our interviewees named Maneeya stated: “At first, when the economy was going down, they did a joke about it and I thought it was very funny. Then I saw the regular news and was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s true!’” Mike, aged sixteen, explained: “I watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. I actually find it a really interesting way to get news, because it’s funny, but you learn from it.” Mohamed, aged fifteen, watched TDS “every night before bed.” Unlike many of his peers, Mohamed also sought out news from the ideologically opposite end of the scale, noting that he also watched the current events talk show The O’Reilly Factor, hosted by conservative political commentator Bill O’Reilly, which aired on the Fox News Network from 1996 until 2017. Although he held progressive views, Mohamed prided himself on being open-minded and tuned in to conservative shows to “hear the other side.” He explained, “I’m very opinionated and quick to start an argument, but sometimes when you start an argument, it could lead to either yourself discovering something new about a topic or someone else discovering something new.” Grouping The O’Reilly Factor with the other mock news programs he watched, Mohamed noted that he appreciated that the hosts of such shows provided unambiguous political opinions: “Jon Stewart criticizes people…he’s sort of sarcastic about it. Satire. And, that’s what I do when I argue with people.”
Although it might seem as if these young adult-oriented programs emerged relatively recently, media scholar Liesbet Van Zoonen has argued that they are best understood within a long history of the blurring of politics and entertainment.36 In the middle of the nineteenth century, for example, as Tony Kelso and Brian Cogan have reminded us, the Lincoln and Douglas debates were staged as a festival, complete with a spectacle of bands, flags, and banners.37 Advertising also emerged in the nineteenth century, bringing a splash of color and entertainment to politics in a manner that tells us a great deal about how politicians imagined the nineteenth-century audience and what it would take to engage their interest in politics. One can observe an even longer tradition of entertainment rooted in casting John Adams as a “no-good monarchist” and Thomas Jefferson as a “vile atheist,” in early election campaigns that were meant to appeal to people’s emotions.38 Current events have long been a source of entertainment, even if scholars have only recently begun to pay attention to the role these sources of entertainment play in political knowledge and, perhaps, mobilization.
Learning from Fictional Narratives
The previous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century campaign examples illustrate how politicians or their advocates have sought to harness the emotional power of popular culture and entertainment for their own ends. But with the rise of the entertainment and cultural industries beginning in the mid-twentieth century, corporations saw the benefits of this connection between emotional expression and politics, not only in terms of possible political engagement, but also in terms of profitability. This picture became more complicated as artistic expression, particularly fictional narratives, came to offer an important avenue for critiquing the impact of capitalism on everyday life in the postwar era, as Guy Debord has argued.39 Scholars began to observe that fictional narratives served particularly well as a cultural forum through which people could explore differing and sometimes conflicting feelings, even to the point of challenging their own deeply held views.40 Fictional narratives allow people to see themselves more clearly, and thus they are especially important for the development of a moral imagination, as Jeffrey Jones has argued.41 He cites the philosopher Richard Rorty on fiction in relation to this point:
Fiction gives us the details about the kinds of suffering being endured by people to whom we have previously not attended. Fiction…gives us the details about what sorts of cruelty we ourselves are capable of, and thereby lets us redescribe ourselves.42
Fiction can elicit feelings, which in turn can contribute to the construction of a “we,” or the construction of ourselves in relation to an affective public, to use Zizi Papacharissi’s term.43
Fictional narratives are occasionally mentioned as a source of information about current events, particularly when such events are related to political and moral judgments. Over the past few decades, a number of fictional films and television programs have become sources of both information and identification for young people, serving as narratives that open discussion to broader contemporary issues such as poverty, racism, drug abuse, sexual harassment or abuse, homophobia, and the rights of members of the LGBTIQ community. Some of those mentioned among youth included Precious, Boyz in the Hood, The Help, Orange is the New Black, Breaking Bad, Faking it, Degrassi High, The Boondocks, The Fosters, Glee, and in northern European contexts, the popular Norwegian teen drama Skam (Shame). For specific references to contemporary political issues, US young people we interviewed also frequently mentioned the animated television series South Park, noting that they viewed the program on television, laptop computers, and mobile devices, with past episodes available on YouTube. Some noted that they shared links to especially popular episodes among their friends via social media. South Park, which is distributed by and is one of the most successful programs of the Comedy Central television network, debuted in 1997 and is slated to air through at least 2019.
