Print Media by and for Teens

[A White Paper written for the Open Society Institute, February 2004,
as background for a conference of OSI Youth Media Grantees.]

By Keith Hefner

History and Context (1960-present)

Prior to the 1960s, "youth media" meant the official school newspaper. Students in the top English tracks wrote the articles and served as editors. Most papers consciously mimicked uncontroversial subjects and staid layout of the local daily newspaper.

During the 1960s, however, many school newspaper editors decided that writing about the latest football game or prom queen was not enough. They clamored to cover the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, student rights, and other social issues. School administrators refused to let them. One result was that thousands of irreverent high school underground newspapers blossomed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Another was that traditional high school papers began to seem irrelevant. Meanwhile, budget cuts and white flight from urban schools also took a toll on the high school press.

In 1974, the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial launched a two-year study of the problems facing scholastic journalism. They found that the high school press was characterized by censorship, racism, elitism, and mediocrity. Sister Ann Heintz, a newspaper adviser at a Chicago Catholic high school, was one of the study's chief investigators and an advocate for youth voices and journalism education. She also was inspired by the Foxfire teen journalism program. During the 1970s, Foxfire produced a series of teen-written books that celebrated the life and lore of backcountry Georgia. The books became national best sellers.

After issuing its final report, called Captive Voices, the RFK Memorial put its money where its mouth was: it provided funding to help Sr. Ann launch New Expression, a citywide paper by and for Chicago teens. As an independent paper, New Expression was not subject to censorship by a single school principal. Sr. Ann was also free to recruit a diverse group of writers, not just AP English students. At the same time, Sr. Ann did not like the shrill advocacy and raw language of underground press. She wanted New Expression to conform to traditional journalistic standards of fairness and objectivity.

Her idea of combining the independence and diversity of voices found in the underground press with the journalistic responsibility of the traditional press-with teen writers-had never been tried before.

New Expression was a quick success with teens and funders. In addition to providing rigorous training to a diverse group of writers, Sr. Ann had three other goals. One was to prepare more minority youth for careers in journalism. Another was to investigate stories that the adult media would probably overlook and oversimplify, because they aren't close enough to teen experiences. (New Expression's writers investigated teen prostitution in an early issue.) The third was to provide teen readers a realistic reflection of their lives and experiences to counteract the stereotypes so often found in the adult media.

Sr. Ann's philosophy and approach were contagious. Within a few years papers popped up in New York, Delaware, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, DC, Boston, Atlanta, Denver, and in several smaller cities. Most of them were based on the Chicago model. Bob Clampitt also founded Children's Express, a journalism program for younger children, in the late 1970s. And in the early 1980s an entrepreneur launched a glossy for profit magazine written by teens called Highwire.

Since then, social entrepreneurs have launched more than 50 citywide teen magazines. About a dozen are still publishing. They are tabloids or magazine-size, with frequencies of 4-8 issues a year. Most of the magazines are published by independent nonprofits, but some are part of larger organizations. The magazines that folded typically lasted a couple years, but failed to attract enough funding, develop good distribution systems, or find and keep strong editors and directors.

During the 1990s there were several innovations in the youth media field. On the nonprofit side, many people started magazines aimed at specialized audiences, like teens in foster care or juvenile jails, or teens who wanted advice about sex and relationships. On the for profit side, dozens of daily newspapers created "youth pages" to try to win back younger readers. Many of them solicited some teen-written material. Daily papers in a few cities-Hartford and Seattle, for example-created separate teen magazines or inserts. Several commercial magazine publishers launched teen versions of their adult product (e.g. Cosmo Girl, Teen People, Teen Vogue, Time for Kids, Wall Street Journal Classroom Edition).

The strongest trend in independent teen print journalism is still the urban, citywide magazine. Another trend is specialized publications for special population or interest groups. The daily newspaper "teen page" model is widespread, but lacks the compelling authenticity of stand-alone teen newspapers and magazines. Teen versions of major magazines rarely address the issues of urban and marginalized youth.

Challenges

Growing competition
During the 1970s and early 1980s, teen-written magazines were almost the only place where teens could read the voices of their peers and see accurate reflections of their experiences. Today, however, teen-written magazines no longer have a corner on this market. Teens can find stories that speak to them in many different places, including:

The Web: Just 10 years ago, if a gay teen, a recent immigrant, or a teen in foster care wanted to find stories that spoke to their experience, their best bet was likely to be a teen-written magazine. Today, almost any teen with web access can find stories (or at least like-minded peers) that speak to his or her experience and identity. Teens can also find answers to important questions on self-help sites run by groups like Panned Parenthood, and many can even join electronic conversations through sites like Live Journal.

Video: Teens increasingly expect stories to be told in visual form, and video has become so cheap that teens can easily make their own videos. Since at least the mid-1980s, youth video has paralleled youth magazines as a forum for youth voices. However, videographers have had a much harder time finding large audiences. The web may change that.

Other media: Magazines: Teen versions of adult magazines focus mostly on celebrities and fashion, but many of them occasionally offer authentic first person stories that teens used to find only in independent youth media. Books: In the past 20 years, young adult novels have increasingly focused on serious topics like identity, sexuality, loss, and other issues that are staples in youth magazines. Pop Culture: MTV, Jerry Springer, Reality TV, and rap all speak to teens and often purport to offer authentic personal stories.

