By Anais Froberg-Martinez & Margarita Rosales Alarcon, ThreeSixty Youth Leadership Board
Despite being home to the New York Times and possessing a “story in every face and on every corner,” high school journalists in New York City are barely getting the crust of what their city has to offer. The NYC Youth Journalism Coalition (YJC) works to change this. In early May, ThreeSixty’s Youth Leadership Board had the opportunity to meet them and take notes.
In 2021-2022, Geanne Belton of Baruch College conducted a survey about student journalism that yielded jarring results. Only 25% of NYC high schools had a student newspaper. The gap between NYC’s thriving professional journalism scene and the lack of it in public high schools caused The Bell, which trains high school students in audio reporting, to create the Youth Journalism Coalition in the fall of 2022 with partners
The coalition’s hard work was rewarded. They gained nationwide attention and achieved local success. Advocates and supporters filled city hall for “J-Day” on April 18, 2024 to demand increased city support for equal access to student journalism and introduce a city resolution. More recently, YJC students met with NYC city representatives to highlight their Journalism for All Initiative, which provides selected high schools three years of direct support to kickstart student journalism programs.
One of the YJC student leaders, Camila Sosa, a senior at Uncommon Collegiate Charter High School, let us in on what it took them to get Journalism for All (J4A) started: “[it] involved email sending, setting up meetings with council members… we were doing a lot of meetings, like giving presentations on what the J4A would bring.”
Liza Greenberg, a senior at Bronx High School of Science, was one of the four YJC student leaders on the selection committee for the first round of applications. “We reviewed all the applications that the different schools sent in, and we could only choose 30 schools,” she said. YJC received nearly double the number of applications that they could accept. The final cohort is geographically diverse and comprised of schools who demonstrated strong support for student voice but lacked the resources to launch a journalism program alone.
On May 3, ThreeSixty Journalism’s Youth Leadership Board members, all high school students from Minnesota, had the opportunity to meet and have dinner with YJC during a trip to New York City. We were given advice: “whenever you see an opportunity, it doesn’t matter if it looks so dull…you can’t let people around you discourage you not to do it.”
While our organizations’ goals differ slightly by method, we are united in our aims for more representative newsrooms. ThreeSixty aims to promote diversity in local Minnesotan newsrooms through student opportunities and direct programming. The Youth Journalism Coalition goes upstream to advocate for student access to journalism education. Moreover, our groups quickly bonded over the same motivations for storytelling. For Natalie Viderman, a student at Hunter College High School, journalism gives her “something that can blend my love for talking and my love for writing… and also my love for current events.”
Even after the hour-long dinner was up, our two groups clearly looked through our multifaceted experiences in journalism and found a common struggle. We were all teens in a changing world that used media against us: adults lament our poor news literacy as teenagers, and it reinforces a stereotype about what news means. However, both our organizations also see journalism as a powerful tool that can empower high schoolers to interrupt this cycle and make youth voices heard.
Although we are in different circumstances, meeting YJC made us think hard about how students could impact the state of news in Minnesota. Beyond just accepting opportunities given to us, we can be the advocates to bridge the gap between student journalism and the bigger, daily struggles.
For example, ThreeSixty could take our goal of promoting diversity a step further and engage in advocacy that proves diversity is an essential part of journalism–not a frivolous means of appealing to Gen-Z that Minnesotan news companies can attach to their values. Ultimately, journalism across the globe has always been about stories on how culture is shifting, changing, losing, and winning. It’s time for the new generation to highlight theirs.
ThreeSixty’s Youth Leadership Board wants to also start working on advocating for the youth in Minnesota. We want to grow and build our skills as journalists since there are still many things we hope to accomplish on our journey as young adults. We aren’t sure where we will be in a year, but we hope to be able to look back and see how much we’ve achieved.