While satirical mock news programs have been critiqued for their progressive orientations, South Park holds appeal among those who espouse center-right and libertarian beliefs, despite the fact that conservatives criticize the program’s vulgarity.44 The program has mocked anti-smoking activists, government-mandated diversity, sex education, and environmentalists, while also mercilessly skewering prominent left-wing celebrities such as Rosie O’Donnell, Jesse Jackson, Michael Moore, and Rob Reiner.45 But South Park has also satirized America’s interventionist foreign policy and conservatives, leaving some to view the program (and associated films) as largely reinforcing anti-political views.46
When asked to provide examples of political issues they learned about from the show, several youth such as Lucia enthusiastically recounted episodes:
They had a funny episode recently about Apple and iTunes and all that. [Laughing] You know how when you update things on your computer, it gives you pages and pages and pages of conditions or whatever, and you don’t read it, you just click “agree.” And, one day on South Park, one of the characters disappears and Apple takes him and turns him into a terrible science experiment because it was stated in the fine print. (Lucia, aged twenty)
Through this humorous animated program, Lucia considered for the first time the importance of reading website privacy policies – a topic of growing political importance. Meanwhile, Hermes, aged twenty, gained an understanding of civil rights violations occurring within US government spying operations:
South Park was making fun of the NSA spying on us, and the whistle blowers. There was an episode where Cartman was on his phone. He wanted to form a Meetup to fight the NSA spying on people, but then says, “The NSA found out about our meeting. They’re reading my tweets.” The NSA knows everything he’s doing. Then, he goes to work for the NSA using the alias Bill Clinton. And it shows all these people in suits spying on everyone, observing the dumbest details, like what TV show they watch, and they’re torturing Santa Claus. What I thought was really funny was how they showed the NSA is reading people’s Twitter posts and emails. And, when Cartman tries to expose it, nobody cares. His own mother just says, “Yes, I know the government tortures people, honey, but they’re keeping us safe.” It was hilarious and also a depressing situation. (Hermes, aged twenty)
Alex, aged sixteen, first learned from South Park about Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, made famous through the 2012 case in which unarmed teenager Trayvon Martin was shot in his own neighborhood by George Zimmerman, who was later acquitted of second-degree murder: “I can think of a recent episode where they were making fun of Zimmerman and the ‘Stand Your Ground’ rule. So, I looked up ‘Stand Your Ground’ to know what it meant,” Alex explained.
Alex, echoing views of those who questioned traditional journalistic authority as noted in the previous chapter, observed that programs like South Park are useful in informing people about current events “because when people joke about things, I trust the source more. They’re joking about bad things, things that are wrong.” A program like South Park thus stands in a long tradition of humor and satire and shares a common literary tradition with the satirical mock news programs mentioned earlier.
Fictional narratives such as South Park not only exposed youth to current events, but also motivated them to seek additional information on politically relevant topics such as the “NSA” or “SOPA.” And mobile phones made this process of secondary research highly accessible. Amanda, aged sixteen, who watched South Park, The Daily Show, and Colbert with her older brothers and cousins, appreciated the privacy and immediacy of her cell phone. “Sometimes they’re all laughing at a joke and I don’t get it. I don’t want to let them know I don’t get it, so I look it up on my phone,” she noted.
Gleaning Knowledge from Mainstream News
We were continually surprised to learn that even youth who said they “don’t follow news too much” had up-to-the-minute knowledge of news related to entertainment, celebrities, or sports. Some youth spoke passionately about sexism or racism in movies or songs, while others expressed views on the ethics of athletes taking steroids, illustrating that youthful gravitation toward popular culture is not mutually exclusive with developing political knowledge. A sixteen-year-old avid video gamer discussed a news story he learned about on Facebook: “There’s this person from PETA wanting to sue Nintendo because of supposed animal cruelty on Nintendo video games, even though none of the animals are real on the games! It’s so stupid! A friend showed it to me” (Manny, aged sixteen). Manny’s interest in discussing video games with fellow gamers on Facebook led him to become aware of People for Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) and the animal rights movement. It also motivated him to develop his own political position regarding what he felt counted and didn’t count as harmful behavior toward animals.
Even if they hadn’t watched it on television, many students had heard about the winner of the September 2013 Miss America pageant, Nina Davuluri, on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, or YouTube, and nearly all mentioned the racist responses Davuluri received online as the first Miss America of Indian American descent. Nico, aged sixteen, said: “I learned about it on Tumblr. I remember someone reposting a few pictures and a story about how people were being outrageously racist about it. People made a lot of comments on Twitter and Steven Colbert also had a little skit about it. I mean, just because she’s not white or blond or whatever, she’s an American citizen and has a right to be Miss America.” Julia, aged eighteen, who heard about the pageant on Facebook, Twitter, and The Colbert Show, echoed Nico’s disapproval:
I thought it was terrible how racist people were and what people were tweeting about her. I was really upset by it. But, one of the good things about Facebook or social media is that I didn’t necessarily look it up on my own, but scrolling through my news feed or scrolling through Tumblr, I saw more info about it… I saw a quote from her that said something like, “The girl next door is evolving in the US” or something like that. I thought that was a great quote.
Thus, a mundane popular culture event covered by the mainstream news and circulated on social media inspired online debates regarding race in contemporary US society, with youth able to view, critique, and express perspectives in the public sphere from the privacy of their phones, affirming in the process their own sense of identity as individuals opposed to racism. We found that social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, prompted youth to consider a variety of civic issues related to collective identity, national belonging, and the common good.
For example, David, aged twenty, the son of Colombian immigrants, was inspired via social media to consider an issue connected to notions of the common good – economic inequality. When a friend posted a video link of actor and comedian Russell Brand, on Facebook, David “liked” it: “He was talking about a revolution of the poor against the rich and talking about not voting and how the system is illegitimate.” The YouTube clip was an interview on BBC’s Newsnight, conducted by British journalist Jeremy Paxman. The ten-minute video showed Brand arguing that a revolution of the disenfranchised against the 1 percent was needed to achieve true democracy. The Newsnight interview, which most youth would not have seen otherwise, went viral, receiving more than 8 million hits and myriad comments on YouTube shortly after its release in 2013 and climbing to more than 11 million hits by 2016 due to its circulation on Facebook and Twitter.
