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Gangs, drugs, street racing, bullying, video game addiction. These are the typical negative headlines we associate with today’s youth. It’s really no wonder why young people disengage from a media that reinforces negative stereotypes and treats them as an entity to be seen, observed, critiqued but not heard. One of the things I’ve always told writing students is “if you don’t tell your own story, others will tell it for you – and it likely won’t be a very good story.” But give them tools, training and a forum and you’re going to hear the real stories. Take 16 year old Charlotte Lytton, who writes about discrimination in the workplace in Today’s Guardian:

“When are we supposed to learn all of these additional skills for the world of work? From reading the papers, it seems pupils are working their socks off at school to be met with disgruntled employers who sack them because they turn up for work five minutes late or their shirt isn’t tucked in. After a six-hour school day that can sometimes include double history and mathematics, when do they expect kids to learn the protocol of the work place?”

Lyton is among the 2,500 youth who have taken part in UK based Headliners, which has provided journalism training and a space to speak for young people aged 8 to 19 since 1994. While youth media projects aren’t new, web2.0 technologies and trends have played an important role in changing attitudes about authority, access and equity and enabled those excluded by traditional barriers to broadcast their voice via blogging, tagging, RSS and social media. In my article Linked out: blogging, equality and the Future (Mindjack 2004), danah boyd and others I spoke to argued that technological access isn’t enough if it isn’t scaffolded with the time, empowerment and skills required to feel entitled to a voice. Projects like Headliners is groundbreaking because they compliment emerging participatory media tools with access to the more elusive hard and soft skills necessary to bridge the digital divide between isolated , narrow-cast echo chambers and rich, broad-cast networks.

Further reading: Links to youth journalism programs (via Headlines)