My First Ward

2008-04-02T10:00:00.002-05:00

Spring 08 Portraits (continued)

2008-03-24T20:29:00.010-05:00

Chris by Ameera

Dawan by Bobby

Maggie self portrait

Monique by Bobby

Qayshanta by Ameera

Spring 08 Student Portraits

2008-03-18T16:45:00.010-05:00

Bobby, by Dawan

Ameera, by Chris

Aaniyaha, by Bobby

March 12th, 2008

2008-03-18T16:44:00.000-05:00

NEW SESSION STARTS TODAY!!!!

The Corner Mural Project

2008-01-14T18:30:00.000-06:00

Our latest entry utilizes youth photography, audio documentary and
local hip hop production to tell the story of the Corner, a renovation
project taking place at the intersection of Wilkes and Rangeline. See
the pictures and hear the voices of First Ward residents as they
describe this development within their neighborhood. This event resulted from collaboration between the Corner Action Committee and the art literacy group Voices from the Corner.

Few photos, again.

2007-12-20T10:35:00.001-06:00

Check out "A few photos from our first sessions," from the month of October. We've updated that link to include not only the pictures, but a local hip hop instrumental as well, as accompaniment to audio documentary from the First Ward. These three elements, pictures taken by First Ward kids, audio collected in the First Ward and hip hop from Columbia, comprise the three themes of our Network. Enjoy!

Ragtag on Tuesday!!

2007-12-13T15:37:00.001-06:00

New Media Network is holding our winter exhibition of our students' work at Ragtag Cinemacafé on Tuesday, December 18th from 5:15-7:00pm. Ragtag is located at 23 N. 10th St. in downtown Columbia. Come and check it out!

Pictures by Micheal, "Halloween at Blind Boone"

2007-11-07T20:04:00.001-06:00

Halloween

2007-11-05T14:21:00.000-06:00

Halloween! Micheal took pictures at the Blind Boone party and will edit them for our next NMN session. Tanika and Micheal got to take cameras home for the week.

A few photos from the first sessions

2007-10-31T00:03:00.001-05:00

A few of our participants in the NMN Fall Session 2007

2007-10-09T12:35:00.001-05:00

First Day of Fall Session 2007

2007-10-03T15:52:00.000-05:00

First Day of Fall Session 2007. Kids are coming from Douglass to join in today.

Launching youth voices

2007-09-26T08:39:00.000-05:00

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.

The First Session of New Media Network

2007-09-19T01:28:00.000-05:00

March of 2007 marked the launching of the first session of New Media
Network. For eight weeks 12 students photographed the moments from
their daily lives and began to take audio recordings. At the end of May
their work was displayed at Ragtag Cinemacafe. Each participant chose
three photos for display.

New Media Network: Combining the Oldest and Newest Forms of Media

2007-09-18T22:55:00.000-05:00

On August 1st, 1981, music, media, and the entire world of entertainment were forever altered with the debut of Music Television, or MTV. The video that heralded the emergence of this media takeover was “Video Killed the Radio Star,” a new wave track by the Buggles that tells the story of a performer whose craft is outmoded by the introduction of new technology.

The creators and co-directors of the New Media Network, Robbin Williams and Holly Hobbs, would contend that now––26 years after the birth of MTV––youth-oriented media has moved even further forward, in ways that would have been unimaginable in 1981. Due in part to the increasingly low cost of equipment and training, one of these changes is a greater involvement of non-professionals and young people in the development of media.

This is, in essence, the central idea behind the New Media Network. NMN’s mission is to incorporate the perspectives of youth from Columbia’s First Ward (most often described by mainstream media as a largely poor and largely African American community) into an interactive and ongoing process of digital storytelling. In contrast with traditional news media formats, however, youth participants will not be recording video. While NMN enthusiastically supports integral community resources like CAT3 (Columbia Access Television) and Ragtag Cinemacafé––of which NMN is a sister organization––an NMN contribution to our local community television station would vary somewhat from standard video news programming (hence the reference to “new media” in the organization’s name).

This stems directly from the idea that, if restricted from videography and encouraged to create storylines using various audio pieces and still photography, students will be forced to conceptualize their projects differently from the video-oriented visual culture that predominates the modern cultural landscape. Instead, participants in NMN will collect and create audio recordings to pair with still digital photography in whatever fashion they prefer, with one general guideline: the opinions expressed, as well as the written and audio journalistic and musical compositions that may accompany these works, must be original and must be community-oriented.

“Community oriented” is the wording NMN uses to describe what they view as a bottom-up, community-controlled development project for the First Ward; through what they term “digital storytelling” (building upon the idea of oral storytelling as the oldest form of media), students create storylines that are from the community, about the community, and for the community of the First Ward. As current media trends associate youth in the First Ward with crime, drugs, and poverty, NMN wants to encourage the greater community to view First Ward youth as an important resource, rather than a problem, by giving those young people a chance to vocalize their own realities and perspectives.

The first eight-week session of the New Media Network took place March through May 2007 at the Blind Boone Community Center. Mostly operating from a generous donation from the Downtown Optimist Club, NMN held sessions after school twice a week for younger students who came to the Blind Boone Center for tutoring. During those eight weeks, 12 students learned skills in digital photography, composition, and post-production and editing. Students also began working with audio recorders, on loan from the University of Missouri ASSET office, to talk about issues that were important to them, to record hip hop freestyles, and to interview other community members at the Blind Boone Center.

The culminating event, however, focused specifically on photography: students selected three photographs to be framed, which were then displayed at a community reception at Ragtag Cinemacafé. (The event was generously sponsored by the City of Columbia Office of Cultural Affairs and 89.5FM KOPN.) Two of these framed and enlarged photographs were returned to the students themselves; the others remain on permanent display at the Blind Boone Community Center. Starting out with these small but important goals in mind, starting October 1st, 2007, the Network will more formally incorporate “new media” into its activities when the majority of the students involved in the first session––along with other students new to NMN––return to build on the audio recording work that they did last spring.

MTV debuted in a world without the Internet. Its automatic success can be accredited largely to the extent to which it resonated with young people that were, otherwise, without a common forum for appreciation of the music in which they shared a mutual interest, and largely without a voice within mainstream media. In an era when Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube allow people the chance to connect, create virtual profiles, and select entertainment with more autonomy than ever before, further incorporating technology and a strong public voice into local news coverage is long overdue. And while it may be some time before the media pieces produced by participants in the New Media Network challenge the popularity of music video culture, giving young people that are marginalized by the varying intersecting factors of race and class the chance to develop their own voices within the context of local media is an integral step towards improving our community.

The New Media Network is still accepting students for their upcoming fall session. For more information about participating, volunteering, or donating, go to http://www.newmedianetwork.us.