Further illustrating how youth engagement with entertainment news via social media can introduce them to politics, Rafael, aged seventeen, gave the following response when asked whether he cared about a political issue, which he related to his love of video games:
Yes, the SOPA bill! There was a petition on the Internet against SOPA. The SOPA bill’s, like, I watch a lot of video games on YouTube…but a lot of people do commentary over it and have their own experience with it. That’s the difference between posting movies and posting video games. With a movie, it’s the same experience whoever watches it, but with a video game, it’s a different experience no matter who does it. And the SOPA bill would put a limit on that. Like movie companies could take a video down if they have a specific thing in it from that movie. The SOPA bill would, like, limit what you can poach from the Internet, and that’s against free speech, against how people can express themselves. So, I signed the petition to make sure that doesn’t happen.
A movie and gaming buff, Rafael first learned of SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) from watching one of his favorite shows – a humorous online movie guide called The Nostalgia Critic. Unfamiliar with the term “SOPA,” he later Googled it to learn more and began following the issue on Facebook and Twitter, sharing online posts with friends.
Ironically, while the students’ comments and behaviors implied that they were uninterested in “objective” news, as we discussed in Chapter 3, it was, in part, their desire to gain a more truthful and balanced understanding of news that motivated them to view blogs, Facebook postings, YouTube videos, satirical mock news, and other “non-news” sources of news. This occurred as the youth encountered a connection between their own identities, including the things they cared about and identified with, and the contemporary issues that sparked their emotions. Such genres as YouTube, mock news, and other non-news sources do not simply relate the news, but also offer interpretations and judgments about current events that provide an emotional framework and a moral discourse through which young people can connect with current events. In contrast to disinterested observations about the political world, typical of “boring” professional news, the teens enjoyed the use of opinion and sarcasm employed in these media to expose lies and abuses. Kara, aged sixteen, expressed what many youth felt was a problem with professional news: “The regular news gives you one side and another side, but you don’t really know which one is good or bad.”
But, even these engaged young people cannot be viewed as “dutiful citizens” who are consuming news on a regular basis. Rather than follow “the news,” young people tend to follow issues that are important to them because of this connection with identification. Kim, aged seventeen, is one such young person who was embedded in a community that cared a great deal about immigration. As she noted, she had “a lot of friends who are involved with the immigration movement. I get information from talking with them and from Facebook. I pay attention to news about immigration, because it affects my family.” Kim knew that her friends and family members would be denied the opportunity to pursue college, which in turn would limit their employment opportunities, unless laws were passed to allow students born in Mexico but raised in the United States to pursue college at the in-state rate, with access to financial aid and US loans. She did not view knowing about immigration law as part of her civic duty to be informed, but rather as a pragmatic response to a set of rules that would either limit or make possible certain opportunities for her family and friends.
Other issues youth cared about included police brutality, racial profiling, reproductive rights, environmental issues, and news about their families’ countries of origin. Eighteen-year-old Santos, the son of Brazilian immigrants, defined himself as “not very political,” yet like Kim, he was also informed about issues that directly touched his life:
On Facebook, I’ve been hearing about all these demonstrations and protests all over the world, like there’s tension in Brazil about the Olympics and all this money being invested to build buildings and brand new stadiums for this two-week event, when so many people in Brazil are living in very serious, sub-par conditions … Also, there have been protests in Russia over gay rights. And of course there’s the government shutdown here.
The fact that students like Kim and Santos followed some news stories and not others only further complicates the question of how news could be created and shared specifically for youth. These examples highlight the fact that there is no single “youth audience” who would choose to consume the same set of news stories, but rather a collection of audiences that more or less share interests with adults that center on issues.
Thus, when people share links to South Park or Last Week Tonight with John Oliver among their friends and family members, just as when they elect to talk about what Kara termed the “regular news,” we argue that they are participating in practices of connective journalism. In the former case, they are sharing these programs because they are humorous, surely, but also because the program articulates something that allows them to claim an identification that is at once political and collective. We will return to this point, but first we turn to our final category in the contemporary youth news ecology: news that is created and shared by and for youth.
News by Youth for Youth
High School (Scholastic) Journalism
Nick News, Wise Up!, Channel One, Children’s Express, various satirical mock news programs such as The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, as well as the fictional program South Park, were all relatively high-profile broadcast properties that were expensive to produce and featured content largely controlled by and aimed at adults. But more common models in youth news media, if less high profile, have involved locally supported efforts to engage young people, with some guidance from adults, in the reporting and analysis of current events.
