Christine, managing editor, age 17
At any one time, Y-Press has two or three managing editors that stay on top of what Y-Press is doing, know what stories are going to be coming out in The Indianapolis Star, and provide help and guidance to younger Y-Pressers.
Christine just stepped down from being a managing editor, a role three Y-Pressers hold for six months. Here she describes the story development process from start to finish.
Storyboard
The process begins with storyboard. Storyboard happens once a month, usually the first Thursday, for an hour and a half. This is a time for Y-Press members to gather together and bring in story ideas and present them to the rest of the board. We either pass them, fail them, or research them. The managing editors guide the conversation, introduce the guest (we always have one guest from the community), and make sure it all runs smoothly.
We have about 7 or 8 stories presented at any storyboard meeting. Lots of times, kids have first filled out a “story roadmap,” a handout that helps younger kids—actually Y-Pressers of all ages—figure out their story, like their angle or the questions they need to ask. Most of the stories get passed or sent back for more research. If something big has just happened, students will bring in lots of story ideas—though they are usually different than the news, because every Y-Press article has to have a kid angle.
Lots of times a kid will bring in a story idea and it’s a story we already did a year or two before. We’ll tend to fail those stories, because we don’t want to repeat a story that we have already covered. But say the story was first done 10 years ago. Well, we now have a new generation and a lot has changed. There are some topics that are constants, like sex among teens. We don’t do that every year, even though it’s always an issue for teens. But we’ll update it when the time seems right.
I’ve been in Y-Press since I was 10 years old. I used to look through my Weekly Readers and try to come up with story ideas. I’d present them to the storyboard and then would hear, “You need to research it more.” I would research it for three months in a row before it passed.
Interviewing
One of the main questions Y-Pressers ask at a storyboard meeting is, “Do you have contacts for this story? Who would you want to interview for this story?” Lots of times, there’s a specific organization connected to what the story is about, like gay teens or cutting or autism, which gives a starting place for figuring out whom to interview.
We also have contact logs to turn to. Or we’ll send out an e-mail asking for leads. Or we’ll go to the Y-Press story archives and look for a similar story and see whom they contacted. We’ll look at their story logs.
Then you’ll start setting up interviews at a time that works for the interviewees. You’ll explain what Y-Press is, and then they’ll say “That’s cool” or “You know what, I’m not really interested.”
Usually it’s the person who came up with the story idea who takes the lead and gets a team together. We also have a dry erase storyboard in the office. It says the title of the story, the day of the briefing (a meeting that has the whole team together before you do the interview), and the time of the interview—and then kids sign up. Y-Press does not assign stories; that’s what sets us apart from other youth journalism groups. You sign up for what you’re interested in.
The briefing is where we come up with the questions we’ll ask at the interview. First, the main editor says where they think the story will go, what angle they want to take. Usually everyone brings about 10 questions to the briefing. We go through them and see if there are any duplicate questions, which we throw out. Then we look for or create “enhanced” questions. The editor always knows what they want because they are the ones writing the story. They don’t want the reporters to ask questions like, “What is your favorite color?” They know that won’t produce good quotes for the story. So they guide the reporters through the briefing and help them realize that “yes” and “no” questions don’t really help you write a story.
At Y-Press, near every computer is a laminated list of questions that have gone well in previous interviews, like “If I were the man from the Mars, how would you describe autism to me?”—good questions to get your interview going.
Once you get a solid 20-25 questions, you highlight them and assign them to the reporters. At the interview, it’s the Y-Press reporters, the younger kids, who ask the questions. The editors mainly ask follow-up questions.
We tape the interviews, we send them off to a transcriber (she’s wonderful); she picks them up once a week and usually has them back in a week or two.
Writing
After that, you meet with the editors (usually two on a team) and you work together. You meet with the Y-Press writing coach and explain to her where you want to take the story, what you envision. You go through the transcript and highlight all of the quotes that would work well in your story.
Then it’s just a matter of getting a good lead, getting the right transitions here and there. There are so many drafts you go through. At Y-Press you get a newsletter each month and it has your deadlines for your first draft, your second draft. You meet, write, and submit a first draft to the writing coach. You review the draft with her and see the changes she thinks you need to make, and then discuss whether these changes should be made. Sometime she’ll suggest a change that you don’t like, you think your way is better. Lynn and Kathleen [Y-Press adult staff] don’t tell you this is the way you have to write it. Instead you explain your views and they’ll say, “Okay it’s your story.”
