Katina Paron is the editorial and program director of the nonprofit Children's PressLine (CPL) housed in the Martin Luther King, Jr. high school in New York City. CPL teaches youth between the ages of 8 and 18 the craft of oral journalism to empower youth and educate adults on youth issues. Youth at CPL interview other youth throughout the five boroughs and across the country on various social and economic issues that affect their everyday lives, their interviews are then in turn published in adult media outlets such as The New York Daily News and Alternet.org for adults to read and learn.

When she's not getting CPL interviews published, Katina's working hard to get funding. Here's Katina...

When you were a teen, what kinds of things did you read if anything at all? Were there any youth media publications in your hometown? Did you take part in any writing programs?
I grew up in southeastern Michigan, about an hour north of Detroit. It was as much of a suburb as it was farm country. If there were cool after-school youth development programs going on, I certainly didn’t know about them. We didn’t have cable, a VCR or money to go to the movies, so from a very young age books were my escape. My mom and older sister were big readers so I read books that were around the house—Jane Eyre, Judy Blum, Harlequin romance novels. I was probably too young to read some of these books but they were there and I was hungry for more life than I had access to in my neighborhood. I remember once asking my sister if the novel Oliver Twist was too old for me. She didn’t understand my question. “Because I’m a kid,� I said, “am I suppose to be reading this? Will I understand it?� “Being a kid has nothing to do with it,� she answered. “Try reading it and see what you get through.� One of the reasons I remember that story is that it is a great philosophy when it comes to how to treat and work with kids. Age shouldn’t limit their access to information.

Besides books the other things I read were my mom’s Family Circle and Women’s Day magazines, and then eventually my sister’s Seventeen. For no other reason than boredom I indoctrinated myself with concepts like how to be a good homemaker, how to use canned tomatoes for workout weights and how boyfriends will make me worthy! I clearly had an attraction for the written word but it wasn’t until I was a teen that I started writing and in school it became my strength.

How did you find your way to youth media professionally?
I studied magazine journalism in college and my school, Boston University, did a great job of scaring students into getting internships. Because I didn’t have any other connections I knew that if I was going to get a job after graduation I needed to stack my resume full of publications who wanted me to work for them for free. That is how I found my way into nonprofits. In the fall of my junior year I was called to follow up on an internship opportunity that I found through BU’s career services. It was for a magazine called Teen Voices and when I called to schedule an interview I asked them to send me a copy and I was told in an exacerbated voice, “No, we don’t do that. Just come down here and see what we are about.�

So, I was waiting for my interview in the magazine’s basement office in the YMCA on Huntington Ave. [in Boston] when I first saw the publication. I physically remember the sensation of flipping through the magazine for the first time and falling in love. I had no idea that media could be used to validate the voices of young people and address real issues. Teen Voices worked with teen girls to edit a magazine made up of teen girls’ submissions on important issues—eating disorders, disability, poverty and discrimination. I had never seen any magazine make an important issue so personal before. Using media making to empower and educate young people and the readers was a new concept to me and it was brilliant. Plus, they needed me and I loved to be needed. In five years I held various titles: intern, section editor, volunteer bulk mail expert, mentor, submissions coordinator, board member and eventually after I moved to New York, fundraising co-chair. But that was all volunteer-based. It wasn’t until 2000, after writing about home automation and health professionally for five years, that youth media became my full-time profession. That’s when I became managing editor of Children’s Express [Children’s PressLine’s predecessor] and youth media became my life.

Children’s PressLine differs from a lot of youth media in the U.S. in that its articles and features are written by youth between the ages of 8 and 18 for adults. Can you talk more about this and the significance of this particular mission?
I believe very strongly that kids need to see and hear the voices of other young people in their media. As I mentioned before, the validation aspects—for the reader and the writer—are a big deal to me. If youth media is a social change agent, as many people believe, than it needs to be speaking to those in power. At CPL that means people who can vote. Most voters aren’t reading or hearing about the youth experience because kids’ media isn’t speaking to them. So, to reach that audience we created a news service that produces articles for publication in mainstream newspapers and websites. It’s not as though we don’t want kids reading the work at all but because we are published in newspapers and newspapers are primarily read by people over the age of 18, we think of adults as our primary audience. Now, there are lots of ways that newspapers should be getting young people to be reading the paper, but they just aren’t doing it. For more on this, read “Youth Are the News� in Youth Media Reporter.