The earliest forms of news produced by youth for youth date back to the 1930s, when high schools began to support newspapers meant to serve the student body. Following the introduction of the flash bulb at around the same time, high school journalism increasingly incorporated photojournalism, and by the 1950s and 1960s, both yearbooks and some high school papers aspired to take on a look heavily influenced by Life and Look magazines, which were the dominant publications of the time.47 Yet, the printing quality of the high school press was often limited, as photocopy machines did not become widely available in schools until the 1970s and 1980s, so many mid-century high school presses relied on mimeograph machines. After the introduction of electronic video editing systems, which entered the commercial market in the mid-1960s, schools started to experiment with student broadcast news. Student news organizations began to go online in the mid-1990s, although many involved at the time were ambivalent about the fact that such publications could disseminate far beyond school boundaries, thereby opening schools up to a wider range of observers and critics.48
But the involvement of adults in the oversight of high school-related news publications has long been in debate. The 1969 Supreme Court case Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School established the constitutional rights of students to free expression and provided a test by which to judge whether or not a school’s disciplinary actions violate First Amendment rights. The court held that students “do not shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate” and protected students’ rights to express political views, in this particular case agreeing that students had the right to wear armbands protesting the Vietnam war.49 The Student Press Law Center was established in 1974 to advocate specifically for student press rights, particularly the right to publish free of censorship by school administrators. California passed the first Student Free Expression Law in 1977 and Washington state passed a similar law that same year. However, in 1984 the US Supreme Court ruled that it was well within the authority of school administrators to determine the appropriateness of speech in classes and in assemblies, and in 1988 the Supreme Court ruled in Hazelwood School District v. Kuhlmeier that public school student newspapers that have not been explicitly established as forums for free expression are subject to a lower level of First Amendment protection. The court noted that a school could censor content deemed inconsistent with the school’s “basic educational mission,” and that rather than creating a public forum, a school newspaper was a “supervised learning experience” subject to extensive control by a faculty member.50 Hazelwood became the standard for future student press cases, as it established that a school district could censor a student newspaper for a variety of reasons.51 But as the Student Press Law Center notes, “the burden remains on the school to furnish a legitimate educational reason for censoring – and that cannot be simply protecting the school’s PR image.”52 Courts and schools continue to debate student rights, most recently in relation to disciplining students in relation to Facebook content published off campus and about student writing that is deemed offensive and hateful rather than humorous and satirical, but involvement in high school journalism is related positively to voting, and to the development of civic competence.53
Although one might think that news by youth for youth would be youth-centered and youth-led, some youth journalism programs are extremely prescriptive, limiting what youth reporters can cover in order to fit with school policies. High school teachers and principals frequently discourage or prohibit student stories about war, teen sexuality, school policies, or other controversial issues.54 Censorship has been found to disillusion student journalists regarding the viability of their political agency. In a study of high school journalism, David Martinson observed that censorship at school newspapers creates a situation in which “students fail to understand why it is important that they be engaged and committed citizens because they learn through the socialization process … that the way to survive is not to raise questions but to go along.”55 Such dynamics instill in students a sense of irrelevance as political actors, curtailing their enthusiasm for journalism and civic engagement.
On the other hand, some programs that understand themselves as “news by and for youth” fail to provide sufficient guidance in helping youth understand what makes a story interesting and newsworthy. Sometimes, adult leadership is underprepared, such as in the case of high schools that thrust the English teacher into the role of newspaper advisor or recruit the physical education teacher for the task because she has a free period to fill. In other cases, funding sources dry up or volunteers leave before a system of cultivating interesting and newsworthy stories is developed. It is understandably harder to gather information on these programs, but it is nevertheless important to acknowledge that many such efforts are short-lived or fail to engender enthusiasm among youth.
Community Youth Media
Since the 1970s, news by and for youth can be further subdivided into news efforts that take place as part of a school’s regular curriculum, such as the daily, weekly, or monthly school newspapers and broadcast initiatives discussed above and those that take place through extra curricular activities either advised by someone from the school or run completely apart from schools by community organizations.56 The latter often are managed with funding support from foundations, corporations, local businesses, or local government, and range in purpose from “giving youth a voice” to “encouraging creative self-expression” and “preparing youth for a career in media,” according to a US survey of youth media programs.57 This same study found that the majority of community youth media programs serve modest income or under-resourced youth communities, and half of all of the programs surveyed operated with an annual budget of $100,000 or less, while 11 percent of them had no budget at all.58
When judged according to a program’s ability to sustain youth interest and youth involvement, the most successful of the youth media program models allow young people editorial freedom to select their own story topics while teaching them how to tell their stories in ways that appeal to a wider public.59 Some of the larger and more enduring examples of youth journalism programs include Zumix Radio in Boston, WHYY TV in Philadelphia, Radio Rookies and the Educational Video Center in New York, and Youth Radio in Oakland, California. Zumix Radio is a free after-school program in which teenagers are trained in journalistic interview and research skills and learn how to use radio recording and broadcasting equipment. Their stories are broadcast via community radio and on the web.60 WHYY TV (Philadelphia Public TV) and the Educational Video Center (EVC) in New York City each teach high school aged youth how to create video news stories regarding issues happening in their neighborhoods. The stories from the first are aired on Philadelphia public television; with EVC, youth-produced documentaries make their way into the film festival circuit.61 Radio Rookies, an initiative of WNYC (New York Public Radio), and Youth Radio in Oakland teach teenagers to use words and sounds to tell true stories about their communities. Upon completion, the news stories from these outlets are distributed worldwide via a variety of media outlets including public radio stations, CNN.com, iTunes, and the NPR programs Morning Edition and All Things Considered. All of these award-winning youth journalism models recruit youth from predominantly under-resourced neighborhoods where most high schools lack funding for school newspapers or journalism clubs. Operating within a youth empowerment model and run by staff with public television and/or community radio backgrounds (journalistic realms historically involved in “watch dog” journalism), these models allow teens to choose their own stories, even when these stories consist of controversial topics.