One of the great things about working at Y-Press is that you learn that your way is not always right, that people may have amazing angles to a story that you would never have thought of. It’s great to be able to have a partner on the stories, especially to get different views on how to write your lead. That’s the hardest part for me—getting the right lead, the one that will catch your readers’ attention.
Publication and The Indianapolis Star
Y-Press works on several stories simultaneously. There are probably 8 or 9 stories on the board right now. There are 120 active members in Y-Press, so individual Y-Pressers usually work on only one story at a time.
The managing editor is usually in charge of working out when stories will appear. We have a managing editor board where we record what stories are finished, what stories are in draft, what stories are still being developed. From looking at those three categories, we assign deadlines for each week.
We used to be located in The [Indianapolis] Children’s Museum and then moved to The Indianapolis Star. They give us our space for a dollar a year. They give us so many resources—we can walk down to their library and find a number in a minute. They always work with us. When they decided they were going to scrap “Indiana Living,” [the section of the paper where we had two columns each week for Y-Press stories] we had a meeting with the Star’s editor, and we talked through all of the options. They helped us for the Benin trip, they give us lots of Internet and web space, they put the Benin video clips on the front page of their website for awhile. I don’t know how Y-Press would function without the cooperation and resources they have made available to us. They’ve just been great.
When an interview isn’t going well
As an editor, I don’t usually ask the questions. But I was at the briefing where we came up with the questions, so I understand what we’re trying to get out of the questions. So [in the course of an interview] I can look at the person and see that as one of the Y-Press reporters is asking a question, they get that face, that blank look that says, “What are they talking about?” I try to rephrase the question, and usually they’ll give me a little nod that says, “Yeah, I know what your are saying now.”
When you write questions, you get so caught up in making them grammatically correct, but then that isn’t the way people talk. And they don’t understand what you are trying to ask when you use such big words. You try to go over the questions with the reporters before the interview, helping them with things like pronunciation. But it’s all a learning experience for them, they put a tremendous amount of effort into asking the questions correctly. But there’s always a little re-phrasing that can do the trick, can help the interview “get” the question.
Sometimes the interviewees are just kind of difficult, they just want to say “yes” or “no.” Then as an interviewer, you have to get them to elaborate, to help them answer to the best of their ability. But sometimes it just doesn’t work out.
Looking back, I used to be so nervous before I asked my questions. Now it’s second nature for me to hop in there and ask away.
Izaak, editor, age 16
Izaak joined Y-Press in 2002. He had always been interested in writing and wanted to improve his writing skills. He saw Y-Press as an opportunity to write about subjects he felt curious or passionate about, as opposed to writing on subjects assigned by a teacher.
He has published 29 stories so far, including the story about the impact of an autistic sibling reprinted here.
Training reporters
You can enter Y-Press when you are 10, and you’re a reporter. When you are 14, you become an editor. When you go out on a story, it’s the reporters who are the main interviewers. The editors are there to back them up; they’ll ask follow-up questions, but they aren’t the main interviewers on the story.
So as an older member of Y-Press, I’ve trained the reporters. We don’t teach them how to write the stories, but we teach them how to interact with the interviewees, how to ask good questions, how to turn an interview more into a conversation rather than an interview. That’s something we really try to stress.
As part of the training, we give them examples of what can go wrong in an interview. It’s our job to supply them with what they need to know so that the interview doesn’t go wrong, but you also have to be prepared that something can go wrong. I’ve had lots of things go wrong with interviews I've done. So our message is that when something goes wrong, you can—and should—fix it. Like when an interview doesn’t show up, you need to do everything you can to find and call them. With Y-Press, you have to work around other people’s schedules. Often something goes wrong with the tape recorder—we have found that the Marantz cassette recorders are the most reliable.
The training sessions usually involve about 25 kids and go on for a day. They used to be two days, but we've revised it, and made it more concentrated. The kids are not going to remember every single thing from the training. The learning really comes from getting out and working on a story; the best training is the experience they get. We try to give them the basic information they need to get started and to work as a team.
