Citizen Paine | Citizen Journalism

Guardian survey shows prevalence of teen blogging

The Guardian reviews the findings of a suvey of 14- to 21-year-olds in Young blog their way to a publishing revolution:

[A]mong those with a web connection at home, 31% said that they had launched their own personal site or blog. Those aged 16 to 17 have taken most avidly to personal online publishing, with a female bias.

No huge surprises in this survey. However, it's noteworthy that of the young people with internet access at home, eight in 10 reported having broadband:

The explosion in cheaper high-speed internet access, which allows quicker access to music and video files and is typically charged at a flat monthly rate, has led to an upsurge in the time web users spend online.

Some previous comments on young people as tomorrow's publishers.

WP on 'Your Mom': 'Do-It-Yourself Journalism Spreads'

Your Mom, the teen citizen journalist web site of the Quad-City Times, is the focus today of a Washington Post article.

The site has tried to balance the irreverence that's part of being a teen-ager with a bit of decorum, allowing articles about any topic the teen contributors want to tackle but keeping profanity off the site, the article says:

Many of (editor Hillary Rhodes') contributors say the thing they value most about Your Mom is its rawness, which they say makes it more relevant than a more restrictive school newspaper. More than a few adults, on the other hand, say they could do without so much honesty.

The QC Times launched Your Mom a year ago.

Today's MySpacer users, tomorrow's muckrakers

I found out this weekend that the 13-year-old, who I already knew was an underage MySpace user (you're supposed to be 16), had set up the 8-year-old with a site. Yeah, I was a bit ticked, but it also made me think about how instinctive citizen journalism will be for their generation when they become adults.

The people driving citizen journalism today, for the most part, came of age well before the World Wide Web was a vehicle for news. While for some of us, it may be second-nature to publish our thoughts when we want and how we want, it doesn't come naturally for most adults in 2005.

For kids, it does.

And MySpace seems to be getting something right. It had 15.5 million unique visitors in May compared with 1 million in June 2004, according to Bambi Francisco's MarketWatch article (registration) on Friday.

From the Piper Jaffray Global Internet Summit  last week, John Batelle describes "a really interesting and entertaining panel of teenagers who told us how they use media ... . All of them used MySpace, it was pretty much a clean sweep. None of them used anything else for social networking and the like."

The attraction comes from the ability not only to post to one's own MySpace site but to use the social networking aspects, which enable teens to interact on each other's sites.

When I was a teen, we used the telephone to get into each other's lives. Now teens are in each other's faces constantly via IM and networks like MySpace and Xanga. Fast forward 20 years and imagine them as adults who own homes and have kids. Imagine them taking the communication skills they're honing today and applying them to a fight over a local development proposal or a school board election. Not only will they have more sophisticated tools, but they'll be more likely to use them than today's adults would be.

All the more reason for us to teach kids not only how to do research online but also how to publish online. And to teach them why a MySpace might not be the best thing for an 8-year-old.