The youth connection
Some of the interns at "MB"
You may be aware that for the past 35 years, the O-R has had a youth group. Originally called the Young Observers, it's now called the Flipside staff and is under the direction of online editor Jessica Smith. Kids in sixth through 12th grades meet here at the O-R office to plan their monthly magazine. They choose their own topics and do all the writing.
At "MB," our new sister newspaper in Melitopol, Ukraine, there's a youth group, too. They call them interns there, and in addition to doing odd jobs around the newspaper office, they write and distribute a free newspaper for students that is published twice a month. Most of the interns are 17 or 18 years old, in their first year of college (they finish high school earlier there), and the editor of Shara, their paper, is a 21-year-old, fifth-year journalism school student who has been an intern for six years.
Shara is aimed at university students, and the topics and photos can be shocking to older and more conservative readers.
As far as I know, we have nothing like this in our country; most of the free newspapers aimed at younger readers are produced and written by much older professional journalists.
These young interns are indistinguishable from our Flipsiders in their talent and enthusiasm. They share so many of the same interests, yet their life experiences are so different. We're hoping that with the help of the U.S. State Department we will be able to conduct an exchange of these young journalists, just as we did in 1999. It was then that two kids from Novokuznetsk, Russia, came here and lived the lives of ordinary teenagers and returned to write about their experiences in their newspaper; and a few months later, two Young Observers went to Russia and did the same thing. The experience was rich for the newspaper staffs, the children, and especially for readers in both countries. So, we're hoping to do it again.