Covering the presidential elections
Covering the presidential elections in 2004 was one of the most interesting things I’ve done in my time with Y-Press. We started working on the conventions in 2003, a year before they took place. It required a considerable amount of research ahead of time. We surveyed a lot of people, we talked to politicians, we collected as much information as we could to get background on the issues. We surveyed 500 kids on what issues they felt were most important. When we interviewed the candidates at the elections, we wanted to know what they thought about the issues that were important to kids—or how the positions they held were going to affect children’s issues.
I went to both conventions, the RNC and the DNC. I interviewed Nancy Pelosi at the DNC and Dennis Hastert at the RNC. We asked [Nancy Pelosi] what the most important issues were to her, and she said “children.” At least, she knew the right answer to give.
One of the things we concluded from this is that children’s issues take a back seat in most politicians’ minds. The politicians we interviewed talked about No Child Left Behind, but we heard much more about the war in Iraq and other issues that took precedence, for them, over children.
We did meet a fair amount of opposition when we challenged some of what they said, like when Dennis Hastert talked about all the positive effects of NCLB and we talked about how we’d heard that NCLB had negative results, too, that it hadn’t really been successful.
I hope to go to the upcoming conventions, I want to compare the two of them and how the issues have changed from the first to the second.
Favorite story
My most memorable story that I worked on was about meth abuse in Indiana. You always hear about the victims of drugs, but you never hear their personal stories. We went to the boys’ [correctional] school before it closed down, and we got to hear a lot of personal stories you wouldn’t have heard otherwise. A big part of Y-Press is sharing those stories that wouldn’t have gotten told otherwise. These were not easy interviews. It’s hard to interview anyone in a correctional institution, but I think it really paid off. Showing how real lives are affected by drugs, that’s really powerful.
Most of these kids, they came from rural towns around Indiana where most of the town was on drugs, a lot of crack houses, things that were shushed about, that weren’t really out there. Some of these kids may go back to drug abuse after they get out of juvenile detention, but some genuinely want to change. They may move away and find a job somewhere else.
The kids were ages 14 to around 17. We interviewed 5 boys at the boys’ school, and we also interviewed 5 girls at the girls’ school.
That’s what I want to continue to do at Y-Press—to tell the stories you wouldn’t hear otherwise.
Keisha, editor, age 18
For Keisha, Y-Press has been her training ground for pursing a degree in journalism. It has suited well her “take charge” attitude.
Becoming a journalist
I’ve been with Y-Press since I was 11. I’m 18 now. When I was 10, I was working as a volunteer in The [Indianapolis] Children’s Museum. There were always opportunities to go other places at museum. My mother saw something in the Star about Y-Press—which at that time was located at the museum—and suggested I check it out.
From then on out, I was part of Y-Press. I started out as a reporter, stayed active, went on to be an editor.
From the youngest age, from when I started to talk, I wanted to be a Disney animator. I wanted to work in the French division of Disney, go to Paris and animate cartoons. I’ve always liked to tell stories, I’ve always liked to write, and I’ve always been interested in world events. I’m one of those people who has a lot of opinions. Whatever the field, I always thought I was going to be the kind of person who talked about things, who talked about things that needed talking about.
I’ll be majoring in journalism next year at Clark University, that’s what I’ll be doing.
I don’t only write for the Y-Press. I’m a staff writer for an African-American community magazine based in Indianapolis. I was also on the school newspaper sophomore year.
Compared to writing school papers, Y-Press teaches you different things. It teaches you how to write, to be sure, but it also teaches you how to ask important questions, a skill that will help whatever you happen to be doing, in the work place, in school. It teaches you to ask, before a writing assignment, “What would be the best way to approach this? What would be the best way I can get this out?” And then with seeing your work published in the Indy Star and other places—you can’t be in that kind of environment and not get better at writing and a whole lot of other skills.
Taking charge
With Y-Press you learn how to ask questions, how to talk to people, you learn how to be resourceful. From top to bottom, it’s really youth taking full charge—we have independent control of all of our projects. With The Indianapolis Star, they respect as us as real writers, real journalists, it’s never condescending, like “Oh, look at those kids, aren’t they cute.” Everyone respects us. It’s great, it really is a blessing.
So much of the time as a young person, you are being dictated to, “You can’t do this, you can’t do that.” You’re told what you can’t do, how things are supposed to be done. So it’s really important for youth at Y-Press—or any organization —to feel like they have a voice, that they have control over things that are important to them.
