Youth Media and Its Global Digital Afterlife

Abstract

As a researcher working at the intersection of youth, learning and media culture, I probably should have anticipated the extent to which digital developments have redefined our fields of study, research relationships, conceptual frameworks and strategies of analysis. Yet evidence of these changes took me by surprise when I was working on a book about youth media and learning (Soep and Chavez, 2010). My ethnographic site was Youth Radio, an organization where I play a dual role, as both participant — Senior Producer in the youth-driven newsroom — and researcher. I’d been associated with Youth Radio for eight years or so. At the time, I was reworking a chapter called ‘Converged Literacy’, about the new learning demands and opportunities created when young people produce media reaching massive audiences. In the chapter, I discussed a radio story a teenaged Youth Radio reporter, Finnegan Hamill, had produced called Emails from Kosovo, which excerpted his correspondence with a girl living in Kosovo just as war was breaking out in that region. The story turned out to be huge. It ran as an eight-part series on National Public Radio, was quoted verbatim by the then president Bill Clinton and subsequently won the prestigious Alfred I. DuPont award for journalistic excellence. All this attention and impact turned Finnegan into a public figure.