Turning Teens on to News

NBC News repurposes vid archive to engage students

By Kathy Ishizuka -- School Library Journal, 9/1/2007

In an era when young people derive their news from Comedy Central’s The Daily Show—if they have any interest at all in what’s going on in the world—what’s big media to do? NBC News has chosen to meet kids on their own turf—the Web—repackaging more than 60 years of the network’s history-making footage into an online video archive. And that’s just for starters. Social networking and other Web 2.0 elements will be incorporated later this fall in an effort to engage a most reluctant set of news consumers: teenagers.

Now available via HotChalk, an online K–12 server and partner with NBC News on the project, the digital archive consists of 2–3 minute documentaries covering a range of world events. From monumental moments, such as the fall of the Berlin Wall, to personal accounts, including an audio interview of former slave Fountain Hughes, the clips bring an element of immediacy to various K-12 topics, such as U.S. history, government and politics, and language arts. Additional primary-source content and access to material from the Washington Post and other publications, as well as lesson plans, will also be available with the NBC offering, which is available free of charge for the fall 2007-08 semester. Thereafter, a site-based subscription will cost from $1500–$2000, regardless of student enrollment, says Nicola Soares, vice president of education initiatives at NBC News.

Later this year, NBC will roll out the next phase of the program, called iCUE, a robust environment that will enable students to engage these AP topics interactively through social networking, blogging, and games. “The social networking aspect is intended to help catalyze discussion in much the same way that kids are exchanging media in pop culture spaces à la MySpace, but to have at the core, the media that is focused around things they need to learn for their classes,” says Alex Chisholm, director of the Education Arcade (TEA), a nonprofit organization that will oversee iCUE’s interactive aspect.

Among TEA’s advisors are Henry Jenkins, director of MIT’s Comparative Media Studies Program and James Paul Gee, author of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy (Macmillan, 2003). “Our job at the Education Arcade is to examine how people are using [iCUE] and get feedback to refine it, and to use it as a lab to understand how learning takes place using games,” Jenkins said in his keynote address at the Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium held in Chicago in July.

ICUE represents NBC’s biggest education initiative yet, according to Soares. But the effort may also help the network shore up its own audience, as young people increasingly turn away from traditional print and broadcast news sources. According to a recent Harvard University study, 28 percent of teens don’t pay any attention to daily news and 32 percent casually follow a single source alone. Moreover, young people are more attuned than older Americans to soft news, following, let’s say, Lindsay Lohan’s latest DUI episode more closely than the proposed troop surge in Iraq.

While kids are savvy enough to get the irony of The Daily Show and know that it’s fake news, says Chisholm, that’s not enough. “We want to help students understand what objective news is … and encourage media literacies where kids become critical consumers of perspective and question sources as opposed to just consuming.”

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