\u201cIt\u2019s one thing to make your own story and have it played on your local station, but to have it noticed by this national organization is really impressive,\u201d said Ruby Rosenberg, a 17-year-old high school senior in Oakland, California. Rosenberg attends Media Enterprise Alliance<\/a> (MEA), an extracurricular video program open to all Oakland high school students. Participants have the option of working on stories for PBS.<\/p>\n The biggest benefit of the relationship with PBS \u201cis the legitimacy and motivation it gives to a student like Ruby,\u201d said Jake Schoneker, program director at MEA. For teenage reporters, audience is typically limited to the handful of people who pick up a school newspaper or tune into a public access channel. SRL reporters are driven by the prospect of their hard work being watched by a million viewers<\/a>.<\/p>\n At a Student Reporting Lab in Oakland, Ca., students can pitch videos to PBS.<\/p><\/div>\n The veteran reporters who lead the SRL program can\u2019t personally visit each site, but they regularly video chat with the young journalists to guide them through the production process, and they field text messages late into the night. At many sites, the youth are also paired with a staff mentor from a local PBS station.<\/p>\n The relationships between PBS and each SRL site vary. Sometimes the SRL is a dedicated class at a school that uses a video reporting curriculum<\/a> developed by PBS. In other cases, it\u2019s an optional unit in an afterschool program.\u00a0At one high school in North Dakota<\/a>, a chemistry teacher with no media experience applied to host an SRL so her students could start telling science stories. PBS provides equipment stipends for programs that need it, but often the staff simply lends additional professional expertise to established youth media programs.<\/p>\n The SRL directors demand an extraordinary level of professionalism, which lets the students know they\u2019re taken seriously, said Chris Sloan, an English teacher at Judge Memorial Catholic High School in Salt Lake City, Utah. The young producers are more likely to be interested in current events when they have the opportunity to add\u2014or hear their peers\u2019\u2014perspectives, explained Sloan, whose new media class is an SRL.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s one thing to watch a news show and watch adults talking to you,\u201d said Thaisi Da Silva, SRL director. \u201cIt\u2019s another to see the kid in your English class talking [on TV] about what\u2019s going on in Ferguson. The kids perk up and all of a sudden they start to care when they see the youth voices respected.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s this platform and power\u2014and undoubtedly the opportunity to get their hands on cool cameras\u2014that attract teens, including those who might not respond to more traditional education models. Rosenberg said many of her peers who are not engaged by the traditional classroom curriculum have become quite passionate about their media projects, something she sees as evidence that more technology is needed in classrooms.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of brilliant people that aren\u2019t academically oriented,\u201d she said. \u201cTechnology in general really needs to be promoted in schools, and it\u2019s through programs like this that students are able to learn these things.\u201d<\/p>\n Rosenberg\u2019s current project looks at school safety measures in her district. After the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, PBS announced that this year\u2019s SRL students should pitch stories on school safety. In addition to an annual theme, the SRL headquarters sends out \u201cRapid Response\u201d questions on an issue du jour. SRL reporters put together short pieces, which PBS then edits into a story for broadcast.<\/p>\n The PBS label lends credibility to student reporters who may typically have trouble securing an interview with, say, a school administrator. But PBS also benefits from the students\u2019 unique access to their peers.<\/p>\n \u201cThey always come up with an angle you wouldn\u2019t hear from an adult,\u201d Da Silva said. \u201cWhat\u2019s really fascinating is they\u2019re able to get their colleagues [peers] to open up at an intimate level.\u201d<\/p>\n SRL is only in its fourth year, but many alumni have scored prestigious journalism internships or are applying to film school. At the very least, most of the participants now watch the news.<\/p>\n \u201cEducation needs more partnerships like this,\u201d Sloan said. \u201cMainstream media needs more consumers, and kids need information.\u201d<\/p>\n Top Photo: Students\u00a0at Media Enterprise Alliance, a Student Reporting Lab in Oakland Ca. The dangers of professional football dominated headlines last year when thousands of athletes brought a lawsuit against the National Football League for mishandling concussion claims. Broadcasters with the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) wondered: How does this issue play out on high school fields? The network sent dozens of student reporters to do some digging, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":8102,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8,395],"tags":[481,393,480,331],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8099"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8099"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8099\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8261,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8099\/revisions\/8261"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8102"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"At](\"https:\/\/educatorinnovator.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/MEA-12.jpg\")
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\nPhotos\/ Natalie Orenstein<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"