20 Years of Youth-made Media

Looking for strong examples of youth media and journalism projects? Check out two decades-worth of work carried out by Mindy Faber, founding director of OpenYouth Networks. OYN is a program based at Columbia College Chicago. Faber has been working with urban youth since the 90’s and hopes the 65+ videos currently posted on her Vimeo channel can be used as samples and inspirations for teachers and youth.

The videos are a diverse documentation of life, from youth in urban environments to Faber’s own family and friends—all spoken in their own words. The collection features interviews, youth-produced narratives and stories of social change covering a wide spectrum of issues that affect the lives of middle and high school students.

Faber hopes the footage will be of interest to anyone involved with the future of youth media and journalism. Some of her projects can be found here:

Part 3 of Resolutions: A Digital Dialogue: This video was made by Evanston Township High School students and interweaves footage shot from when the students shadowed each other at one another’s schools, as well as clips from a 3-hour discussion that took place in the TV studio at ETHS.

 Mi Nobre: by Astrid Maldonado, a 17 year Latina student who participated in a Global Youth Video Machete workshop. The video was presented at the National Endowment for the Humanities annual conference as a example of multicultural and digital learning in 2003.

Race Is, Race Ain't, Class is, Class Ain't: This mockumentary was made by youth in collaboration with video artist, Mindy Faber in 1999. Miranda July wrote an essay about it that was published in Felix in the early 2000s.

For more of Mindy's videos visit:

OpenYouth Media
Fractured Fairytales: Movies made by middle school students
An archival site featuring videos interviews with urban youth
Narrative works by high school youth

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Listening Across Borders

We all know that young people are the so-called "early adopters" of new technologies, but the question remains in student media circles about how to best harness these innovations to enhance youth communication efforts. The answer also might shed some light on how to attract bright young people in the professional news media.

A recent MTF-funded proejct tackled the issue head-on with YouthLAB, an intense two-week summer program that gathered 20 teens from Barbados and Chicago "together in a virtual space to create global exchange using peer-to-peer networks and other tools of participatory media." The project hatched dozens of youth-produced videos, Skype chats and mash-ups.

You can read all about the project and lessons learned for the youth media field in a new Youth Media Reporter piece by Open Youth Networks director Mindy Faber (http://www.youthmediareporter.org/2007/11/listening_across_borders_creat.html). Better yet, you can check-out the teens work yourself at the Youth Lab Web site (http://youthlab.net/).

Interested in youth media? You can sign up for a free subcription to Youth Media Reporter on its site, http://www.youthmediareporter.org/.

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