Benin
Every year, except the year of 9/11, the Y-Press bureau has traditionally done an international story. All of the stories ideas go in front of everyone else in the bureau, and then the kids in the bureau vote on which international story idea they think is best. As a children’s bureau, our story ideas are about youth issues around the world.
Last year, I proposed the idea of going to Benin, a brand new African democracy since 1990. The most interesting thing about Benin is that they’ve had a transition to democracy without bloodshed, without anyone having to lose his or her life.
I’d written a story about African immigrant youth in America and the father of one of the youth I interviewed started talking to me about Benin. I’d never heard of it before. But when he started talking about the growth of democracy there, that really perked up my ears, because democracy and Africa are not two things you usually hear going together.
That’s not what you associate with Africa.
When you hear about Africa today, the first thing that always pops out is AIDS, followed by warfare and poverty. And you think about the babies with the big bellies. Yes, that’s a reality in Africa, but it’s not the whole story. So I thought, why not talk about Benin, about why it is what the BBC calls “a beacon of democracy.” What makes Benin so different from Nigeria, which is right next door but has so many issues, or Rwanda?
As a little girl, I’d always said, I’m going to Africa, I’m going to Africa. When the Y-Press board approved the project, it was incredible. I got to go and talk about what I wanted to talk about. We learned a lot, more than we expected to learn. It was a blessing.
We weren’t sure until the last minute that we had raised all of the money we needed to go. But at the last minute we got it—another blessing. It was something we were meant to do.
We’ve also gone to Northern Ireland, Russia, Puerto Rico, Brazil. We always have two to three chaperones, with one of them being a photographer from The Indianapolis Star.
I hope to go back in 10 years and see what’s happening in Benin. The country has so much promise.
Robin, editor and board member, age 17
Robin joined Y-Press when she was 11. Her mother saw a Y-Press column in the newspaper one Sunday and said, “Hey, look, this was written by kids!” Robin picked up the phone and called the number listed in the article and signed up immediately. The 2000 presidential election, she remembers, had brought current events to her attention for the first time.
Developing trust
How long it takes to develop a story has a lot to do with finding and getting the trust of the interviewees. The last story I did was about Adderall abuse. That took more than a year because it took us a really long time to find youth interviewees, for the obvious reason: it’s hard to convince teenagers to be like “Oh, yeah, I abuse Adderall and I would love to tell the newspaper about it!” Sometimes we do stories where there is an organization with an obvious pool of interviewees, or we’ll do a story about some sort of a disease or condition where people who have the condition are happy to talk about it in order to gain more public awareness for their needs. It really depends on what kind of a story it is.
We promise anonymity. With the Adderall story, that was the only way we would get people to talk to us about their experiences. It was the same with the story we did on cutting. We are aware that with some of our stories, teenagers are taking a big risk by talking to us. But we like to think that they’re also gaining something from being able to share their experiences.
One of the benefits of having youth reporters doing the interviews and the stories is that it does help with the trust issue with the interviewee. If you’re talking to someone your own age, you feel less like you’re confessing to the principal.
Adderall story
The Adderall story is probably my favorite. It's a really interesting topic to me. It speaks not only to the situation in high school and these kids’ lives, but also to a societal trend— that high school students are so afraid of not doing well in their classes that they would illegally take someone else’s prescription medication.
It was also interesting conducting interviews. We have an image in our mind of what a drug addict is like that’s not always true—some homeless person on the street or, in the case of teenagers, some kid who doesn’t care about school, who’s not responsible, who hangs out with the wrong crowd.
One of the Adderall interviews we did was face to face. The girl came into the interview all put together. She was cute in her outfit, I liked her jewelry, she was an everyday student—not a drug addict out on the street. That was really interesting to me, because it revealed that the concepts we have about who would be susceptible to something like drug abuse are completely based on stereotypes.
Y-Press board
We have a meeting every quarter. There are four youth directors [of which I’m one] and around seven adult directors. This past year we’ve been working on strategic planning, basically trying to figure out a plan for how to grow and strengthen the organization in the next 3-5 years.
A lot of the business of the board comprises the financial stuff, which the youth directors have less to say about, since we’re not so familiar with the funding aspects of running an organization. But we talk a lot about what we see as the mission of Y-Press and how best to achieve that mission and how best to present Y-Press to the outside world. For example, the youth directors, because of their familiarity with the organization, were asked to create an “elevator speech” about Y-Press, so that if one of the youth or adult directors was at a conference or some sort of large meeting, they could briefly explain what Y-Press was about—especially to [potential] funders.