Because these examples are funded according to public broadcasting models of foundation, grant, and government support, they hold some things in common with the not-for-profit models now being widely proposed in response to the collapse of the for-profit commercial media industries.62 This funding model is one to which we will return for further discussion in Chapter 7.
Youth Media and Media Literacy
Production Skills and Critical Analytical Skills
Most of the youth media programs listed above, as well as many other community youth media efforts, incorporate a significant component of critical media literacy into their work. According to Patricia Aufderheide and Charles Firestone, media literacy is generally defined as the ability to access, analyze, evaluate, and communicate messages in a wide variety of forms.63 But, as we have observed about the differing levels of adult involvement in the production of news for youth, we also note different approaches that shape programs in media literacy. Some experts, such as Neil Postman, have argued that media literacy is important because young people need protection from a toxic culture. On the other hand, other experts such as David Buckingham have viewed media literacy differently. As media literacy expert Renee Hobbs has said of this “debate” between a protectionist, Postman-like approach, and a child-centric Buckingham approach to media literacy: “Maybe children and young people don’t need to be protected at all, just invited to participate in the community’s discourse about media.”64 Most who work in youth media adopt this latter approach to media literacy.
There are also debates in media literacy about the extent to which such efforts should be about directing young people toward concerns of social injustice. Whereas some, particularly in public education circles, view media literacy as an extension of what they view as a depoliticized process of “literacy,” others, who prefer the term critical media literacy, think of media literacy as a tool for educational, social, and political change.65 Those in critical media literacy also emphasize the importance of examining the role of various media institutions in the power relations of society.66 As JoEllen Fisherkeller observes about the relationship between critical media literacy and youth media,
Often, but not always, youth media programs help young people to challenge the status quo and create change where necessary, and thus help youth to develop as powerful members of society, whether as workers, artists, citizens, activists, and/or leaders.67
Several national US organizations, such as the Center for Media Literacy, the Media Literacy Project, and the National Association for Media Literacy Education, offer resources to assist in the incorporation of media literacy efforts in classrooms and after-school activities.
Some critical media literacy programs focus specifically on news. Paul Mihailidis’s work with the Salzburg Institute is one example in which educators are encouraged to provide leadership in this area.68 Ben Adler has noted that the News Literacy Project, which focuses specifically on helping young people evaluate the trustworthiness of differing news sites, is perhaps one of the more successful of the efforts addressing news, although even its reach of 10,000 students has been relatively limited.69 Such news-focused efforts have been particularly interested in the ways that participation in the news selection and production process serve as a key part of a critical approach that can foster increased civic engagement among youth.70 Hobbs and her colleagues, for instance, looked in-depth at an in-school news video production class to learn more about the outcomes of involvement in such programs. They found that having positive attitudes about news, current events, reporting, and journalism, attitudes typically developed in critical media literacy programs, were the best predictors for how young people would translate their experiences in youth media into civic engagement.71
While youth media and youth media literacy programs gained momentum with the ubiquity of television in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, many programs now incorporate web and mobile app design and social media into their efforts.72 Amy Stornaiulo and her colleagues, for example, have argued that efforts that utilize video conferencing technologies to bring together young people from various countries can help to humanize the struggles of one set of people for another, which can shift youth’s self-understanding.73 Youth media expert Lissa Soep has encouraged young people to develop and amplify techniques associated with citizen journalism, as they scan found footage and then attempt to create a larger narrative in which these can be placed to enhance a story’s appeal among broader audiences.74 Although we will return to a more fulsome discussion of the relationship between youth connective journalism practices and citizen journalism in the following chapters, it’s important to note here that Soep’s approach is a particularly promising way to assist young people in developing critical media literacy as well as production skills, since it asks young people to consider found footage as evidence that can then be placed into a larger interpretive context – something youth frequently do in connective journalism practices.
In our own research, we found that although some young people are critical of the business model of mainstream/legacy news, as discussed in the previous chapter, most are unaware of how the news they create and share on social media is mined, shared, and utilized for commercial profit and marketing purposes. This underscores the critical need for the teaching of digital media literacy to help youth think more about the business models and platforms of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more. Young people need to have opportunities to consider whose interests are served and how algorithms work to give priority to different stories made available.75 Such issues challenge the idea that just releasing one’s youthful news stories or comments online will enable those stories to find an intended (or broader) audience. They also encourage those in leadership positions to question the celebration of social media platforms as “democratizing” and automatically enabling greater participation for all young people.