In short, the competition for youth readers is much more intense than it was 10 or 20 years ago, and youth media can no longer assume that the novelty of teens telling their own stories will guarantee an audience.

Other Challenges (new and perennial)

Finding readers: Publishing an article is an act of faith that presumes there will be someone with the interest, inclination, time, and skill to read it. Interest, inclination, and time for reading are being crowded out by other sources of entertainment and information. Furthermore, many youth-written publications are read in school. However, prescribed curricula and the growing emphasis on standardized testing is limiting opportunities to use supplementary materials.

Recruiting and training quality adult staff: Youth media is a low prestige, low paying, low visibility field, which, paradoxically, requires highly skilled staff. It is very difficult to find staff who have strong journalism and youth development skills, and very expensive to train them.

High cost of creating quality stories: Counting staff time, production expenses, and overhead, it costs $2,000-$4,000 to help a teen to write, edit, print, and distribute a high-quality story in a print magazine to 100,000 readers.

Relatively high cost of materials and distribution: Teen magazines are expensive to print and distribute, and the economies of scale are not very large because as circulation increases, so do costs.

Perception of callowness: It is very, very difficult to get adults to take teen writing seriously. "Teen writing" is practically synonymous with callowness, usually for good reason. To reach larger audiences, quality youth media must find ways to distinguish itself from other teen writing.

The demand for evaluation: Scientifically sound evaluations of the impact of youth media would be fabulously expensive. Unlike, say, teen pregnancy prevention programs, which have one easily measurable outcome variable, youth media projects have scores of potentially significant outcome variables for both participants and readers. Youth media programs need to find ways to demonstrate their effectiveness that will satisfy funders.

Increased scrutiny of cost/client served: Youth media work is extremely labor-intensive. Adult professionals work with relatively small groups of teens. The media they produce has the potential to impact large numbers of their peers, but funders are often interested only in the number of teens who receive direct services.

Opportunities

Reaching specialized audiences: Most of the new print media projects of the past 10 years are targeted at narrow audiences-especially the most marginalized and voiceless youth, such as teens in foster care or the juvenile justice system. Citywide teen magazines also have become more focused on teens facing especially difficult challenges, such as homelessness, rape and sexual abuse, loss, and adapting to American life as an immigrant. These are audiences that will never be well served by commercial media. They need youth media to get their stories told.

Reaching youth in new settings: As it becomes more difficult to reach teens in regular school classes, youth publications need to find new settings where its stories have special value, such as juvenile prisons, foster care independent living classes, conflict resolution programs, bereavement groups, after school programs, and self-help groups for substance abusers, sexual abuse survivors, etc. This will involve identifying the settings, creating guides for how to use the stories, and marketing them.

The Web: The web has tremendous potential to help teen magazines find new audiences for their stories.

Collaborations: A foster care magazine in Seattle is distributed as an insert in another local publication. A magazine by tenants in Chicago public housing projects includes teens' stories. A public health project in California's central coast region publishes a teen magazine as part of a teen health and pregnancy prevention intervention, and the teen-written Sex, etc. newsletter is produced under the auspices of a family life program at Rutgers University. The stories that originally appear in youth magazines are often reprinted in books and websites, used by advocates, and sometimes adapted for video. Each of these collaborations helps broaden the reach of teen voices.

—Serving community: Community-based teen written magazines provide coverage of local teens' stories in ways that the web or national teen magazines cannot.

—Promoting reflection: Print (including print on the web) is, obviously, the only media based on reading, where the user controls the speed at which the facts, ideas and emotions are consumed. Only in print can the media consumer easily revisit complicated or unclear ideas, circle and underline them for further review or sharing with others, argue with the text in the margins, and check back to see whether one's initial perception conforms to what was actually presented. Print's special ability to facilitate reflective thought is one of its greatest strengths.

Conclusion

What do we mean by independent youth media? What are we trying to achieve? How is independent youth media different from what's already out there? The official high school press meets a need in the suburban areas where it still exists. The youth versions of adult magazines and newspapers provide lots of teen friendly information (e.g., Upfront magazine, which is published by Scholastic and The New York Times) and entertainment (Teen People, etc.). Magazine/websites like Youth Noise and Teen Ink offer middle class kids a chance to make their voices heard. And Planned Parenthood and other Web sites offer good self-help information.

What is uniquely important about independent youth media of the kind that has been supported by the Open Society Institute is that it focuses on serving the most marginalized, most voiceless youth in the society-and making those voices heard by their peers and by significant adults. Their stories will never be regularly heard or covered in commercial media, or even in most high school papers, teen websites, 'zines, or any other forum. They need intensive, costly training to learn the skills they need to make their voices heard. They and the communities they live in lack the resources to launch their own media.

By focusing on the most marginalized youth, by organizing our efforts to reach them in settings where they will actually read our publications, and by making their stories accessible on the Web, we can help teens learn new skills, provide an accurate, affirming reflection of their lives, and promote justice.