They’re members of the first class of the West Bronx Youth Journalism Initiative, a new program designed to expose Bronx high school students to journalism and teach them basic reporting skills – as well as to give the young people a voice. “From what we were hearing, not a lot of high schools in the Bronx had student papers,” said James Fergusson, the Initiative's program coordinator, as well as editor of the Mount Hope Monitor. “So you have all these potentially great reporters not getting a chance to do it.”
(For more on the decline of student newspapers in New York City, see Black And White And Forgotten All Over?, City Limits Weekly #604, Sept. 10, 2007.)
Last week, students were busy at work on their last projects of the term, from a photo essay about Jerome Avenue to a look at the first Christian hip-hop concert in the metro New York area, and even editorials in support of the various presidential candidates. The pieces will be published in the May issue of “Bronx Youth Heard,” a new English/Spanish supplement that appears in the three papers of the Bronx News Network: the Norwood News, the Highbridge Horizon and the Mount Hope Monitor, which have a combined circulation of about 25,000.
“Newspapers can often be dry and formulaic,” said Fergusson. “We wanted to inject some different voices in there.” He said he’s gotten good initial feedback from the community on the first issue, which ran in April, and has plans for two more issues in the fall. After that, “Bronx Youth Heard” will become a quarterly publication.
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Many students expressed pride and excitement at seeing their name and picture next to their work in the first issue. “It was, like, amazing,” said 16-year-old Daniel Silvera, a student at the Community School for Social Justice, who wrote about the need for a public middle school in Highbridge. “I gave the paper to people in school, in church. They said now I’m famous.”
The group of a dozen students – who had to apply to the program, and began meeting in February – gets together every Wednesday afternoon in a residential building owned by the Mount Hope Housing Company, a local nonprofit that provides not only classroom space but also laptops and an office for Fergusson. The initiative itself is funded through a grant from the New York Foundation, and run by Mosholu Preservation Corporation (MPC), a Bronx-based nonprofit that also operates the West Bronx News Network.
MPC president Dart Westphal, who spoke to the class last week, sees the youth journalism initiative as an extension of his organization’s other efforts to promote community journalism in the Bronx. It was about 20 years ago that MPC started to wonder, “How do you have a viable, livable neighborhood without just fixing up the buildings?” he said. The answer: “Let’s start a newspaper.” Westphal thinks local news strengthens civic engagement and makes for a better community overall, but had been missing from the neighborhoods of the West Bronx for many years.