It’s been a unique opportunity. Few 17 year olds get a chance to sit on that side of running an organization. It’s made me understand a lot better all of the things that go on behind the scenes. I see how Lynn [the executive director] has worked so hard, for so long, helping students write their stories, plus doing all of the fundraising.
I think we have an ability to affect the decisions of the board, even if on certain issues we don’t have a legal right to vote and make the decision ourselves. The adult directors are chosen partially on the basis of whether they will totally dismiss something someone under 18 says. They are open to listening to pretty much anything the youth directors have to say. Our opinions definitely do matter.
I’m not sure I’ll pursue a career in journalism, but I feel the skills I’ve gained from participating in Y-Press have better enabled me to participate in any career. The opportunity to sit in board meetings and have serious discussions about problems that need resolving—those are skills I don’t think I would have gotten anywhere else. Also Y-Press has fostered in me an interest in the world, the curiosity to come up with an idea to investigate further.
Jonathan, editor, age 14
Jonathan has been with Y-Press since the fall of 2005. He recollects that his parents said they knew some kids who were in Y-Press and that Jonathan should sign up, but that he didn’t want to. “I was skeptical, but I went,” he says. He quickly found he liked it—a lot.
Stepping up to the plate
In school, I didn’t enjoy writing because it seemed the writing I did was solely applicable to school. But the writing at Y-Press is for an audience that actually reads it, which makes me now enjoy writing—I’m creating something that’s actually published, something tangible that people can read and look at.
[Amazingly,] soon after I joined Y-Press, I met with former President Bush—me and two other girls. We had 15 minutes with him. He came and spoke at a local college and I wrote a commentary about it. I think that was the best thing to initially write. It’s much harder to write a story where you have to put your opinions down on paper.
We prepared for the meeting with Bush for several months. My question was directed towards Hurricane Katrina and the tsunami near India and, as kids, what could we do. Typically you would expect a politician to rely on the old line, just give money. But he said you can contact your local representative in government and indicate your interest, and he suggested other actions.
And then this past fall I went on the trip to Benin and wrote the story about it. That was my first story that I did completely by myself. It was hard. But luckily I didn’t procrastinate, I had two months to write the story. We had 36 tapes of 2 hours each, for quotes, which took a bunch of time to go through.
I am working on four stories right now, including one on teen court. Al Gore is coming to town and I’ll hopefully will interview him and write a commentary on that.
Making the intangible tangible
For me, what was really interesting about the Benin trip was that, in America, Africa is so often seen as an intangible place with intangible problems and intangible poverty. Going there made it tangible—to see the streets and the lifestyle and then compare it to what you see portrayed in documentaries in the U.S. It was great to talk to the kids; we got some really good stories from them, they were open to it. They understood that nothing was off limits, so they told us anything and everything we asked. We didn’t get embellishments, but a real concrete look at what was going on there.
The poverty I saw there was overwhelming, even though I knew it existed. I know I don’t have the ability to change a whole lot of over there, but you see it and you want to help. It gave me an awareness that’s much stronger than before. Seeing the people and hearing their stories, it brought the poverty to life.
Teamwork and confidence
It’s interesting, I think we all thoroughly enjoy being together, but if it weren’t for Y-Press, if we just knew each other from school, we might be at each other’s throats. But at Y-Press, we seem to work well together. There hasn’t been any conflict on the team to speak of. If and when there is dissension, it never causes a negative outcome.
Even if you don’t want to become a team at Y-Press, you have to, you don’t want to fail—and you won’t succeed unless you work as a team.
Lots of what Y-Press does isn’t just stories. For the Benin trip, for example, we had to do a grant proposal and fundraising. There are presentations we do. I’ve gone to various foundations to talk about Y-Press. There are lots of things you do that aren’t related to just stories alone.
Y-Press boosts your confidence because it’s an organization where you see results. Like we raised the money for Benin—$25,000—in two months. When you have the chance to do something like that and then reap the consequences immediately, it can’t help but raise your confidence.
At Y-Press, just the fact that you are a 10- or 11-year-old kid and you’re making phone calls to strangers—including an ex-president—to set up an interview is extraordinary. Just learning a simple thing like making phone calls boosts your confidence.
