1997-98
ASNE New Media Project
A teen romance.
Like every other newspaper in the Western
world, The Record of Hackensack, N.J., is looking for ways to reacher younger
audiences. This is the story of an alliance with a public school that posed
some interesting complications.
Love at first sight.
For nearly two years, The Record published a Tuesday section, Student
Life. We recruited nearly 100 high school journalists who met at the newspaper
monthly to work with editors. The teens developed cover stories, designed
pages, wrote articles, took photos.
Student Life was an artistic success. But it was a section wrapped in
the wrong product, delivered to a non-targeted audience. Also, it was receiving
limited support and understanding from the advertising department. Meanwhile,
the Internet was becoming a central focus for teens, and our student staff
was encouraging us to concentrate on this medium.
With this in mind, I visited the Academy for the Advancement of Science
and Technology, an extraordinary magnet high school, one mile from The
Record. This institution attracted students from 70 districts throughout
Bergen County. There, I encountered talent and technology that overwhelmed
me.
Two teachers, three students and I brainstormed for a month and developed
the prototype for Teenvoice and called it "in.site." Within three
months, that staff of three had grown to nearly 60 students who were working
on Teenvoice in the classroom, at home, at all hours of the day and evening.
They were given unprecedented access to Record news resources and archives.
As the project evolved in a purely R&D environment, we realized:
• These young journalists were extraordinarily capable and would
be publishing on the Web with or without the newspaper.
• Their grasp of new media technology exceeded that of most, if
not all, professionals just entering the field.
• As teens, they understood their audience better than any adult
journalist at The Record.
OK, what do we do now?
How to harness all this? How to guarantee quality and responsibility
while keeping as hands off as possible for fear of fatally altering the
very essence of the site -- the teens' voice. And how to do all this while
The Record day in and day out covered the county school district in general
and the academy story in particular.
The academy was a big local story because of its technological prowess
and leadership. Additionally, many local districts were becoming increasingly
agitated that the academy was attracting their best and brightest students,
and those students' transportation costs were being paid by local taxpayers.
Would a critical story on the front page anger the schools' superintendent
and sabotage the project? Would the paper be perceived as engaging in a
conflict of interest by getting too close to an institution it must cover?
These were difficult questions that could seem insurmountable. On the
other hand, the Web was exploding around us and schools, towns, hospitals,
county departments all were becoming instant publishers -- offering not
only news and information about their communities, but also ways to connect
their users -- many of The Record's traditional readers -- to local resources
and services.
The Teenvoice project -- indeed the business -- remains a daily work
in progress. Landmines exist partnering with our communities. We have initiatives
with parents, houses of worship, health agencies, public employment services,
etc., but the risks of avoiding engagement are even more daunting as the
web evolves around us.
How to keep love alive.
Here are some steps we have taken:
1) As editor, I left the newsroom to create an entirely new and
separate vice presidency dedicated to empowering our diverse communities
- not only to publish on line, but also to connect to The Record and its
many weekly and niche products. In doing so, these communities also can
be connected to each other.
2) The newsroom is not directly involved in these ventures. Stories
over the last 18 months have remained objective and replete with critics'
comments. We talk openly and constantly to our community partners about
the firewalls, and both parties understand there may be necessarily rocky
moments.
3) We have created a year-long and unique electronic journalism
curriculum taught formally at the academy to every staff member of Teenvoice.
Issues from libel to ethics are paramount. And this project now is closely
connnected with the Schools to Work program, the same public-private initiative
used by The Record to train and recruit more traditional employees such
as press operators. Currently, we are developing this curriculum to be
taught interactively to student correspondents throughout North Jersey,
via television and the Net.
Meanwhile, Teenvoice has grown exponentially. It represents more than
5,000 hours of development by nearly 100 teens. As the product evolves,
we realize that the teen staff is creating turn-key sites that can resonate
for teens anywhere in the country and provide newspapers with tools and
solutions to connect to their schools and young readers. Part of our responsibility
is to share these possibilities and design cost-effective modules for newspapers
keen on tapping into the teen audience as well as their $100-billion-plus
consumer market.
The core Teenvoice staff manages nearly a dozen specific worlds, from
auto to fashion, from colleges to entertainment. Soon, we will launch a
Teen Health Net, which is a partnership among The Record, the academy and
the county health department.
Love is in the air.
A score of other high schools have formally aligned with the project
and are contributing content directly to the site. More districts are joining
weekly. The original youth advisory board now concentrates its work on
the Web and works from their homes and classrooms across the region.
The Teenvoice staff has developed dozens of templates and self-publishing
tools that let teens who know little if anything about webbing and HTML
publish directly to the site.
While the curriculum teaches the teens, the teens frankly are contributing
more, especially to our professional understanding of the new media world.
Their skills in this realm are extraordinary. And they represent our future
workforce as the 21st century begins.
But, those talents go beyond ease with virtual reality and videostreaming.
They understand how to collaborate, how to work over long distances (they
rarely work in the same place at the same time), and how to make news part
of a participatory environment that engages the reader as an active partner.
And, while the newsroom remains independent from Teenvoice, there are
opportunities for editors and reporters to gain valuable insight from the
venture. They have a unique window into the lives, tastes and needs of
teens, who number 50,000 in Bergen County alone.
How the newsroom collectively and independently takes advantage of this
resource and how the traditional newspaper reflects teen interests and
needs in the daily pages are challenges for editors, reporters, the advertising
staff and the marketing department.
And a final lesson.
Meanwhile, we continue to learn together and reinvent ourselves through
Teenvoice. One conclusion of note: These same teens will be gravitating
to the online, interactive environments embodied by Teenvoice when they
become adults. Not because they are turned off by newspapers, but because
they can be so much more empowered by the news through this new medium.
Just ask them.
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