While being in second place does not make us eligible for the overall Best of The Web award, it is still a high honor – especially considering the other amazing projects against which we were judged in this contest.

Christopher Connell‘s featured article in the most recent edition of the Carnegie Reporter was a long awaited look at the News21 Fellowship program from a third party. Indeed, the Carnegie foundation was one of our sponsors, but Mr. Connell is a freelancer and wrote fairly of our successes and our dreams.

I am also flattered to announce that I am mentioned significantly on two pages of the article, on the first page as the lede anecdote and on the 8th as part of a sidebar.

Here is a quote from the lede anecdote:

“We are trying to study youth and technology and tell the stories in ways that will also help inspire the future of journalism.” That may sound presumptuous for someone ten days out of college, he allowed, but given the parlous state of the economy and the news business, ‘you can’t avoid it.’
“Tenser and partner Andrew Burton aren’t just being interviewed. They are filming Robertson and the KBCH studio with a flip cam and taking photographs, all the while soliciting listeners to contact them with stories. Before the sun sets over the Pacific, they will have posted on the Internet a blog, pictures, video and sound from their 25 minutes on air with the Larry King of this stretch of coastal Oregon. And they were not alone. They were part of a larger army of 93 News21 fellows who fanned out across the country.”

In Lincoln City, Oregon, the coolest kid in school isn’t the quarterback or a cheerleader. It’s an artist. Students and teachers alike from Taft High School routinely visit Kaity Curry’s Web site to see if they made it into her “doodle diary.” Her cartoons capture moments in her life that she wants to remember. She posts her favorites to her blog: Frankensteinbeck. She explains: “I like Frankenstein, Steinbeck… oh and the musician, Beck.”

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This is a video from youngandthewireless.com, a newhouse.syr.edu and news21.com project.

We asked high school students at Taft High School what their last text message was while taking their portraits. We edited their responses into a video montage.
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This is a video from youngandthewireless.com, a newhouse.syr.edu and news21.com project.

For generations, most every teenager in Sioux County, Iowa, has cruised Highway 75 on Sunday nights. They gather to hook up, show off, and hang out. The cops can still remember cruising as kids themselves, but now they’re enforcers, cracking down at the urging of shop owners angry with the litter and crowds. The cruisers have adapted. When they’re shooed along, they use text messages to reorganize and regroup at new locations on the fly.
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This is a video from youngandthewireless.com a newhouse.syr.edu and news21.com project.