What do the young people write about? How do they choose topics?
The writing/teaching/editing relationship is the core of Youth Communication’s program. The process begins with discussions between the adult editors and the teen staff, during which they seek to discover the stories that are both most important to each teen writer, and potentially most appealing to the magazines’ readers. Story ideas are proposed and discussed in group meetings and also in one-on-one meetings between writers and the adult editors. Once topics have been chosen, students begin the process of crafting their stories. For a personal story, that means revisiting events from the past to understand their significance for the future. For a commentary, it means developing a logical and persuasive argument. For a reported story, it means gathering information through research and interviews. Students look inward and outward as they try to make sense of their experiences and the world around them, and to find the points of intersection between personal and social concerns. That p
