Converged Literacy

It was a classic case of burying the lede, but this time Youth Radio's Finnegan Hamill hadn't even written a story—yet. In 1999 Finnegan was a junior at Berkeley High, taking a break from his Youth Radio peer teaching job to focus on academics, his position at the school newspaper, hockey, and church. But he stayed connected to Youth Radio with occasional visits, especially when he had a story idea.

For almost twenty minutes Finnegan caught up with then Deputy Director Beverly Mire, whose office was the first stop for many students headed into the building on their way to class and for alumni swinging by to visit. Bev remembers covering the usual topics: what was going on at school, the latest Youth Radio news, that kind of thing. Mindful that class would start in a few minutes, Bev says she was about to end their conversation when Finnegan mentioned, almost as an aside, that he'd been "emailing this girl in Kosovo." A huge massacre had just taken place there, and the bloody civil struggle was escalating into full-blown international war. NATO was preparing to drop bombs. News outlets around the world scrambled to devise an angle on this incredibly complex crisis, and Finnegan had found a direct line to one sixteen-year-old girl witnessing the run-up to war from her apartment balcony. And that line came through email, of all things, itself an emerging medium at the time, at least as a means to connect two teenagers unknown to each other in real life, separated by a vast distance in geography and experience. To think Bev could have let Finnegan walk right out the door, had he not just in time gotten around to his lede.

Bev had previously been a radio music director. She described the moment she heard about Finnegan's emails as like playing a hit record for the first time: "A feeling goes through you, and you're like, 'Oh my God, this is big.'" And it was. Emails from Kosovo became a regular series that aired in seven installments on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, from February to June 1999. President Bill Clinton quoted the Youth Radio series on March 29, 1999, in his radio address announcing U.S. participation in NATO's bombing campaign (emphasis added):

PRESIDENT CLINTON: Three days ago I decided the United States should join our NATO allies in military air strikes to bring peace to Kosovo.... We should remember the courage of the Kosovar people today, still exposed to violence and brutality. Many Americans, now, have heard the story of a young Kosovar girl trying to stay in touch with a friend in America by e-mail, as a Serb attack began. Just a few days ago she wrote, "at the moment, just from my balcony, I can see people running with suitcases, and I can hear some gunshots. A village just a few hundred meters from my house is all surrounded. As long as I have electricity, I will continue writing to you. I'm trying to keep myself as calm as possible. My younger brother, who is nine, is sleeping now. I wish I will not have to stop his dreams."

Emails from Kosovo was a turning point for Youth Radio. It put the organization on the national news map, winning the prestigious Alfred I. DuPont Award, and revealed the potential for youth media to cover, and even influence, international affairs. The stakes attached to this particular story were pretty extreme; it was not every day, after all, that Youth Radio found itself leveraged by the president of the United States in an emotional justification for war, or that a story's key source faced grave bodily danger. The scale and intensity of this series raised a distinct set of challenges, as we elaborate below. And yet whenever young people produce real media products for real broadcast audiences, the same issues arise in some form: complex decisions related to content, voice, boundaries, balance, impact, control, responsibility, and credit.

It might seem strange to frame the capacity to handle these issues as a form of literacy, and yet that is just what we aim to do in this chapter. We offer a new approach to understanding and promoting youth media learning: converged literacy.

As Henry Jenkins (2006b) has argued, in the media world convergence describes content expressed through a range of technologies all housed in one place, a website, for example, that features audio, graphics, digital photos, video clips, and a way for visitors to post comments. It's not just that you can find such a wide range of materials in a single location; convergence also makes it possible for a single piece of media to be distributed across a whole range of platforms. You might listen to the same Youth Radio story on your car stereo, through a podcast, by clicking on an online audio link, or by showing up at a community event where the story blares from speakers, the sound filling an assembly hall packed with people.

Literacy, the second key term in the concept we explore here, is a process of making, reading, understanding, and critiquing texts. In today's world, those texts increasingly transcend words on a page (Kress, 2003). Rather than frame literacy as a neutral function of the isolated mind, we locate young people's textual experiments and analyses in social contexts, sometimes face-to-face, and sometimes mediated through digital technologies.

In this chapter we bring together these two terms, convergence and literacy, to articulate what it takes for young people to claim a right to participate as citizens of the world and agents in their own lives (Ong, 1999). We develop the notion of converged literacy by exploring the processes behind four Youth Radio products. The Emails from Kosovo series provides a glimpse into a form of convergence created before the term came into mainstream fashion, revealing some of the educational and ethical challenges that arise when young people's private communication enters the public domain. The Core Class, Youth Radio's broadcast media course for incoming students, shows how the program has had to transform both what and how it teaches in order to stay relevant given new developments in digital media culture and face-to-face community engagement. The 2002 feature story, Oakland Scenes, mixes poetry and news reporting to examine the sources and effects of escalating murder rates in that city. Here Youth Radio producers reframe a topic that media makers too often use to criminalize young people and deflect attention away from the root causes and effects of persistent violence. In this story, youth expressive culture interrupts that tired narrative. The Picturing War story that Belia Mayeno Saavedra reported in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal examines digital media as a tool for cultural analysis and transformation. The story highlights U.S. Marines' responses to prison torture and the online archives of digital photos they took while deployed in Iraq.

HOW MEDIA MAKES LITERACIES...