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Media Salon: Best Practices
 On February 11, 2002, more than 70 community members, including many young people representing various organizations, gathered to discuss how youth can create and utilize media to influence public opinion about juvenile justice issues. (For more information about the event, including the complete audio recording, please visit Media Salon: Youth Voices in the Juvenile Justice Debate.) The following is a summary of best practices, as identified in the Media Salon.
Production Strategies
- Combine personal stories with statistics to create compelling content about juvenile justice issues. While the public may be moved by a story about somebody's life experiences, stories with numbers to back them up are often the ones that get noticed and picked up by news outlets.
- Communicate your message through several different media: Web, print, broadcast and so on.
- Emphasize prevention and rehabilitation as ways to reduce the incarceration of youth. No matter how many times people have heard these ideas, continue to hammer them into their minds.
- Create a single, focused message. Knowing exactly what your message is, you will be able to express it clearly and make an impact.
- Learn to communicate through images. Television, the Web and even some print media have made us a very visual society. Often, people or events that are readily "photographable" make the news. Use compelling images to inform people about juvenile justice.
Media Relations
- Create opportunities for youth to communicate with journalists. Ways to make this happen can include creating a source-sheet of young people who can be contacted by reporters, forming a youth editorial board to be consulted for youth-related news coverage, or holding community meetings. Youth can also write letters to the editor, submit columns for inclusion in local newspapers and find other ways to respond publicly to news coverage.
- Remember that, even if media organizations have business interests to consider, journalists are individuals with plenty of control over how they tell a story. Relate to them and try to make them partners with you.
- Urge news organizations to explore the causes of juvenile crime and to quote youth of color at least as frequently as they quote White youth in stories.
- Help the media understand the roots of youth crime by producing studies and reports that dig deeper than quick sound bites or assumptions.
- When responding to a media organization's news coverage, use specific examples to make your feedback constructive.
Organizational Tips
- Include youth in all levels of decision making within your organization (planning the media project and related events, developing content, and so on).
- Focus on winning campaign victories. Use your media to shape people's opinions about juvenile justice; these opinions turn into votes.
- Use California's Proposition 21 as a case study of how youth media advocacy worked or didn't work to shape public opinion about juvenile justice.
- Foster effective spokespeople within or on behalf of your organization. Build media capacity within your organization so that you can generate the dialogue that you'd like to see in mass-media coverage of juvenile justice.
- Aim to secure a regular slot in a publication or broadcast. With a weekly platform, you can build an audience.
Ideas for Collaboration
- Have speakers from other groups visit your organization. Let your members know what else is going on.
- Share information: You're not the expert on everything. Form a network in which each group shares what it does best.
- Hold joint media events. If two groups host a press conference together, they will probably draw a larger audience.
Other Ways to Publicize Youth Views
- Write letters to the editors of newspapers and magazines.
- Share your views through KQED's Perspectives series (www.kqed.org/radio/perspectives/submissions.html).
- Make calls to radio shows like KQED's Forum (www.kqed.org/radio/forum), in which audience participation is a fundamental part of the program. Keep track of upcoming topics, and when a youth issue is going to be discussed, spread the word to encourage youth advocates to listen and call in.
- If the media coverage you see is not what you want, don't watch it. Otherwise, the message will never get back to the people who created it.
- Pursue internships and volunteer opportunities to learn more about how media organizations function. Find out what they're after and how can you give them your story in the way they're used to getting it. You have to get inside the machine in order to learn how to take it apart.
Volunteer at or Share Your Perspectives With Local Public and Community Radio and Television Stations
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