Launching youth voices

On October 3rd, the New Media Network will launch their fall session at the J. W. Blind Boone Community Center in Columbia. Starting on October 3rd and meeting each Wednesday until December, younger students (ages 9-13) will meet from 4pm to 6pm, while older students (ages 14-18) will meet from 6-8pm in the Blind Boone computer lab to learn skills in digital photography, editing, and audio recording. Through the teaching of skills in digital media, the New Media Network hopes to encourage students to tell stories about their community, with their own voices and from their own perspectives. During this upcoming session, NMN will be aided by a new aspect to the program––a website and accompanying blog called My First Ward, a project facilitated by the University of Missouri School of Journalism’s online community newspaper, MyMissourian. With the help of this new online, interactive project, students will be able to upload photos, create discussion forums, post audio recordings and music, and publish stories about community issues of importance to them.

In a community like the First Ward, where so many stories covered in the mainstream media have to do with drugs, gangs, and violence, a project like My First Ward, which focuses on community stories produced by the young people themselves, becomes all the more important. New Media Network’s integration of the My First Ward project not only attempts to address issues of the Digital Divide and inequitable access to resources but simultaneously seeks to strengthen and extend the relationship between the University and its neighboring communities. In the contemporary political climate, with the injustices of the Jena 6 dominating the media and the 50-year anniversary of the Little Rock Nine commemorated, the New Media Network hopes to encourage political awareness of community issues on the local level by facilitating a space for youth-controlled digital media.