Communications Research in Action: Scholar-Activist Collaborations for a Democratic Public Sphere

8. Youth Channel All-City: Mapping the Media Needs and Interests of Urban Youth

CHAPTER 8 Youth Channel All-City Mapping the Media Needs and Interests of Urban Youth isabel castellanos, amy bach, and rachel kulick Around the country, public access media centers are facing an identity crisis, an identity opportunity, or perhaps a combination of the two. These centers are a part of a larger media democracy and education movement that seeks to transform the structural, social, and representational arrangements of the current media system. Public access centers are noncommercial spaces for individuals to produce and air their own media. However, their role as a relevant public and free form of communication is currently being questioned by the local municipalities who financially and politically support these centers. New digital technologies and inexpensive consumer equipment allow individuals to create media in their own homes while our Web 2.0 world gives young people and adults alike the capacity to produce and distribute their media texts through Internet platforms such as personal Web sites, podcasts, blogs, and online video sharing sites like YouTube. Accompanied by shifts in local and national policies, public access television centers are rethinking their approach to community media and their strategies towards operations and community inclusivity.1 This chapter focuses on the Manhattan Neighborhood Network (MNN) Youth Channel (YC), a youth media division of a public access center that is taking the traditional public access model in a new direction. The YC, like many emerging independent youth media spaces, takes a communityoriented approach to media production that looks to collaborative production practices, peer-to-peer education models, and other informal mentoring approaches for young people to not only make media but also to 157 158 i s ab e l ca s t el l a no s, am y b ac h , an d r ac h e l k u l ic k cultivate a sense of belonging within a larger youth community and youth culture. Since 2000, the YC has been reframing the traditional public access model of first-come, first-served into one where it emphasizes outreach to marginalized communities of individuals and alliance-building between and within these communities. This chapter centers on a collaborative research project developed at the MNN Youth Channel in which YC participants, staff, and university-based researchers joined together to conduct a community needs assessment of the media needs and interests of urban youth. Together, we launched the community needs assessment with the hopes of cultivating a community process for young people and media educators to inform the direction of a new public access/community media initiative, the YC All-City, which will be a noncommercial youth channel that will provide young people with a citywide platform for media education, production, and programming. We see this chapter, and indeed this study, as an entry point to considering community-oriented approaches to public access, policymaking, and infrastructure development that expand the boundaries of who can be a researcher , policy informant, and policy maker. The first section of this chapter examines how the MNN Youth Channel fits within the larger context of public access media. It focuses on the different inclusivity models that these centers use and, in particular, the alliancebuilding approach the YC strives to cultivate. This section also presents the methodology and methods used in the design and execution of the community needs assessment for this study. In the second section, we explore the findings from the community needs assessment with a critical eye towards examining how young people’s experiences in their communities and with the mainstream media impact their involvement in community-oriented youth media spaces. The third section of this chapter offers a reflection on our collaborative process as a potential entry point to consider communitydriven approaches to policymaking. a brief look at public access television Public access television in Manhattan started in 1971 when two cable channels were allocated for noncommercial public use. Currently in Manhattan, public access television is provided to cable subscribers on four different public access television channels2 that are operated by MNN, reaching a potential audience of more than 650,000 cable subscribing homes in Manhattan .3 Today more than 3,000 Public, Educational, and Governmental Access television stations are in operation. These stations range in size from multimillion dollar operations in large cities, like MNN, to smaller stations in small communities that operate on shoestring budgets (Davies and Yu 2007).4 These public access centers maintain a media culture...