“Staff Meetings
Teens, whether they hear from a friend or answer the LA Youth ad asking for journalists, come in and meet together on Saturday afternoon staff meetings for two hours to discuss story ideas, write headlines, vote on essays, and make assignments. It’s great when everyone’s here and we just talk about whatever comes up. We share ideas concerning everything from teen rights and girls who sleep with men three times their age to school issues and places where teens can go out at night.
Training and Writing
Writers do research, conduct interviews, analyze data and begin to compose their articles. It is a lot of hard work. Sometimes we have to keep calling and calling people for answers to our questions. We have to go out there and get the facts ourselves—no one here in LA Youth is spoonfed the information.
Artists and photographers create pictures as well as attend training sessions to help better their skills.
Editing and Layout
Stories are edited, re-edited, and re-edited again. Gohar said we should include a picture of someone banging their head against the wall to show the writing process, but we didn’t have a picture of that.
When the stories are done, they are placed on newspaper pages on Macintosh computers, using desktop publishing software called “QuarkXpress.” Illustrations and photos are scanned in and prepared by Editorial Assistant Nancy Martinez.
Web Site
The co-editor of the LA Youth webpage, Dena Schwartz, helps create the website.
Going to press
The boards are sent to the California Community News presses in Glendale. The presses are very efficient—they print, fold, cut and bundle 100,000 copies onto pallets in just a few hours. It is noisy and very inky.
Ready for delivery
Once the papers are bundled, they are divided into boxes and envelopes, labeled and shipped to schools and libraries by a private delivery service. The newspaper is sent to more than 500 locations.
That’s me (Sharon Hwang), posing with the November issue of the newspaper before it was shipped out.
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