As prior research has found, many youth recognize and want this kind of critical media literacy education.76 They realize that they can benefit from media literacy training and are appreciative when schools or after-school programs provide it. In the youth media programs we studied, we found that youth are adept at doing online searches for news on topics of interest to them and older teens, in particular, have some methods for evaluating the trustworthiness of information. These include scrutinizing a website’s “look,” checking multiple information sources, following links to determine a story’s original source, and going to legacy newspaper sites.77 One young person we interviewed named Jaime, aged eighteen, noted that when evaluating a news link, he tried to “make sure it’s a primary source, not too far removed from the direct source. Also, usually in the web address if it says .gov or .com. or .edu, you can tell if it’s coming from a university or government source or a commercial source.” Susie, aged eighteen, also checked web addresses: “I usually look at the source, like if it’s promoted by the government or by a business or some sort of legitimate source. I ask myself, ‘Could I cite this source? Can I see a logo?’ Does the website look nice?” Tito, aged sixteen, noted: “I go to ABC, NBC, those types of news sites, or CNN. Then, you can compare a story on each of them.” Young people also noted that when they saw a story “all over the Internet,” they tended to believe it. This speaks to the power of virality in verification practices of young people, which raises a number of issues that we will return to in Chapters 6 and 7. Amanda, aged sixteen, expressed this feeling: “If it’s online and everyone’s talking about it, it’s probably true. You have to ask yourself, is this believable? Did someone make this up? But, there are some real things that are unbelievable! So, if I heard about it at first, I might think it’s a joke. But, then I would check on a real, official thing like the Boston Globe.” Because Amanda grew up with parents who followed the news and was involved in a youth media program, she may have been more attuned to checking legacy news sources than others. But, many youth, especially younger teens, were less wary and tended to trust online sources more easily.
As many leaders in youth media have affirmed in relation to the goals of their programs, youth need to learn to develop sophisticated ways of evaluating online sources of information, using techniques such as looking more closely at a website’s mission, exploring an organization’s funding model, learning about what types of people endorse it, and considering its history of accuracy. Interestingly, while many young people automatically trust big name news organizations such as CNN or Fox, we also found a tendency among some, particularly young people of color, to automatically consider larger news sites “biased” and smaller, purportedly “alternative” sites, as “reliable.” This position is illustrated in the comments of Santos, aged eighteen: “I think that big media like NBC or Fox tend to have a bias…I like to go to smaller sites, like Jezebel.com…They tend to post a fair amount of unbiased and fair news.” This kind of skepticism, also discussed in Chapter 3, is undoubtedly related to a long tradition of biased coverage of communities of color.78 Still, when asked how they defined terms such as “unbiased” or “reliable,” most youth have a hard time articulating criteria. Similar results were found in a national 2016 study of online youth civic reasoning, which noted: “Our ‘digital natives’ may be able to flit between Facebook and Twitter while simultaneously uploading a selfie to Instagram and texting a friend. But when it comes to evaluating information that flows through social media channels, they are easily duped.”79
Being Informed in Immigrant Families
While media literacy is crucial in schools and universities for youth of all ages and races, it is especially important for immigrant youth, whose parents may have even less familiarity with US news norms and marketing tactics than US-born adults have. Immigrants, particularly those coming from rural areas of developing countries, are especially vulnerable to predatory lending, phone and mail scams, or other forms of exploitation. Because they usually speak English better and have greater technological skills than their parents, the children of immigrants often find themselves playing the role of “protector” and translator for their parents.80 We found that those immigrant youth who had the benefit of civics or journalism classes noted that their parents were more trusting and less questioning of news sources than they were and credited their classes for making them more careful news consumers. Numerous immigrant youth noted that their parents had not finished high school and/or had limited English skills (some parents also had limited literacy skills in their native language) and most described their parents as having meager digital skills. In a reversal of traditional generational roles, the immigrant youth found themselves explaining US news to their parents.81 For instance, Danny, aged twenty, who had recently won a scholarship to college, felt his educational attainment and technological savvy put him in a more advantaged position than his parents: “I like to think that the young generation is pretty smart. Smarter than the older generation, sometimes. Some of our parents never even graduated high school.” He used the term “smart” to refer to higher levels of education and technological skill, but distinguished between “smarts” and “wisdom.” Like most of the youth, he respected his parents’ life experiences while recognizing that he was more up-to-date regarding US news. He continued: “We have that education and we think we’re smarter, even though, you know, it’s different because the older generation might be wiser. I know I get my wisdom from my parents.”
Similar sentiments were repeated by others. Kim, aged seventeen, a senior in high school who lived in a single parent household, discussed the generation gap between herself and her mother, who was Peruvian and spoke little English:
I feel like my mother is less informed than me. She’s working. She’s busy. When she comes home she’s tired and puts on the Spanish news, but she doesn’t pay attention that much because she’s cooking or doing other things…She reads the Spanish newspaper, but…unless you are very tech savvy, and my Mom is very old fashioned, then you don’t get up to date on what’s going on. You don’t have the chance to see lots of different opinions and debates…I think because of the energy that I put to find out information and the technology that is offered to me, that I’m better informed.
Kim noted two instances when she needed to explain current events to her mother. The first was news of a “lock down” (a concept her mother had never heard of) in relation to a shooting at a nearby school. The second was the Boston marathon bombing: “With the Boston marathon bombing, I had to inform her. I think my mom jumps to conclusions because she is so old fashioned. In school, these days, they teach us to be more open-minded and…they make us question a lot of things. I feel like my Mom doesn’t question things…So, I often have to inform her of other sides of a story or more details than she normally gets.”