Our goal is to give people, voters, the information they need to make informed decisions about issues that affect youth. And pretty much all issues affect kids. In 2005, when the country was debating Social Security, the media focused on how this issue affects older people or disabled adults. No one talked about how kids get Social Security! This is a personal issue for me because my dad died when I was 10 and I was raised on the Social Security money that came for me as his dependent. Kids are the direct beneficiaries of Social Security and have a right to be heard on the issue but no one but Children’s PressLine gave them that space. We did a great story that gave kids from all over the country a chance to speak on the issue. We let them tell their story from a first-person experience angle and it was powerful. In a democracy everyone has a right to be heard on public discussions. Twenty-six percent of the population is under the age of 18 and they are not represented in the media or in policy discussions. CPL fixes that, we give them a seat at the table and tools to represent themselves. As former President Clinton told the National Association of Black Journalists in 2005, “The press corps should look like the country they are reporting to. You get different and better questions if the people asking the questions represent America and the world.�

How do you think youth media plays in the lives of youth who create it? Do you notice any differences in what creating youth media means to the girls in your program versus the boys in your program without over generalizing?
We tell our funders and our parents all the time that responsibility transforms, and it does. Years ago, one of our reporters, named Janes, talked about how “Regular Janes� is shy and afraid to make waves but “Reporter Janes� is confident and curious and strong. It is such a powerful thing to be handed a microphone and given a responsibility to inform others on the issues affecting youth. We tell our members that CPL isn’t about them; it’s not here to give them something to do after school. It’s is about the young people they interview and their responsibility to get their stories out there. Without them who would care that there are kids in a housing development in Starrett City, Brooklyn, afraid of losing their homes to developers? Or that teachers call them “monkeys� in the classroom? Or that it is really hard to have an autistic sibling? These are the stories that our kids are trained to tell and it is an amazing challenge that they accept.

When it comes to the difference between boys and girls in the program, this is a hard one. More than 80% of our editors, the 14- to 18-year-olds, are female but our ration is more balance with our younger, 8- to 13-year-olds, reporters. But for many of the video youth media programs, they have a much higher population of teen boys so it is hard to come up with any type of research evaluation that compares boys and girls in youth media programs.

What particular challenges do you face as the editorial and program director of a nonprofit like Children’s PressLine?
The challenge is that we are unique. When it comes to getting published, newspaper editors don’t know what to do with a youth news agency. Many get confused by the co-branding issue. Some adults don’t understand why they would ever want to read anything produced by a young person. Thank god the people at The New York Daily News understand the value of representing youth in their paper and are giving us the opportunity for the second summer in a row to create community news bureaus covering Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens for the paper’s borough edition.

We also don’t fit into an easy check box for some funders. Are we youth development or are we an independent news agency? Well, we are both. Do we work with children or teens? Both. Are we local or national? Both. And I admit, when you try to be everything, sometimes you miss everyone but journalism is a multi-disciplinary pursuit and when you combine that with youth you create a very textured and deep program that can impact a nation, a democracy and the individual.

What Children’s PressLine features are you most proud of?
There is a column we created for our Daily News pages called “BackTalk: kids speak, officials respond� that I’m simply in love with. “BackTalk� embodies of one of CPL’s guiding principals: bringing authentic youth voice to adults in power. “BackTalk� is a Q&A-style column, with the “Q� being a quality of life concern from a young person in the community and the “A� coming from a public policy official responsible for the issue. For example, one girl wanted to know why there aren’t enough bike racks in Canarsie, Brooklyn, so we posed her question to the head of the transportation committee and published his response to her. It’s a great column to remind politicians that even though kids can’t vote they are still part of their constituency. The other cool part about “BackTalk� is that it is activity-based content. To gather the “A� we conduct free, peer-led “Media + Community� workshops with young people at community centers and through youth programs in neighborhoods. Last year, these workshops allowed us to work with 167 young people in Brooklyn and Queens. This year we’ll be adding the Bronx to the list and plan on working with more than 200 young people this summer.

What are some upcoming stories Children’s PressLine is working on right now? Will Children’s PressLine be interviewing presidential candidates?
Right now CPL is working on some great community coverage in the Bronx, Queens and Brooklyn. We are really excited to be able to teach kids how to cover local issues and to see how that will change their perspective on their communities. One of the things journalism is really good at is civically engaging young people. It gives them an opportunity to understand local government while providing them with tools for action. Journalism is also a great service learning project. We give kids the opportunity to identify and research an issue that matters to them and then give them the tools to understand the issue while calling for change in front of a public audience. And in the case of the Daily News this summer that means 2.4 million readers. It’s empowering. The atmosphere in our office this summer will be electrifying.

We will be covering the presidential campaign in 2008. Our goal is to cover debates and forums that bring the candidates to New York City and then travel next summer to St. Paul and Denver to cover the Republican and Democratic National Committee Conventions, respectively. Right now I am working on getting the funding to make this coverage a reality. Unfortunately, even progressive institutional funders get nervous when you ask them to support a program that combines kids, media and politics on a national level. So, we’ll probably have to work on an individual level to make this support happen. This is a longer, slower process but we’re not going to back down.