Jaime, aged eighteen, said his parents “came through a lot, they’ve lived through things I wasn’t around for…But, I’m more technology-wise and, in the online political world, I’m more informed.” Hermes, aged twenty, whose Salvadoran mother cleaned office buildings, felt similarly: “I feel my mom is less informed, probably because we’re definitely from different generations and she’s not that Internet savvy. She works, she comes home and cooks, she watches a little bit of TV, but… she doesn’t really care that much about it. I’m online, I’m more connected all day than she is, so I tend to hear about things before she does and have more information which I can explain to her.” Tito, aged sixteen, summarized the type of exchanges that immigrant youth often have with their parents: “They’re updated about what’s going on in Colombia and I know more about what’s going on in the English-speaking world. I tell them what’s happening here and they tell me what’s happening over there.”
Just as immigrant children become translators for their parents in social service, medical, and legal situations,82 their facility with digital media allows them access to more detailed, diverse, and up-to-the-minute news than their parents receive. Youth felt their parents were not as updated as they were about US news, particularly breaking stories. In a reversal of the usual parent–child relationship, young Latinos apprised their immigrant parents of US news developments and their meanings, including the DREAM Act, school policies, immigration laws, and hyper-local crime news stories. The young people’s proficiency with the Internet, near constant physical connection with mobile media, and fluent English skills underscored a generational digital divide that has technological, educational, and linguistic aspects.83
Social context is important here. While non-immigrant youth can also have parents who are less digitally skilled than they are, we found that much greater gaps exist between low-income Latino immigrant youth and their parents regarding formal educational attainment, English skills, and digital know-how. This is further complicated by the fact that many immigrant youth have parents who are undocumented residents. Because of precarious economic situations these parents may have faced both in their native countries and in the United States, many immigrant parents from developing countries lack high levels of formal education and find themselves working long hours at low-wage jobs with less time to focus on the news than more affluent parents might have. Many parents of the youth we interviewed were employed in manual labor jobs and did not have digital skills. While non-immigrant youth typically have parents and extended family members who can reinforce normative ideas regarding democratic rights and participatory processes, low-income Latino immigrant youth are less likely to have these ideals demonstrated or reinforced at home84 and are the least likely of all US youth populations to discuss politics with their parents.85 This combination of factors highlights the urgent need for critical media literacy programs for youth living in low-income immigrant and minority communities.
As the above section illustrates, youth media and critical media literacy programs face a variety of challenges that include but also extend beyond the issue of limited funding. Programs designed to encourage youth participation in media production and in critical media literacy must be designed with the specific contextual and cultural experiences of youth in mind.
Citizenship and Participation
As noted in the Introduction, we take a critical approach to youth and citizenship, and this forms the basis for how we suggest that readers think about the relationships between various elements of the youth news ecology and questions of political participation. Participation is sometimes viewed in a binary way, assuming that people either choose to participate in governance and politics, or they do not. However, some scholars have pointed out that the choice of whether or not to participate is usually shaped in advance by systems that foster either what Nico Carpentier86 has termed as minimalist or maximalist approaches to participation. Although he discusses political systems only, we add that these two different approaches to shaping participation are found both in governmental systems and in other systems in which young people grow up. Dictatorships and nation-states with strong centralized leadership tend to take a minimalist approach to participation, as do authoritarian families. Similarly, schools that adopt a minimalist approach to participation focus on creating and maintaining order. In settings of minimalist participation, decision making remains centralized and participation is limited to elites. Politics is understood narrowly in relation to institutional politics, and political activities outside of official institutions are viewed as threatening.
Authoritarian households tend to operate with the same emphasis on centralized decision making and on containing threats from the outside. In political, family, and school systems of minimalist participation, then, participation is largely understood in relation to protection, obedience, and compliance. In such situations, there is little incentive for participation and choosing not to participate in decision making in these settings largely amounts to compliance with the existing arrangement of power and control.
Carpentier has explored what a minimalist approach means within the communication industries, arguing that those media systems that have embraced a minimalist approach have envisioned a single, homogeneous public that is to be won over, persuaded, or punished when out of compliance. He notes that minimalist forms of media participation therefore provide a potent support system for institutionalized politics and make it difficult for those deemed “outsiders” to be heard. In minimalist approaches, media professionals keep a strong grip on processes of production and dissemination and, as Carpentier writes, “participation remains unidirectional, articulated as a contribution to the public sphere but often mainly serving the needs and interests of the mainstream media system itself, instrumentalizing and incorporating the activities of participating non-professionals.” This results in the disconnection of the audience from media as well as from other societal fields. Clearly, the minimalist approach to participation aligns with a broadcast media model, in which power is centralized in the hands of the few and non-elites are generally discouraged or barred from access.
In contrast, a maximalist approach to participation, as suggested by the term, seeks to maximize participation on the part of all people. This approach, Carpentier argues, embraces a broadly defined notion of the political, considering many sites of decision making. Moreover, a maximalist approach to participation is concerned with the continuous role of participation in decision making, rather than merely in the election of representatives.
Those who advocate a maximalist approach to participation tend to emphasize communication rights not only in relation to institutionalized politics, but also in relation to a variety of other social realms in which consensus and collaboration are deemed important aspects of collective decision making. Some in the fields of media studies therefore focus on democratizing the media sphere itself.87 Others similarly highlight the importance of community, citizen, and alternative media to overall processes of informing and equipping people for collective decision making.88 A maximalist approach to participation allows for the possibility that participatory actions will bring about change within political systems as well as in arrangements of power and resources.
In the United States, families and schools that embrace a maximalist approach to participation are in minority. In most families, a parent retains primary responsibility for supporting children financially and emotionally, and it is not until children are financially and emotionally independent that arrangements in power relations truly change. But in families as well as in schools and in other settings that aspire to maximalist participation, young people are encouraged to participate in family decision making, and such participation can result in dramatic changes to the ways in which families interact as family members, and the ways in which students participate in the life of their schools and beyond.89
We have observed this same approach in relation to news provided for and with youth. Some youth media programs presume that young people are passive audiences, or understand youthful expression as subjugated under the rights of school administration. In contrast, others envision youth as participants who co-create and distribute news, sometimes with the assistance and financial support of adults. These latter kinds of programs do not “empower” young people so much as they create a space for young people to identify a problem, explore how that problem is constituted in communication, and then provide resources that amplify practices of connective journalism that would otherwise reach only a very small number of peers. It is this amplification that we believe is an essential aspect of the news of the future. We therefore do not advocate that adults view the practices of connective journalism as somehow apart from the context of “adult” life, news, and citizenship, or as something that could survive as developed serendipitously among youthful populations. That kind of unplanned activity can be viewed instead as a first step. In order to truly involve youth in processes that link their concerns with the changing of policies that shape their lives, it is going to take resources and vision. Many youth media programs provide evidence of these kinds of hope-filled activities that can change youthful life trajectories, and they therefore deserve more attention among those who question the future of news and the role of young people, and participatory citizenship, in that future.
Satirical mock news programs and references to fictional narratives seem to lend themselves well to youthful connective journalism practices because young people are able to utilize the sharing of such items as a means of starting a conversation, illustrated by Marc’s quote about news at the very beginning of this chapter. A key part of this conversation rests on the fact that sharing such items communicates something about the person who is doing the sharing. And, since the person receiving the communication indicates agreement with a “like,” retweet, or snap, the item can play a role in reinforcing a shared sense of identity. To the extent that either the sharer or any of the recipients interpret the item through the lens of contemporary political concerns, the communicative act of sharing becomes proto-political because it is interpreted, and hence constructed in shared meaning, by those who participate in the communication. It is not easy to determine whether or not a particular proto-political connective journalism practice is part of a larger political process that leads to action – a subject to which we will return in the next two chapters.
Conclusion
As we argued in the previous chapter, young people who come from low-income and minoritized communities are exactly the people most in need of the kind of investigative journalism that reveals abuses of power that will affect their lives and the lives of their families, peers, and community members. When people take note of the fact that youth are not frequent news consumers, we argue that it’s not that young people do not care about the issues reported, but rather that many seem to feel that most of the mainstream news sources available to them fail to live up to their expectations of what journalism should do, as was discussed in Chapter 3. However, this does not negate the fact that young people deserve to be informed about issues that affect their quality of life.
In this chapter we have argued that maximalist and minimalist participation occurs in how youth are situated in relation to the youth news ecology that surrounds them. Those news efforts produced by adults for youth have often begun from a minimalist participation perspective, focused on protecting youth and preparing them for adulthood in a way that echoes rather than questions the developmental approach to citizenship. These efforts have largely fallen out of favor, as financial models within the legacy media have rendered this approach unsustainable. But, as we have observed, although these efforts may have informed youth of relevant current events in genres that were meant to appeal to youth, they remained at best on the periphery for most young people. Much more familiar to youth were the satirical mock news efforts designed for a young adult rather than an early or mid-adolescent population. Because youth are only peripherally considered a part of this audience, to some extent, even the popular mock news programs largely end up positioning adolescent (and younger) people as outsiders who watch and share the shows. Only a small minority of youth actually create and share their own critiques, although such efforts open spaces enabling young people to envision a journalism with fewer ties to the journalistic authority that they tend to resist or question.
Some youth-oriented media efforts exist within a similarly protectionist and minimalist participatory framework, as school administrators and courts question student rights to free expression. Such a protectionist approach cannot be seen apart from the underfunding of schools that make it necessary for them to serve more frequently as places of containment than as places of encouragement, learning, and empowerment. Other youth media efforts have successfully experimented with a maximalist orientation to participation that is youth-centric and creates a space for young people to find their way into participation. However, as this chapter has pointed out, there is a need for much greater exploration of what maximalist participation for youth could mean.
With a focus on how structural forces enhance or impede youthful participation, we have also highlighted issues beyond the questions of what happens when youth encounter, create, or share news. We argue that if we, as a society, want to see greater engagement of young people in news and in the larger life of our society as engaged citizens, we need to examine the structures that shape and limit youthful life experiences. The future of news for youth is not only about encouraging youth. It is also about partnering with them in rethinking and reimaging a society that better assures human rights for all.
Therefore, in the next chapter, we will discuss how young people embrace connective journalism practices that move beyond simply sharing information within the youth news ecology, to inserting themselves directly into the stories that are unfolding around them. In recent years, with the rise of youth movements related to #BlackLivesMatter, LGBT rights, The DREAM Act, public transportation, or school funding, administration and standardized testing, youth have participated not only in sharing news, but in reshaping how we think of what news is, and how practices like witnessing events and expressing shared outrage factor into the evolution of connective journalism.
* * * * *
